by David Brooks
Erica gripped the chair as her mom stood and headed toward the exit. “I wanna go to New Hope,” she said stubbornly.
“You have no legal residence in the district,” the caseworker repeated. “You have no authorization.”
“I wanna go to New Hope.” Erica had no argument, no logic, just some furious sense that her mother shouldn’t take this shit lying down. Her mother, now alarmed, pleaded with her to get up and leave. Erica wouldn’t go. She gripped the chair harder. Her mom tugged. Erica wouldn’t release. Her mom hissed at her in quiet fury, desperate not to make a scene. Erica wouldn’t budge. Her mom yanked her, and the chair fell over with Erica still in it.
“You want me to call the cops?” the caseworker hissed. “You want to go across the street?” The juvenile-detention center was across the street.
Erica held on and soon three or four people were tugging at her at once, including some sort of security guard. “I wanna go to New Hope!” She was crying now, her face a mask of tears and anger. Eventually they got her loose. The rent-a-cop screamed at her. Her mom took the furious little girl back home.
Her mom didn’t scold her or even say a word. They rode home silently. That night her mom washed Erica’s hair in the sink, and they talked sweetly about other things.
ERICA’S MOTHER, AMY, was the most downwardly mobile member of her family. Her parents had emigrated from China, and all her other relatives were doing well. But Amy suffered with recurrent long bouts of mania and depression. When her spirits were up, she had phenomenal energy and she’d be off doing the model-minority thing. In her early twenties she spent months each at several different colleges, training academies, and learning centers. She trained as a medical technician. She learned computer software in the hopes of becoming an IT professional. She would work two jobs and just plug away with a doggedness she said she’d inherited from her ancient Chinese peasant stock.
During these prosperous months, she’d take Erica out to the all-you-could-eat buffet at Golden Corral and buy her new clothing and shoes. She’d also try to run her life. She’d tell Erica what to wear and which of her friends she wasn’t permitted to see (most of them—they carried germs). She assigned Erica extra reading so she’d “run ahead” of the other children. Amy even taught her Chinese calligraphy, with brushes she’d kept packed away in the closet. There was a lightness and rhythm to her brushstrokes that Erica hadn’t known her mother possessed. “When you do calligraphy, you must think in a different way,” her mom would tell her. For a couple of years, Erica even took skating lessons.
But then there were the down times. Amy would go from slave driver to nullity in a matter of days, leaving Erica to play the role of mother. It was normal to find bottles of Bacardi and Manischewitz Cream and weed and mirrors with cocaine dust around the apartment. Amy wouldn’t shower or wear deodorant. Nothing at home would get done. When Erica was a baby, and depression struck, her mom would put Pepsi in her baby bottle just to get her to shut up. Later, she would feed her Cheerios for dinner. They’d go for days on a diet of bologna from the corner bodega. When she was nine, Erica learned how to call a cab so she could take her mother to the emergency room for what she told everybody were heart palpitations. She learned to live in the dark, because her mom would tape shut the curtains.
During these times, her dad didn’t come around. Her dad was Mexican American. (The genetic combination accounted for her striking looks.) Erica’s dad was a mixed bag—charming and bright but not exactly Mr. Reliable. On the negative side, he seemed incapable of holding reality in his mind. If he was driving drunk and hit a fire hydrant, he would invent a lavish tale to explain that his car had been rammed by a runaway bus. He would give strangers invented versions of his life story. He would tell lies so glaring, even young Erica could see through them.
Furthermore, he talked constantly about his self-respect. His self-respect prevented him from taking any job that involved serving others. His self-respect caused him to flee whenever Amy got domineering. He’d disappear for weeks and months and then show up with Pampers, even when Erica was five or six. He came and went and yet complained that Amy and Erica were sucking away all his money.
On the other hand, Erica didn’t hate him, the way some of her friends hated their dads who came and went. When he was around, he was funny and compassionate. He remained close to his own parents, brothers, and cousins and often included Erica in large family get-togethers. He’d bring Erica and her various stepsiblings around to picnics and parties. He was very proud of her then, and told everybody how smart she was. He never went to jail and he never abused her, but somehow he could never stay on task. He had momentary enthusiasms but nothing ever amounted to anything.
Both of Erica’s parents were desperately in love with her. In the early days, they wanted to marry and build a traditional home. According to a Fragile Families study, 90 percent of couples who are living together when their child is born plan on getting married someday. But, as is typical, Erica’s parents never performed the deed. According to the Fragile Families research, only 15 percent of those unmarried couples who planned on being married actually did so by the time of their child’s first birthday.
