by Todd Rose
To my mother’s added anguish, my rebellion extended to our family’s faith. It was generally assumed, among good Mormon families, that at age nineteen, every young man would head out for a two-year “mission” to spread the gospel anywhere in the world that the church elders chose to send you. But by the time we moved to Layton, it was clear to everyone who knew me that a mission didn’t figure in my plans. To their credit, my mom and dad never pressured me to change my mind, even as they bore the brunt of their neighbors’ judgment about this further sign of my presumably bad character.
All this helps explain that when I first started going out with Kaylin, the young woman who in less than a year would be my wife, her devout Mormon parents weren’t exactly fainting with joy.
We met in twelfth grade, about a year after I enrolled at Layton High. We sat near each other in seminary class (the Mormon equivalent of Bible study), held in a brick building across from the campus, and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was blond and petite, with porcelain skin, and while she never would have been kicked out of the Commons, I could see she was also quite shy. I suspected she might not be good at small talk, so I decided to give us a reason to communicate. When she left her desk to go to the restroom, I stole her Bible and put it on my desk. This was the kind of ploy that would have been viewed as purely annoying in my old high school, but by then the world was seeing me in an entirely different light. When Kaylin returned and saw me with the book, she looked puzzled, but not angry. So I took the initiative and made her a deal: the book for her phone number. We had our first date the same week.
Kaylin and I were inseparable from that point on, but she paid a high price for the romance. Shortly after our first date, her friend Amy, a straight-laced girl from an upstanding Mormon family, was banned by her parents from seeing Kaylin anymore, on the grounds that I was such an obvious loser, with no plans for college, a career, or even a Mormon mission. What’s more, I’m sure Kaylin’s religiously devout dad also felt justified in his own poor opinion of me after he discovered that I’d convinced his daughter to use his credit card to pay for about $1,200 in food and gasoline for my friends.
Worse ignominy was to come, however. About two-thirds of the way through my senior year, my parents called me in to our dining room for a talk. They’d visited the principal, who’d told them that at that point, there was no way I was going to have enough credits to graduate. I had a 0.09 grade point average for that semester, and a 1.5 cumulative average for my junior and senior years. My mom said the principal had “suggested” that they take me out of school and have me take the General Educational Development test (GED) for an equivalent of a high school diploma. Then he told them that I would no longer be allowed on the high school campus.
The news was not a huge surprise. I’d known I was in danger of failing, and had even signed up for summer school the previous year, although my discipline failed me after just a couple weeks and I stopped showing up for class. My parents had then pushed me to sign up for night school that year to make up the credits, only to find, once again, that I was pretending to attend, but instead just enjoying the free nights out with friends.
As they sat with me around the dining room table, my mom kept saying how worried she was about what would become of me, but my dad just said he was fed up. “From here on in, if you want to keep on living with us, you’re going to have to start contributing,” he announced. “It’s time for you to get a job.”
Now that I was eighteen, he said, he wasn’t willing to let me lounge around doing nothing and going nowhere on his dime. Had my mom been the one to say this, I probably wouldn’t have taken it seriously, but my dad, in my experience, never said anything he didn’t mean, and when he showed me the budget he had drawn up, detailing what it would cost me to rent an apartment on my own, I realized I had better take his advice.
“You Don’t Have to Marry Him”
* * *
Within a week after that pivotal talk with my parents, I found myself a job stocking shelves in a department store for $4.25 an hour, then the minimum wage in Utah. It was one of the few jobs listed in the classified ad section that didn’t require a high school diploma. I don’t remember feeling especially sad as I resigned myself to this daily monotony. At that point, I still had no real reason to think much about the future. My circle of friends was still my first priority, and I didn’t think leaving high school would mean I’d stop seeing them. On the other hand, from my first day on the job, I was bored out of my mind. This, I discovered, was much worse than sitting in class day after day. But there was no going back, it seemed—and especially not after Kaylin suddenly told me her own world-changing news. Eight months into our courtship, she was pregnant.
Kaylin’s father by then disliked me so much that he declared himself willing even to tolerate a child born out of wedlock if it meant avoiding linking our lives together. “You don’t have to marry him,” he told her repeatedly, often even when I was standing right there. But Kaylin was in love and also more than ready to leave home. To prepare for my new life as a responsible married man, I switched to a slightly higher-paying but even more boring job, as an aluminum factory assembly-line worker: punching a clock, wearing a cotton jumpsuit uniform, and filling shifts alongside a woman with a mustache. I lasted there just one week.
We got married just before Kaylin started to need to wear maternity clothes, in the small basketball court of our Mormon church, which community members could use for free. Kaylin’s father, as a wedding present, absolved me of the $1,200 debt from the charges on his credit card.
