by Todd Rose
More generally, I’m convinced that this kind of careful consideration of context offers the most powerful check on all kinds of student misbehavior, as well as the best way to ensure that kids meet their potential at school. Ample research shows that when kids feel less powerless and bored and more positively connected to adults and peers at their school, they tend to excel, emotionally, socially, and academically. In an online column titled “School Bullying: A Tragic Cost of Forced Schooling and Autocratic School Governance,” Boston College research psychologist Peter Gay compared the top-down power structure prevalent at most schools to prisons and the Chinese feudal system, theorizing that it’s only natural to expect that students would rebel whenever they could get away with it, or even when they couldn’t, just as happens in China and in prisons. Bullying occurs regularly in settings where people have no political power, as Gay notes, and, in most cases, as long as the guards and wardens—or teachers—have more interest in hiding the problem than confronting it effectively. In contrast, when students feel that they have genuine power over their environment, they have a vested interest in keeping it both peaceful and successful.
So, once again, the key is in the context. If you want young people to learn empathy, don’t just talk about it. Place them in supportive, democratic, and fair-minded environments free of cruelty—for instance, where no teacher would consider punishing, much less ridiculing, a student with a lousy short-term memory—and where empathy flows naturally. Then just sit back and watch the miracles happen, like me sticking up for Scooter, or Maleka Gramling singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a hundred of her peers.
BIG IDEAS
A student’s ability to learn depends on his or her emotional state, which itself depends on context.
Emotions usually have a far greater impact than “pure” rationality in determining whether we make good decisions.
A little stress can help someone learn, while too much stress prevents it. The optimal amount of stress varies from person to person.
Whether someone is challenged and engaged, or, conversely, threatened and shut down, depends on a balance of demands and resources. Demands include anything from the difficulty of the task at hand to the person’s perception of other people’s reactions. Resources include factors such as perceived skills, available materials and support, and individual temperament.
ACTION ITEMS
Pay attention to how much stress your child is under, at home and at school, and whether your child is feeling threatened versus challenged.
Particularly if you notice that most of your interactions with your admittedly challenging child have become negative, try a few “random acts of kindness” to see if you can’t initiate a positive feedback loop.
Some U.S. high schools have managed to create cultures that support learning by nurturing students’ emotional resources. It’s worth a parent’s time to evaluate how your child’s school measures up, and, if possible, find ways to support improvements.
7
Turnaround
“Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.”
—Mulla Nasrudin
Minimum Wage Days
* * *
Because of how much time has passed, and how much better our lives have become in recent years, my parents and Kaylin and I can now laugh about all the ways I used to drive them nuts—not least being how I worked at no fewer than ten jobs within the two years after our first son was born.
From that day that I first held Austin in my arms, I’d been telling everyone who would listen that becoming a father had changed me to the core. I was finally ready to apply myself, I declared, and to work hard to support my new family. Yet I still couldn’t manage to stick to any particular employment for longer than three months at a time.
I went from stocking shelves in a department store to making aluminum sheets on an assembly line to manning ovens for a bagel franchise on the predawn shift, to working the phones in a credit card customer service department, to selling chain-link fence, door-to-door, across northern Utah.
I never got fired from any of these jobs, and almost always at least initially won praise from my bosses for my high energy and productivity. Yet as soon as I learned the routine, I’d get so bored that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate another day, and then I’d quit. This struck many people around me at the time (including, and most notably, my in-laws) as even worse than getting fired, since to them work was not ever supposed to be enjoyable, but more something that you endured. Kaylin’s dad thought he understood the problem, pronouncing me “inherently lazy.”
To no one’s surprise, we were always short of money. Not long before Austin was born, Kaylin and I had moved out of my parents’ basement and into a one-bedroom apartment about two miles away. It was our declaration of independence, the start of our life as genuine adults, but luxury wasn’t its strong suit. The place measured barely 450 square feet—so small that I could lie on my stomach in the middle of the apartment and have a body part in every room: the kitchen, bathroom, front room, and a bedroom so tiny that it could barely contain both our bed and Austin’s crib. The other little problem was that I couldn’t afford even the first month’s rent. To my huge embarrassment and relief, my mom quietly came to our rescue, writing the check on my promise that I had a plan to repay her.
She might have known better. Our financial situation was only getting worse, with my average pay so low that Kaylin and I depended on a generous friend to donate diapers. After a stack of bills piled up, we finally applied for welfare assistance, and stayed on welfare for the next three humiliating years. Kaylin supplemented our income by selling blood as often as once a week, which was as frequent as the law allows.
Sad to say, there were more than a few occasions after we’d start to save a little money that my impulsivity caught up with me, and I’d do something that would push us back to the far side of precarious. Barely one week after I’d been hired at a new, commissions-only sales job at an electronics store, for instance, I used my lunch break to wander over to a nearby car lot and, on a whim, bought a new blue Honda Civic I could in no way afford. The car would soon be repossessed, and that one dumb move would spoil our credit for several years to come.
