Awkward

  Carson’s advisor knew that Carson had no intent to embarrass him at the applied mathematics symposium, but he also knew that this misstep would carry significant consequences for Carson’s reputation. This was a hit that Carson could ill afford, given his negative balance with most people in the department. If Carson had been a kind soul who had earned the social respect of his peers, then people who witnessed the pop-up fiasco would have seen this awkward moment as an aberration and attributed the incident to faulty antivirus software. But Carson had no social cushion, and his advisor knew that if Carson did not make deliberate efforts to be more likable, he would never form the social ties necessary to reach his full professional potential.

  In the wake of the pop-up disaster, Carson took a hard look at what he “didn’t get.” He eventually concluded that he got physics, but did not get people. For the first time in a long time, he tried to see the world through other people’s eyes and considered what his classmates might say when asked about what they don’t get. Full of good intent, Carson set out on a social science investigation around the department, asking a handful of his peers what they “didn’t get” in graduate school. Some of his classmates didn’t get advanced statistics and some of the foreign-born students didn’t get all of the nuances of the English language. Although this was probably frustrating for them, those who struggled with advanced statistics went for additional tutoring, and some of the English as a second language students consistently went to the writing lab for extra help with papers. As Carson sat in his dorm formulating theories from his interviews, he realized that his classmates were doing things to figure out what they didn’t get, but he was doing nothing to improve how to get along with other people.

  Carson made a genuine effort to examine his attitude. He began by visiting his advisor’s office, where he gave another apology for good measure, then asked for a “candid and uncensored” critique about what exactly he didn’t get. He took meticulous notes as his advisor told him in great detail about why Carson could not afford to move through his graduate studies and professional career with blinders on: because science is a collaborative discipline. He recited case studies about how many of the greatest scientific discoveries resulted from collaboration and sometimes scientists being open to people with wildly different perspectives. The detailed feedback and concrete examples made sense to Carson, and he left that meeting on better terms with his advisor and a determination to shift his perspective about what it would mean to be successful in graduate school.

  Carson had hoped that his academic status would carry over to his social relationships, but he realized that 99.99 percent of people were not going to determine his likability based on the prestige of his professional credentials or publication record. It’s an understandable fantasy because physics was what came naturally to him, but he realized that small behaviors like taking the time to lend a helping hand with a colleague’s experiment or showing up for a colleague’s marathon to cheer him on carried far more weight in people’s minds than professional status or power. His shift to approaching interactions with an intent to contribute first and worry about his self-interest second might sound like common sense, but it’s a perspective that some people never learn and even the best of us can lose our grip on.

  During his last year of Carson’s doctoral program, I had a chance to catch up with him on his campus. I had not seen him since we had graduated from college and he was as awkward as ever, but as he showed me around his department I could tell that he was well-liked and there were people who were clearly drawn to him. What Carson had come to understand about the pull between two people in a friendship is that one does not become more magnetic by launching higher than the other, but instead by adopting pro-social values that really matter in the long run. When Carson decided to be fair, be kind, and be loyal, he became a more substantial person, which had a way of attracting other people of substance into his orbit.

  PART II

  THIS IS GETTING AWKWARD:

  HOW MODERN SOCIETAL SHIFTS

  ARE MAKING EVERYONE FEEL

  MORE AWKWARD

  6

  NURTURING AWKWARD CHILDREN

  By my last year of junior high, I was a serious academic underachiever, a below-average two-miler on the track team, and my social progress had definitely hit a point of diminishing returns. At a family dinner toward the end of my final semester, my parents informed me of a decision “we have reached as a couple,” which was their way of saying that this decision was a nonnegotiable executive order. They had decided to send me to a different high school from the one my junior high classmates would attend. I staged the obligatory adolescent protest, but I knew in the back of my mind that a change of scenery might provide some traction to get out of my rut.

  After learning that professionalism and maturity were not the keys for junior high social success, I was reluctant to make decisive moves to prepare for high school social life. I began high school with the social aspirations of many awkward kids, which was to avoid doing anything that would get me harassed by bullies and make a few reliable friends. Things turned out better than I had hoped because I caught a few early breaks. One of my early childhood friends had grown into a six-four man-child by the time we were fifteen and was the star running back on the football team. We were locker partners and he was a good friend to me. He took me under his wing and a few of his friends from the offensive line followed suit. Suddenly my fortunes had changed from being a skinny kid with no social capital who was always in danger of being thrown in a locker to being a skinny kid with some borrowed social capital who was well guarded. By high school standards, this was a vast improvement.