There were many reasons they never actually got hitched. They faced very little social pressure to actually do it. They didn’t entirely trust each other. They never could afford the glorious wedding of their dreams. They were afraid of divorce and the pain that would spread all around. Most important, the cultural transmission belt had snapped. For at least a few decades in American life, it was simply assumed that couples with children would get married—that this was part of entering adulthood. But somehow those life scripts no longer got passed along, at least in certain subcultures, so a decision that had once been automatic and canalized in the brain now required conscious intention. Marriage was no longer the default option. It took specific initiative. For Erica’s parents, it never quite happened.
What was Erica’s socioeconomic status? It depended on the month. There were times, when her mom was productive and her dad was around, when she lived a middle-class life. But in other years they slipped back toward poverty and into a different cultural milieu. These downward slides sent them hurtling back into disorganized neighborhoods. One month they’d be living in a neighborhood with intact families and low crime. But then they couldn’t make the rent, and they’d have to scramble to find a place in a different neighborhood, with empty lots, high crime, and a varied array of living arrangements from apartment to apartment.
Erica would remember those scenes all her life—the small plastic bags to carry stuff away, saying good-bye to the comforts of the middle class, getting crammed into the spare room of some relative or friend, and then the dreary first visit to the decrepit empty apartment in some half-abandoned neighborhood, which would be their new temporary home.
There were fewer jobs in these new neighborhoods. There was less money. There were fewer men, because so many were in prison. There was more crime. But it wasn’t just the material things that were different. Modes of thought and habits of behavior were different, too.
The people in the poorer neighborhoods wanted the same things as everybody else wanted—stable marriages, good jobs, orderly habits. But they lived within a cycle of material and psychological stress. Lack of money changed culture, and self-destructive culture led to lack of money. The mental and material feedback loops led to distinct psychological states. Some people in these neighborhoods had lower aspirations or no aspirations at all. Some had lost faith in their ability to control their own destinies. Some made inexplicable decisions that they knew would have terrible long-term consequences, but they made them anyway.
Many people in these neighborhoods were exhausted all the time from work and stress. Many lacked self-confidence even while making a great show of pretending they had plenty of it. Many lived on edge, coping with one crisis after another. There were more horrible stories. A girl Erica knew stabbed and killed a classmate in a moment o
f passion, effectively ruining her life at fifteen. Erica decided that in these neighborhoods you could never show weakness. You could never back down or compromise. You could never take shit from anybody.
To cope with the disorder, the moms set up sharing networks, and would help one another out with child care, food, and anything else. They looked after one another within the networks, but they were alienated from almost everything beyond—the government, the world of middle-class jobs. They radiated distrust—most of it earned. They assumed everyone was out to get them: Every shopkeeper would shortchange them; every social worker would take something away.
In short, each cognitive neighborhood had a different set of rules of conduct, a different set of unconscious norms about how one should walk, say hello, view strangers, and view the future. Erica handled the moves between these two different cultures with surprising ease, at least on the surface. It was like jumping from one country to another. In the country of the middle class, men and women lived in relatively stable arrangements, but in poverty country they did not. In middle class country, children were raised to go to college. In poverty country they were not.
Annette Lareau, of the University of Pennsylvania, is the leading scholar of the different cultural norms that prevail at different levels of American society. She and her research assistants have spent over two decades sitting on living-room floors and riding around in the backseats of cars, observing how families work. Lareau has found that educated-class families and lower-class families do not have parenting styles that are on different ends of the same continuum. Instead, they have completely different theories and models about how to raise their kids.
Educated-class kids like Harold are raised in an atmosphere of what Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” This involves enrolling the kids in large numbers of adult-supervised activities and driving them from place to place. Parents are deeply involved in all aspects of their children’s lives. They make concerted efforts to provide a constant stream of learning experiences.
The pace is exhausting. Fights about homework are normal. But the children raised in this way know how to navigate the world of organized institutions. They know how to talk casually with adults, how to perform before large audiences, how to look people in the eye and make a good impression. They sometimes even know how to connect actions to consequences.
When Lareau showed lower-class parents the schedule one of her educated-class families stuck to, the lower-class parents were horrified by the pace and the stress. They figured the educated-class kids must be incredibly sad. Lower-class child-rearing, Lareau found, is different. In these homes, there tends to be a much starker boundary between the adult world and the children’s world. Parents tend to think that the cares of adulthood will come soon enough and that children should be left alone to organize their own playtime. When a girl Lareau was watching asked her mother to help her build a dollhouse out of boxes, the mother said no, “casually and without guilt”—because playtime was deemed inconsequential, a child’s sphere and not an adult’s.
Lareau found that lower-class children seemed more relaxed and vibrant. They had more contact with their extended families. Because their parents couldn’t drive them from one activity to another, their leisure time was less organized. They could run outside and play with whatever group of kids they found hanging around the neighborhood. They were more likely to play with kids of all ages. They were less likely to complain about being bored. They even asked their mom’s permission before getting food out of the refrigerator. “Whining, which was pervasive in middle-class homes, was rare in working-class and poor ones,” Lareau wrote.