In view of all this, it’s easy for me to imagine how someone looking at my life from the outside might have concluded that I really hadn’t changed. In many ways, I was still behaving like the goofy kid who’d thrown a rock at a car for no reason, and the slacker teen who’d skipped school to take his buddies to breakfast with his ill-gotten gains. Nonetheless, I have no doubt today that beneath that discouraging appearance, I was indeed changing—slowly, subtly, but also fundamentally.
The Man in the Mirror
* * *
If I had to set a date for the start of those changes that led to my transformation from junior hoodlum to Harvard applicant, it would be the day I stood up for Scooter back at Layton High. My unprecedented decision to act on an empathetic impulse and defend the bullies’ victim was a major turning point for me: the moment I authentically signed up as part of a larger community. Sure, I was getting at least somewhat more mature as I got older, but my transformation was more complicated than that. Until that time, and most likely due to so many years of being socially isolated, I had seriously doubted the goodness of human nature, not least my own. But my new circle of friends in high school had made me feel not only accepted but worthwhile, and, for the first time, I felt I truly owed other people my best efforts.
Getting married to Kaylin hugely added to my new feeling of self-worth, which in turn opened the door to other previously impossible changes. Slowly at first, but then more and more, I became more honest with myself. I still made many stupid mistakes, but for the first time that I could recall, I was able not only to acknowledge blunders after I made them, but also to try to figure out how they’d happened. In other words, I was increasingly able to learn from my mistakes.
Of course, many well
-adjusted people acquire this skill in childhood, but people like me, for some good reasons, have a harder time. Part of the problem is that from a very early age, I’d made so many dumb mistakes that I’d gotten in the habit of denying or explaining them away, out of the fear that if I didn’t, I’d be confirmed as an unredeemable screwup. I got so good at this that I even fooled myself. Blaming other people or circumstances for my own blunders was the way I managed to live with myself. In the early years of my marriage, however, I mustered the courage to drop some of those excuses and face myself more honestly. My new ability to recognize the good parts of myself helped me to address the parts that needed improvement.
Many years later, I came across some research that helps explain this process. It’s part of a new niche of psychology, inspired by Buddhist philosophy, that has been establishing some dramatic benefits of “self-compassion,” or, more plainly, being kind to oneself. Researchers have found that people who score relatively high on tests of self-compassion are less depressed and anxious, and more happy and optimistic than others.
University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff, a pioneer in this field, takes pains to contrast self-compassion with self-indulgence, a point I agree is well worth making. Rather than being a way to spoil yourself, she suggests, genuine self-compassion can serve as a check on the kind of relentless self-criticism that keeps you stuck, too pessimistic about your own potential to muster the energy to start improving yourself. In contrast with this unproductive sort of self-blaming, self-compassion has been associated with success even when it comes to dieting to lose weight. My mother, as I think back, was a powerful model of self-compassion for me, from her early maintenance of those “restorative niches” I told you about in chapter 1 to the forgiving way she talked about herself. “I was not perfect and I made tons of mistakes, but I did the best I could at any given moment,” she has told me.
In the wake of my unprecedented social success at Layton High School, I was not only able to be kinder to myself, I got better at tending to the relationships that were most important to me. This includes genuinely listening to my parents, who, as I finally recognized, had always had my best interests at heart. Suddenly I cared a lot more about what they thought, although of course I initially didn’t let them know this. And as I paid more attention to them, it dawned on me how admirable they were. Had they always been that way? Or was I only now able to see it?
More impressive to me than anything either of them ever said was the way they had been living their lives, voting with their feet in favor of the value of education. This in fact is a common theme in the most positive relationships between parents and children: Good examples are always much more effective than words.
Many years later, after I’d gotten into Harvard, a reporter asked me what in the world had given me the confidence that I could go back to school after my previous failure. I realized I’d never actually thought about it in those terms. I’d watched both of my parents reinvent themselves by reeducating themselves, and seen how much they’d benefited. I only had to follow their footsteps. This is just one reason why dropping out of high school didn’t ruin my future, as it sadly does for so many other kids. Once I decided to change, I had the foundation I needed to turn my life around.
Well before then, my parents had become models for me not only in respect to their career paths, but in how they were each growing as human beings. My father’s career switch, which brought him so much more prestige and pay, to a surprising extent also seemed to make him more reflective and less reactive. As I saw it, he’d gone back to school as someone who could be quick to anger and emerged a model of self-control. As he gained self-respect, he seemed to be more able to worry less about me, and be a lot more patient, a development that was a powerful lesson for me, since I’d so long feared my own temper was beyond my ability to change. But here was my father, in his late forties, learning an entirely new way of handling his emotions. And if he could do it, maybe so could I.