  Although high school was going extremely well on the social front, I continued to underachieve in many of my classes. This fact escaped many of my teachers, who had bigger problems than a relatively well-behaved C student like me, but my low academic expectations caught the sharp eye of my chemistry teacher, Mr. Z. He told us on the first day of school that he went by Mr. Z because he had no patience for students mispronouncing his Eastern European surname. Legend had it that Mr. Z had worn the same outfit for all twenty-five years he had been teaching high school chemistry, a sweater-vest, a starched shirt, khakis, and polished brown oxfords. He was always on time, never conducted a show-a-video-and-worksheet class, and was one of the top triathletes in his age group in the state of Colorado. He was a self-proclaimed nerd before it was common to reclaim a derogatory term by using it as self-description. He was an awkward guy, but his awkwardness was overshadowed by his strict expectations of excellence for himself and from his students. It was a philosophy that struck most high school students as overly earnest.

  One day Mr. Z called my parents to tell them that I was “in jeopardy of doing very poorly in chemistry” even though I was a solid C-plus student in his class. Sure, I was underachieving, but I was far from failing. When Mr. Z informed me that I would need to come in after school to redo the problems I had missed on my chemistry homework until I started fulfilling my potential, I became incensed. The idea of missing after-school socializing was unthinkable. I was gaining social momentum and Mr. Z’s detentions would surely infringe upon a critical window to socialize with people at the end of the school day.

  The first time I showed up to Mr. Z’s after-school detention to fix my homework problems, I realized that no other student had been sentenced to this punishment. As I stood at the chalkboard fixing a problem, I found it difficult to steady the chalk in my hand, which shook with anger. As I plugged in values and balanced equations, shards of chalk were flying off the chalkboard like sparks—until I would make a mistake and Mr. Z would stop me with the same phrase: “careless mistake.” My eyes would grow wide and my mouth would fall open as I tilted my head to the side and felt my face grow hot.

  One Friday afternoon, I missed the opportunity to spend a weekend with some friends at someone’s mountain home on account of my chemistry detention. To a high school student these kinds o
f lost social opportunities feel like the end of the world. My dad picked me up from school and saw that I was making my angry face. He knew exactly what was on my mind: “If Mr. Z was not in the way, then this never would have happened.” My dad was the vice principal at my high school and had known Mr. Z for years. My dad decided that I needed some context to understand Mr. Z’s intent. He asked, “Did you know that Mr. Z grew up without a mom and dad until he was a teenager?”

  I had not known. None of the students in Mr. Z’s classes knew anything about him except that he was evangelical about chemistry and a self-proclaimed nerd. My dad explained that Mr. Z was raised in an Eastern European orphanage and was adopted around age three by a family in the United States. His adoptive parents decided after a couple of years that they could not keep him, which left him bouncing around foster homes throughout his childhood. When he was thirteen years old, an older couple permanently adopted him. The husband and wife were both successful science professors and they saw Mr. Z not as a misfit, but as a boy with a precocious scientific ability who was bored with his schoolwork and who needed a great deal of structure to guide his high energy toward something positive.

  Mr. Z’s adoptive parents provided a systematic approach to life, which was something that he desperately needed. He also loved the casual dinnertime stories his parents told about scientific discoveries or legendary scientists. By the time Mr. Z graduated from high school, he was at the top of his class, a state champion distance runner, and was accepted to the Naval Academy for college. After graduating with a science major, he quickly rose through the ranks as an officer while working as an engineer on top-priority military projects. At the end of his commitment, Mr. Z could have continued his fast rise with the navy or he could have accepted lucrative job offers from private companies that worked on defense projects. Instead, he decided to pursue his teaching certificate to try to motivate kids like me who were trying to do the bare minimum to get by in school.

  After telling me Mr. Z’s story, my dad offered a hypothesis about why I was in those detentions: “Mr. Z is hard on you because he cares about your future. I know you don’t love chemistry. I know you’re not interested in the scientific method or statistics. But you have to understand that science was Mr. Z’s way to a better life. This is his way of trying to help you out.” I contemplated this conversation about Mr. Z for many weeks. It made me less upset about the detentions, but it also made me wonder how a guy like Mr. Z managed to achieve so much, at such a high level. I wondered about classic questions of nature versus nurture and how much Mr. Z’s inherent nature versus his adoptive family influenced who he became. Years later, as a graduate student in psychology, I would learn that these answers are not dichotomous, but rather suggest a dynamic interplay between genetic influences and the people who modify our psychological trajectories along the way.

  The Nature of Awkward Families

  WHEN I SAW teenagers as psychotherapy clients, they would often tell me, “My parents totally made it awkward.” The “it” could refer to their father’s style of dress at a baseball game, their mother’s intervention with a teacher at the child’s school, or an attempt by a parent to be cool when a teenager’s friends came over to the house. When I heard these stories, I would first acknowledge that their parents’ black dress socks with shorts or use of the phrase “homey” with their friends was indeed awkward, but then I would ask the teenager, “Do you think your parents ever feel awkward about what you do?”