Harold’s childhood fit into the first of Lareau’s categories. Erica’s childhood was so chaotic she sort of bounced between styles—sometimes her mother doted on her; sometimes she had no mother, only a patient she had to care for and nurse back from the edge.
The lower-class mode has many virtues, but it does not prepare children as well for the modern economy. In the first place, it does not cultivate advanced verbal abilities. Language, as Alva Noë has written, “is a shared cultural practice that can only be learned by a person who is one among many in a special kind of cultural ecosystem.” Erica’s home, like the homes of most working-class kids, was simply quieter. “The amount of talking in these homes varies,” Lareau wrote, “but overall, it is considerably less than in middle-class homes.”
Harold’s parents kept up a constant patter when he was around. In Erica’s home, the TV was more likely to be on all the time. Erica’s mom was simply too exhausted to spend much energy on childlike conversation. Scientists have done elaborate calculations to measure the difference in word flows between middle-class and lower-class households. A classic study by Betty Hart and Todd Risley of the University of Kansas found that by the time they are four, children raised in poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children raised in professional families. On an hourly basis, professional children heard about 487 “utterances.” Children growing up in welfare homes heard about 178.
And it wasn’t just the quantity; it was the emotional tone. Harold was bathed in approval. Every miniscule accomplishment was greeted with a rapturous paean to his magnificent abilities. Erica heard nearly as many discouraging statements as encouraging ones. Harold’s parents quizzed him constantly. They played trivia games and engaged in elaborate duels with mock insults. They were constantly explaining to him why they had made certain decisions and imposed certain restrictions, and Harold felt free to argue with them and offer reasons why they were wrong. Harold’s parents also corrected his grammar, so that by the time it came to taking standardized tests, he didn’t actually have to learn the rules of the language. He just went with whatever answer sounded best. These differences in verbal environment have been linked in study after study to differences in IQ scores and academic achievement.
In short, Harold’s parents didn’t just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits. Harold was part of a hereditary meritocratic class that reinforces itself through genes and strenuous cultivation generation after generation.
Erica didn’t have most of these invisible advantages. She lived in a much more disrupted world. According to Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, stress-hormone levels are higher in poor children than in middle-class children. This affects a variety of cognitive systems, including memory, pattern awareness, cognitive control (the ability to resist obvious but wrong answers), and verbal facility. Poor children are also much less likely to live with two biological parents in the home. Research with small mammals has found that animals raised without a father present were slower to develop neural connections than those raised with a father present, and as a result have less impulse control. It is not only a shortage of money and opportunity. Poverty and family disruption can alter the unconscious—the way people perceive and understand the future and their world.
The cumulative effects of these differences are there for all to see. Students from the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 75 percent chance of earning a college degree. As Nobel Prize–winning economist James J. Heckman had found, 50 percent of lifetime-earnings inequality is determined by factors present in the life of a person by age eighteen. Most of these differences have to do with unconscious skills—that is, attitudes, perceptions, and norms. The gaps in them open up fast.
Emergence
When Erica was in eighth grade—not in the New Hope School, but in an old-fashioned public school—two young Teach for America alumni started a new charter high school nearby, called simply the Academy. It was meant to pick up the kids who graduated from New Hope, and it had a similar ethos—with uniforms, discipline, and special programs.
The founders had started out with a theory about poverty: They didn’t know what caused it. They figured it arose from some mixture of the loss of manufacturing jobs, racial discriminatio
n, globalization, cultural transmission, bad luck, bad government policies, and a thousand other factors. But they did have a few useful observations. They didn’t think anybody else knew what caused poverty either. They believed that it was futile to try to find one lever to lift kids out of poverty, because there was no one cause for it. They believed if you wanted to tackle the intergenerational cycle of poverty, you had to do everything at once.
When they first conceived of the Academy, they worked up a presentation for donors, which they later discarded because almost none of the donors understood it. But the premise behind the presentation was still dear to their hearts. The premise was that poverty is an emergent system.
Through most of human history, people have tried to understand their world through reductive reasoning. That is to say, they have been inclined to take things apart to see how they work. As Albert-László Barabási wrote in his influential book Linked, “Reductionism was the driving force behind much of the twentieth century’s scientific research. To comprehend nature, it tells us, we must decipher its components. The assumption is that once we understand the parts, it will be easy to grasp the whole. Divide and conquer; the devil is in the details. Therefore, for decades we have been forced to see the world through its constituents. We have been trained to study atoms and superstrings to understand the universe; molecules to comprehend life; individual genes to understand complex behavior; prophets to see the origins of fads and religions.” This way of thinking induces people to think they can understand a problem by dissecting it into its various parts. They can understand a person’s personality if they just tease out and investigate his genetic or environmental traits. This deductive mode is the specialty of conscious cognition—the sort of cognition that is linear and logical.