by David Brooks
After bedtime, Harold would be up in his room talking to his characters. His parents would be downstairs, exhausted and unable to hear exactly what he was saying. But they could hear the rise and fall of his voice as the stories danced in the air above him. They would hear him calmly explaining something. Reacting with alarm. Rallying his imaginary friends. He was in what Rob and Julia used to call his Rain Man mode, lost in his own spacey world. They’d wonder when exactly Harold would start joining the human race, if ever. But upstairs, while tutoring his monkeys, Harold drifted off to sleep.
CHAPTER 5
ATTACHMENT
ONE DAY, WHEN HAROLD WAS IN SECOND GRADE, JULIA CALLED him from the playroom to the kitchen table. She rallied her energy and told him it was time to do his homework. Harold ran through his normal gospel of homework avoidance. First, he told her he hadn’t been assigned any homework. When that small fib cracked, he told her he’d already done it at school. This was followed by a series of ever lessplausible claims. He had done it on the bus. He had left the assignment at school. It was too hard, and the teacher had told the class they didn’t have to do it. The homework was impossible because the teacher hadn’t covered the material. It was not due for another week, and he would do it tomorrow, and so on and so on.
Having completed his nightly liturgy, he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber.
Harold’s backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well on his way to a promising career as a homeless person. Inside, if one dug down through the various geological layers, one could find old pretzels, juice boxes, toy cars, Pokemon cards, PSP games, stray drawings, old assignments, worksheets from earlier grades, apples, gravel, newspapers, scissors, and copper piping. The backpack weighed slightly less than a Volkswagen.
Julia pulled Harold’s assignment folder from amid the wreckage. It is said that history moves in cycles, and this is true when it comes to the philosophy of homework-folder organization. In some ages, the three-ring binder is in vogue. In others, the double-sided cardboard folder prevails. The world’s great educators debate the merits of each system, and their preferences seem to alternate according to some astrological cycle.
Julia found his assignment sheet, and realized with a sinking heart that the next sixty-five minutes would be spent completing the ten-minute assignment. The project’s requirements were minimal—Harold would merely need a shoebox, six colored markers, construction paper, a three-foot display board, linseed oil, ebony, the toenail of a three-toed sloth, and some glitter glue.
Julia dimly suspected, and research by Harris Cooper of Duke University confirms, that there is only a tenuous correlation between how much homework elementary students do and how well they do on tests of the material or with other measures of achievement. She also suspected that this nightly homework ordeal served other purposes—to convince parents that their kids are getting a suitably rigorous education; to introduce the children to their future lives as spiritually crushed drones; or, more positively, to introduce children to the study habits they would need later in life.
In any case, Julia, trapped in the overpressured parenting life that everybody in her social class ridicules but few renounce, girded herself for the bribery and cajolery that would follow. She would, over the next few minutes, present Harold with an ever more elaborate series of incentives—gold stars, small pieces of candy, BMWs—all to induce him to do his homework. When these failed, as they inevitably would, she would wheel out the disincentives—threats to cut off TV privileges, to take away all computer games and videos, to write him out of her will, to imprison him in a cardboard box with nothing to eat but bread and water.
Harold would be able to resist all threats and incentives, either because he was not yet capable of calculating long-term pain versus temporary inconvenience, or because he knew his mother had no intention of ever cutting off the TV privileges, and thus putting herself in the position of having to entertain him all week.
In any case, Julia sat Harold down with his homework assignment at the kitchen table. She turned her back to get a glass of water, and 7.82 seconds later Harold handed her a sheet of paper claiming his homework was done. Julia looked down at the homework sheet, which looked like it contained three or four indecipherable markings that seemed to be in early Sanskrit.
This would mark the beginning of the nightly redo phase of the homework, when Julia would explain it was necessary to do his work slowly and carefully and in English if possible. Harold went through his normal protests, fell into another of his cycles of misery and internal chaos, and Julia knew that it would be another fifteen minutes of turmoil and disorder before he was in any mental shape to do the homework. It was as if she and Harold had to endure a phase of internal riot and protest before Harold would capitulate and be in a state capable of steady work.
One modern view of this situation is that Harold’s freedom was being crushed by the absurd strictures of civilization. The innocence and creativity of childhood was being impinged and bound by the conformities of an overwrought society. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.