Kaylin’s mother sewed her dress for her, while one of her sisters baked our cake. Her brother served as amateur photographer—so amateur that every picture in our album has a curious pink ring around the outside. Only immediate family and a few friends attended, and my family discouraged any potential extravagances, such as bouquets or formal invitations, for fear of sending the wrong message to my younger siblings.
“Now you will obey your husband as you obeyed me,” Kaylin’s father intoned, as he stood at the altar. I caught my dad’s eye, and he shrugged, and we exchanged a smile. That whole obedient-wife concept was not exactly dogma in our own house.
For our honeymoon, Kaylin and I drove to Nevada with my grandparents, who generously subsidized the trip. We stayed for two nights in a $29-per-night motel in Wendover, about two hours from Salt Lake City, and a common destination for Mormons sneaking over the border to gamble. Mostly we played board games in our room, but a couple times I went with my grandmother to the casinos, even though, at nineteen, I was two years shy of the legal gambling age.
I had yet to reach my twentieth birthday six months later, when, back in Utah, in a dimly lit hospital room, I held my newborn son, Austin, in my arms, and wept. It was July 11, 1994—the day it hit me that, for the first time in my life, other people were depending on me, and that somehow or other I was going to have to live up to their trust.
BIG IDEAS
If you offer your child a Porsche as a bribe if he gets straight A’s, make sure to clearly state that the deal expires in high school, lest your child go on to get straight A’s throughout all of college and graduate school and then expect you to keep your promise. (Mom? Dad?)
Goals matter. Every behavior is goal-directed for the simple reason that brains simply don’t function without goals. It makes no sense to assume that a child is not goal-directed, when the problem is more that we don’t understand the goal that is motivating his or her behavior.
The powerful role of emotions ensures that having friends—or at least, preventing complete social isolation—will almost always trump academic achievement for a child.
Sometimes a fresh start can be a miracle cure for a struggling child—a way to reboot the context. Yet for that second chance to be useful, the child needs to understand why things didn’t work in the old context, and have a sense for what he or she can do to avoid repeating past mistakes.
Feeling empathy and s
howing it are two different things. If a child is constantly picked on and bullied, he may be capable of the former but not the latter.
ACTION ITEMS
Remember how I learned social skills from mimicking Jimmy, and make sure that as you model your very best behavior for your kids, you also support their spending time with other kids who are smart about relationships.
If you want to change your child’s behavior, start by trying to understand the goals that are motivating it.
Find an opportunity to admit a genuine mistake to your child. Tell him or her not only what you did, but also what you learned from it.
When praising your child, remember that you can be most effective when you focus on factors, such as effort, that are within his control.
Before you ask your child to “try harder,” evaluate whether that’s really the problem.
6
Social Justice
“The first rule is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
—Richard Feynman
The Microphone Test
* * *
A few years ago, in the name of scientific inquiry, I decided to really stress out my students. I was about five weeks into a course I teach at Harvard called Educational Neuroscience, and had led my class of roughly one hundred graduate students through the basics of brain architecture, perception, and memory. We had just moved on to consider recent research about the role of emotions in learning, when out of the blue, I told the students I was going to pick one of them at random to give the rest of the group a brief lecture on the role of neuroscience in education. The task itself would be simple: The person I chose would merely have to summarize what we’d learned to date. No big deal, right?
“You can now have two minutes to take some notes on what you might say, but you can’t take your notes with you to the podium,” I explained.
I projected a slide onto the screen in the front of the room, showing the scene the lucky student I picked would have to face: a close-up photograph of an enormous microphone, in front of a sea of expectant faces. I took out my pocket timer to count down the two minutes.
The impact was immediate, obvious, and also quite startling, especially considering that so many of these students were planning to make a career of standing up in front of a group, five days a week, to teach. Some students gasped. One woman actually sprang from her desk and escaped through a back door. As my timer ticked down to zero, I could tell that quite a few of the people in the room were literally panicking. Their minds went blank, as they later described it. Several said they felt incapable of taking a single note. (Remember what I told you in chapter 4 about how stress plays havoc with your working memory.)
“Ten seconds,” I warned, theatrically pacing in front of my lectern. Then, “Time’s up! The lucky winner is—”
I looked around the room, drawing out the suspense, and then said, “Okay. So just kidding. I’m not going to actually have you give the talk.”
I heard a few more gasps, now mixed with laughter and sighs of relief.
“But I do want to talk about the experience,” I added.
I asked first for comments from people who had felt just fine about the test. A student sitting up in front immediately began waving his hand.
“Things have just been clicking for me in this class,” he said. As he went on to explain, he’d begun to feel the course was especially relevant to his life, after he had recently suffered an illness that his doctor attributed to stress. He was excited by this new, visceral understanding of the connection between his emotions and mental and physical health.