  It’s risky to come back with this kind of reflective question to a teenager, but I found that they appreciated the play. Teenagers would recall with a degree of amusement times when their parents must have felt awkward, like the time when the teenager chose a family movie that had an unexpectedly long and graphic sex scene. By the end of these therapy sessions, we would usually conclude that being part of a family is inherently awkward.

  While family life naturally presents awkward moments, there are unique challenges for the modern family when it comes to defining expectations for each member. Alison Gopnik is a leading child development researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and during a presentation to the Association for Psychological Science she provided an insightful overview of some shifts in familial expectations. Throughout most of human history, families were part of a network of extended family who lived close by or even in the same household, which meant that kids not only received guidance from their parents, but also from aunts, uncles, grandparents, and older siblings or cousins. This arrangement also meant that kids learned to take care of other children while they were growing up because they usually had to tend to younger siblings or relatives. But that changed in the late 1900s when kids were more likely to be isolated from rich networks of extended family, were less likely to actively care for other children, and were more likely to learn how to “be an adult” through experiences in school or the workplace.

  Numerous intellectuals have pointed to an interesting shift in the expectations held by the modern family. The expectation used to be that parents simply provide a safe, supportive environment for their children, but that shifted to an expectation that parents intensely manage their children’s progress toward discernible achievements in the classroom or on the playing field. The average child now is under constant surveillance and her free time is much more structured, which means that parents have a level of involvement in their children’s lives and a personal stake in their children’s achievements that is unprecedented in recent history.

  In some ways this intensive parenting has conferred certain protective advantages that are important for children’s safety and emotional well-being, but the pendulum of protectiveness has swung so far that the modern family has also removed some of the exploration and learning that occurs through children’s free experimentation and the corrective action of natural consequences. Part of the job description of being a child is to do some things that are socially inappropriate or foolish, to learn what the consequence of those actions are, then to take responsibility for correcting course. Part of being a kid is: be inappropriate, find out the consequence, revise, repeat.

  When this natural progression becomes hindered through parental interference or overinvolvement, interactions between family members can get awkward. Parents try to be cool, kids try to be adult, and everyone has a sense that the expectations for parent and child have become blurred.

  Our first lessons about how to be social come from our families. For much longer than infants in other species, human infants rely upon their caregivers for protection, nourishment, and mobility. Human infants are completely reliant on their caregivers to meet their physical needs, protect them, and teach them how to navigate the complexities of social life. Caregivers teach their children how to make friends, work collaboratively with others, and manage conflict. They provide direct instruction about how to behave in social situations, but children also learn by observing how their caregivers navigate social interactions. Although caregivers have direct and indirect influences on whether their children became socially fluent or socially awkward, the strongest influence biological parents have on their children’s social fluency is genetic.

  John Constantino and Richard Todd at the Washington University School of Medicine investigated the heritability of awkward traits in the general population with a sample of 788 pairs of seven-to-fifteen-year-old twins. Identical twins are more genetically similar to each other than fraternal twins, which allows researchers to infer genetic influences on traits if identical twins’ scores are more similar than fraternal twins’ scores on tests measuring certain traits. Constantino and Todd wanted to investigate whether identical twins would show more similarity than fraternal twins on a measure of social skill deficits called the Social Responsiveness Scale. While they were interested in genetic influences, they were also interested in how much social skill deficits were influenced by non-familial social influences such as teachers and friends.

  Constantino and Todd found that
identical twins were far more similar to each other than fraternal twins on the measure of social skill deficits. Their analyses suggested that boys’ awkwardness was 52 percent heritable and that girls’ awkwardness was 39 percent heritable. They also found differences between boys and girls regarding environmental factors. Girls’ awkwardness was more strongly influenced by their family environments (43 percent) than boys’ (25 percent).

  This study and others suggest that awkward characteristics are heritable, but it’s important to note that awkwardness is neither 100 percent heritable nor 100 percent environmental. This is the kind of outcome most behavioral genetic researchers find intriguing. The goal of behavioral genetic researchers is not to tell us that there is nothing we can do about our psychological fates; rather the goal is to discover what is attributable to genetic influences and environmental influences in hopes of one day figuring out which environments might reduce individuals’ genetic risks and maximize their genetic strengths.

  For caregivers, teachers, or other mentors of awkward children, these behavioral genetic findings suggest that some kids will show a stronger biological disposition toward awkwardness than others, but they also suggest that family environment and non-familial environments have a substantial influence on how children’s awkward characteristics manifest.

  The question is how caregivers can provide environments that minimize the potential negative outcomes of, and maximize the strengths of, children’s awkward dispositions. We will see that awkward children can be coached to think through social situations and encouraged to make good use of their unique perspectives. But this approach needs to be tailored to awkward children’s unusual ways of seeing the world. This can mean a war of attrition between awkward children’s impulses and their caregivers’ attempts to impose social rules that channel those impulses. To start thinking about how this battle plays out, let’s take a look at an updated version of one of the most influential theories of the twentieth century.