Indeed, it was only once I moved out of my parents’ house that my dad and I started spending a lot more time together. Fortuitously, we’d both gotten interested in golf at the same time. We ended up meeting together almost every weekend, roaming the various golf courses of northern Utah, both of us walking and carrying our own clubs to save money. It was during these rambles that my dad began to dole out advice, and I realized that either he had gotten much smarter, or I’d grown up enough to recognize his wisdom.
My Dad, Redux
* * *
My father had always been strict, but never in a my-way-or-the-highway manner. I remember Kaylin’s father, shortly after our marriage, warning me, “Never apologize to your children,” advice that seemed so foreign to me after my own parents’ more straightforward style. Particularly as my siblings and I grew older, both Larry and Lyda had made it a practice to own up to their mistakes and discuss them frankly.
One of my father’s mantras was that everyone makes mistakes, but what truly builds and demonstrates good character is what you do afterward. This is particularly good advice for parents of kids like me, who make more than our share of gaffes. Rather than focus your energy on trying to stop the blunders, which is usually impossible anyway—at least in the short term—you can better help your child by encouraging him to be honest about what happened and to figure out what he can do to make things better.
My parents’ approach helped inspire one of the smartest things I did for myself during this time, which was to buy myself a small, black spiral notebook, in which I kept a log of the dumbest, most out-of-control things I did. I called it my “D’oh!” book, an homage to the cartoon character Homer Simpson. My teachers in religious school had encouraged me to write in a journal, but even as I finally took up this practice, it mortified me. What kind of loser needs to fill up a whole notebook with his stupid faux pas? Still, I was starting to recognize the usefulness of training my metacognition—the fancy word scientists use for the way you keep track of how you think and behave. Maybe if I flexed this mental muscle of self-control, I figured, I wouldn’t keep throwing my golf clubs down after making a lousy shot. Maybe I wouldn’t even have bought that Honda on my lunch hour. To ease the initial pain of this exercise—after all, this was one of my weakest muscles—I came up with the strategy of only allowing myself to read the book in times when my self-confidence was particularly high, like after I’d just hit a winning shot in a rec-league basketball game. At times like these, I was able to think over what had happened, determining if the error was truly to any degree my fault, and if so, what I could do about it. Usually I also included my dad’s take on the incident, if he’d happened to witness it, or if, as was increasingly the case, I’d talked to him about it afterward.
There was the time, for example, when we were out golfing together, and my dad wandered off about twenty yards to look for his ball. I spotted him out on the fairway just as a woman in a short golf skirt walked in front of him. It struck me how funny it would be to wolf-whistle in her direction, making her think it was my dad. So of course I did just that. Had this been just two or three years ago, Larry might have (rightly) flipped out at my rudeness, and, conditioned as I was, I braced myself as he walked back to me. But instead, looking less angry than just slightly embarrassed, he quietly told me what a coincidence it was that he had just two weeks ago attended a sexual harassment training workshop at his job. “Son, I know you meant what you did as a joke, and I’m not saying it wasn’t funny,” he said. “But just imagine how that woman feels. A few minutes ago, she felt like a golfer. How does she feel now?” He then gave me a soft pat on the back and returned to his shot.
When I was growing up, my parents spent a lot of time arguing over the best way to raise me. Of the two, my father always seemed to have higher expectations, which he thought he could get me to fulfill with strict rules and consequences. He thought my mother was too soft, since she usually leaned more toward trying to build up my self-confidence, which she could see was below
sea level. For various reasons, including sheer force of will, my mom routinely won these arguments, and I’m glad she did. When you’ve fallen into a hole, someone else’s lofty expectations of you just aren’t that helpful. Yet today I’m equally grateful for my dad’s approach, which helped me enormously as soon as I was ready for it. This illustrates the point that there simply isn’t one right way to raise a good kid. You can set all the goals you want starting out, but prepare to change your methods according to shifting circumstance. Once again, it’s chess, not checkers.
At the same time, it’s worth noting the abundant research demonstrating that children benefit more, in terms of mental health and general well-being, to the degree that both of their parents are involved, always assuming the involvement is benign. Strong relationships between fathers and children have been linked with reduced risk of drug abuse, greater problem-solving ability, and even, interestingly enough, impulse control and memory.
Would a closer relationship with my dad earlier in my childhood have prevented me from misbehaving as a kid? I honestly don’t know. Still, I’m certain that his guidance and example had a huge amount to do with the fact that I’m no longer working at jobs that bore me out of my mind.
As Larry and I started golfing together through the humid spring and summer of 1995, my son Austin’s first year, I observed him and listened to him ever more closely. When he told me how hard it had been to return to school, I knew what he meant, having watched him take classes at night and on weekends on top of his full-time job. Yet I’d also witnessed, at close range, the rewards he’d earned, including more interesting work, more pay, a new house, and a lot more self-respect. I realized I wanted all those things, too, and pretty soon, I was forming a plan.