But looking at her son, Julia didn’t really get the sense that the unsupervised Harold, the non-homework Harold, the uncontrolled Harold was really free. This Harold, which some philosophers celebrate as the epitome of innocence and delight, was really a prisoner of his impulses. Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
Harold wanted to do his homework. He wanted to be a good student and please his teachers and his mother and father. But he was just unable. He somehow couldn’t help that his backpack was a mess and his life was disorganized. Sitting at the table, he couldn’t control his own attention. Something would happen by the sink and he’d check it out. Some stray thought would drive him toward the refrigerator, or to an envelope that happened to be lying near the coffee machine.
Far from being free, Harold was now a victim of the remnants of his own lantern consciousness, distracted by every stray prompt, unable to regulate his responses. He was smart enough to sense that he was spinning out of control. He could not reverse the turmoil welling up inside. So he would get frustrated and think he was bad.
Some evenings, to be honest, Julia made these moments worse by losing patience. At these tired, frustrated moments, she just told Harold to buckle down and get it over with. Why couldn’t he complete these simple assignments, which he knew how to do, which should have been so easy for him?
That never worked.
But Julia had other resources. When Julia was young, her family moved around a lot. She switched schools and sometimes had trouble making new friends. At those times, she threw herself at her own mother, and relied on her company. They would take long walks together, and go out for tea together, and her mother, who was lonely, too, in the new neighborhood and had nobody she could talk to, would open up. She would tell young Julia about her nervousness in the new place, what she liked about it and what she didn’t, what she missed and what she looked forward to. Julia felt privileged when her mother opened up in this manner. She was just a little girl at the time, but she had access to an adult viewpoint. She felt she was being admitted into a special realm.
Julia lived a very different life than the one her mother did. It was much easier in many respects. She spent an insane amount of time on superficialities—shopping for the right guest-room hand towels, following celebrity gossip. But she still had some of those internal working models in her head. Without thinking about it, without even realizing that she was replicating her mother’s behavior, Julia sometimes would share her own special experiences with Harold. She wouldn’t really think about it, but often when they were both on edge, when times were hard, she would just find herself talking about some adventure she’d had when she was young. She would give him privileged access into her life.
This particular evening, Julia saw Harold strangely a
lone, struggling with the stimuli and the random impulses within. She instinctively pulled him in, and brought him a bit inside her own life.
She told him a story. She told him, of all things, about a drive she had taken across the country with some friends after college. She described the rhythms of that drive, where they had stayed night after night, how the Appalachians had given way to the plains and then the Rockies. She described what it was like to wake up in the morning and see mountains in the distance and then drive for hours and still not reach them. She described the string of Cadillacs she had seen planted upright along the highway.
As she did this, his eyes were rapt upon her. She was treating him with respect and letting him into that most mysterious region—the hidden zone of his mother’s life that had existed before his birth. His time horizon subtly widened. He got subtle intimations of his mother’s girlhood, her maturity, his arrival, his growth, this moment now, and the adventures he would someday have.
And as Julia talked, she was tidying up. She was clearing space on the counters, removing the boxes and stray letters that had piled up during the day. Harold leaned in toward her, as if she were offering him water after a thirsty walk. Over the years, Harold had learned how to use her as a tool to organize himself, and during their little random conversation he started to do just that.
Julia looked over at Harold and noticed he had his pencil dangling from his mouth. He wasn’t really chewing on it, just letting it hang softly between his teeth in the way he automatically did when he was thinking about something. He suddenly looked happier and more collected. With her story, Julia had triggered something—an implicit memory of what it was like to be calm and in control. She’d engaged him in the sort of extended conversation that he was still incapable of performing on his own. It was like a miracle, and Harold soon got his homework smoothly done.
But of course it wasn’t a miracle. If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.
Firmly Attached
Social scientists do their best to arrive at some limited understanding of human development. In 1944 the British psychologist John Bowlby did a study called Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves on a group of young delinquents. He noticed that a high percentage of the boys had been abandoned when they were young, and suffered from feelings of anger, humiliation, and worthlessness. “She left because I’m no good,” they’d explain.
Bowlby noticed that the boys withheld affections and developed other strategies to cope with the sense of abandonment that plagued them. He theorized that what kids need most are safety and exploration. They need to feel loved by those who care for them, but they also need to go out into the world and to take care of themselves. Bowlby argued that these two needs, while sometimes in conflict, are also connected. The more secure a person feels at home, the more likely he or she is to venture out boldly to explore new things. Or as Bowlby himself put it, “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”
Bowlby’s work helped shift thinking about childhood, and about human nature. Up until his day, psychologists tended to study individual behavior, not relationships. Bowlby’s work emphasized that the relationship between a child and a mother or primary caregiver powerfully molds how that child will see herself and the world.