I then called on another student, who, with similar confidence, said, “I’m a teacher. I thought I’ll just take some notes and see what comes out.” Having already survived similar tests, in other words, she knew she could get through this one.
Gramling’s Anthem
* * *
After hearing from a couple more of these buoyant folk, I asked for a show of hands of people who’d had a negative reaction. The first to respond was Maleka Donaldson Gramling, normally one of my most enthusiastic students, and someone I’d pegged as an extrovert, not least because she’d been a member of a Harvard choir as an undergraduate and had gone on to sing in a world fusion band. On tour with the choir, she had once performed in front of ten thousand people at an outdoor concert in Germany.
Still, Gramling had frozen up in the face of the microphone test. She confessed that she hadn’t been able to take a single note, holding up her blank page to prove it.
“I was surprised at myself,” she said quietly. She’d never had any trouble recalling what she’d learned in class while relating it to family and friends afterward. Moreover, Gramling added: “I don’t get nervous when I’m singing.” Yet when I suggested that she give the mini-lecture, she said, “Everything just left my brain, and it was like, no, I just talked about this! But what am I going to say? And then I hear you go: ‘Ten seconds!’”
As so often—even now—still happens, I didn’t stop to think about the possible consequences of what I said next. “You wanna come sing?” I asked her.
“You serious? Okay!”
Without any further hesitation, she walked up in front of the picture of the mike, placed her hands on her hips, closed her eyes, and belted out a spine-tinglingly beautiful rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The rest of the class cheered her soaring high notes. She smiled and returned to her seat.
I shook my head in wonder. My experiment could easily have gone either way, of course. Gramling might have bombed, and been permanently scarred by that experience in my classroom, in which case her fellow students likely would have judged me as a sadist. Instead, there she was, just a minute after having freaked out about not being able to speak to a class of her peers, singing to us as if she were at Fenway Park. It was obvious to me and the other students alike that at that moment she saw herself as a completely different person from the one who had panicked just a few minutes before. And this simple change in perspective had a real-time effect on her ability to perform.
When I look back on Gramling’s anthem today, I consider it the turning point in my own perspective: the moment I was genuinely sold on the enormous relevance of emotions in both learning and behavior. To be sure, I’d already been aware of a great deal of intriguing new research on the power of emotions, which I was including in my lectures. Yet together with many of my colleagues, I still wasn’t entirely convinced of the strength of the connection—until I saw it so plainly demonstrated.
Emotions Rule
* * *
I owe the idea for the microphone test to my colleague Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann. For several weeks leading up to that day in class, she’d been trying to convince me about how new findings on emotions and cognition (rational thought) show that when we’re dealing with the brain, emotions must no longer be seen as the proverbial icing on the cake—they’re really much more like the batter.
This notion, championed so far most famously by the neuroscientist and bestselling author Antonio Damasio, is gaining adherents as evidence accumulates that brain areas linked to emotion are much more crucial than we’d ever thought in governing behavior. As Damasio and his colleagues have shown, people with damage to these brain areas tend to make seemingly irrational and often self-destructive decisions, and lose their ability to learn from their mistakes, even if their “rational” brain networks remain intact. While this may at first seem unlikely, it starts to make more sense when you recall that we humans evolved as social animals, and that reading emotional signals has long been far more critical to our survival than reading words on a page.
Rappolt-Schlictmann’s own pioneering research bears this out. She has focused primarily on studying ways in which preschool teachers can help unusually stressed children calm down enough to make learning possible. In studies of preschoolers from low-income, high-stress families, she and her team have monitored the children’s levels of
cortisol—the stress hormone I told you about in chapter 4. She found that these levels drop significantly—on average about 10 percent—when the kids are placed in smaller groups, with teachers trained to speak softly and help them feel secure. (Note to parents: feel free to try this at home.)
Many kids in poverty are chronically stressed, since they come from environments in which they often need to be especially vigilant to keep themselves safe and fed. If they then are placed in a chaotic classroom, they’ll likely feel threatened instead of challenged. At that point, learning becomes a low priority, and in fact all but impossible, as the child devotes all of his or her energy to the limited choice of fight or flight.
It’s worth keeping in mind that stress is not always a negative factor. Indeed, some stress is needed to keep us awake and alert. The tricky thing to figure out is when that healthy sense of challenge increases to a harmful sense of threat, because that tipping point varies from person to person, even though the physiological consequences do not.
Stress Is Subjective
* * *
The dramatic variability in the way people experience stressful events helps explain the diversity of responses by my students to the microphone test. For some, the pressure was a net plus: They felt motivated by watching me pace back and forth with my timer. Yet approximately one in four of them “choked” under that same pressure. What made the difference had nothing to do with intelligence—some of the top-performing students went blank, swamped by the physiological response to stress—but rather with a combination of factors, having to do with both their innate biology and all of their experience to date.