Before Bowlby’s era, and even in the years beyond, many people focused on the conscious choices people made. The assumption was that people look at the world, which is simple, and then make decisions about it, which are complicated and hard. Bowlby focused on the unconscious models we carry around in our heads, which organize perception in the first place.
For example, a baby is born with a certain inborn trait, like irritability. But he is lucky enough to have a mother who can read his moods. She hugs him when he wants hugs and puts him down when he wants to be put down. She stimulates him when he wants stimulation and holds back when he needs tranquility. The baby learns that he is a creature who exists in dialogue with others. He comes to see the world as a collection of coherent dialogues. He also learns that if he sends signals, they will probably be received. He will learn to get help when he is in trouble. He will develop a whole series of suppositions about how the world works, and he’ll rely on these suppositions as he ventures forth and meets other people (where these suppositions will either be validated or violated).
Children born into a web of attuned relationships know how to join in conversations with new people and read social signals. They see the world as a welcoming place. Children born into a web of threatening relationships can be fearful, withdrawn, or overaggressive. They often perceive threats, even when none exist. They may not be able to read signals or have a sense of themselves as someone worth listening to. This act of unconscious reality construction powerfully determines what we see and what we pay attention to. It powerfully shapes what we will end up doing.
There are many ways to define parental relationships, but Bowlby’s protégé, Mary Ainsworth, figured that a crucial moment came when a child was separated from her attachment figure and compelled, even for a few minutes, to explore the world on her own. Ainsworth devised the Strange Situation Test to examine these transition moments between safety and exploration. In a typical permutation of the test, Ainsworth put a young child (usually between nine and eighteen months) and her mother in a room filled with toys that invite exploration. Then a stranger would enter the room. Then the mother would leave the baby with the stranger. Then the mother would return. Then the mother and the stranger would leave the baby alone. Then the stranger would return. Ainsworth and her colleagues closely observed the child at each of these transitions: How much did she protest when the mother left? How did she react when Mom returned? How did she react to the stranger?
Over the subsequent decades, the Strange Situation Test has been applied to thousands and thousands of children all around the world. About two-thirds of the children cry a bit when their mother leaves them in this test and then rush to her when she returns to the room. These children are said to be securely attached. About a fifth of the children don’t make any outward display when their mother leaves, nor do they hurry over to her when she returns. These children are said to be avoidantly attached. The final group doesn’t display coherent responses. They may rush back to Mom as she returns but also punch her in anger when she gets close. These children are said to have ambivalent or disorganized attachment styles.
These categories have the same flaws as all attempts to categorize human beings. Nonetheless, there is a mountain of research, known as attachment theory, which explores how different types of attachment are related to different parenting styles, and how strongly childhood attachments shape relationships and accomplishments over the course of a lifetime. It turns out that attachment, even at age one, correlates reasonably well with how people will do in school, how they will fare in life and how they will develop relationships later in life. The results of one test in infancy don’t determine a life course. No one is locked into any destiny during childhood. But they give an insight into the internal working models that have been created by the relationship between parents and child, models that will then be used to navigate the world beyond.
Securely attached
children have parents that are attuned to their desires and mirror their moods. Their mothers soothe them when they are alarmed and play happily with them when they are gleeful. These children do not have perfect parents or perfect relationships. Children are not fragile. Their parents can screw up, lose their tempers, and sometimes ignore their children’s needs, and yet if the overall pattern of care is reliable, then their kids still feel secure in their presence. Another lesson is that there is no one right parenting style. Parents can deliver stern punishments, and as long as the child thinks the conversation is coherent and predictable, then the attachment will probably still be secure.
When parents do achieve this attunement with their kids, then a rush of oxytocin floods through their brains. Some scientists, with that special way of theirs, call oxytocin the “affiliative neuropeptide.” It surges when people are enjoying close social bonds; when a mother is giving birth or suckling her child; after an orgasm, when two people in love gaze into each other’s eyes; when friends or relatives hug. Oxytocin gives people a powerful feeling of contentment. In other words, oxytocin is nature’s way of weaving people together.
Securely attached children tend to cope with stressful situations well. A study by Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota found that when you give a shot to a fifteen-month-old who is securely attached, he will cry at the pain, but the level of cortisol in his body will not rise. Insecurely attached children may cry just as loud, but they may not reach for their caregiver and their cortisol levels are more likely to shoot up, because they are accustomed to feeling more existential stress. Securely attached children tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. In school, they know how to use teachers and other adults to succeed. They don’t feel compelled to lean against and be near the teachers at all times. Neither do they hold themselves aloof from teachers. They come and go—establishing contact and breaking away. They also tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less of a need to lie to puff themselves up in other’s eyes.