Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  In the months that followed, their son’s anxiety and depression worsened. He struggled at school, withdrew from friends and family, couldn’t get excited about anything that didn’t involve a screen. The family took him to see assorted therapists—the problem seemed, in some way, shape, or form psychological. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with an internet addiction.

  I asked Jason, Shep’s father, what an internet addiction looked like in a fourteen-year-old.

  “It looks exactly like it does in a forty-year-old,” he said. “He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t focus on anything else. He had total exhilaration when he did just that one thing to the total exclusion of everything else in his life. He fell into it like crack, stopped sleeping regularly, was staying up all night, which made the ADHD worse.”

  When Jason and Elizabeth began restricting how much time and money Shep could spend on Mobile Madden, he stole their credit cards, at one point racking up a $10,000 charge.

  One night, after confiscating his computer and iPad, Elizabeth woke at two in the morning with a feeling of dread. She made her way down the hallway to Shep’s room and found his bed empty. She discovered her son in his closet, playing on an old, broken Xbox he’d restored himself, the discarded iTunes gift cards he’d stolen from her office littering the floor. It was at this moment she realized they were in over their heads. Soon after, an educational consultant they’d hired suggested something that at first seemed extreme, a new company that had quickly developed a reputation for helping children just like Shep get through problems like these. Their rates were GDP–high, but Elizabeth and Jason weren’t sure what else to do. The company was called Cognition Builders.

  The idea is simple, Elizabeth and employees of the company explained to me later, though at first it sounds strange. The idea is that if you want to truly change the way a person parents, you need to be there as they’re parenting.

  To this end, Cognition Builders offers its clients a team of trained, on-the-ground professionals, or “family architects,” as it calls them, who are essentially highly trained parenting coaches who embed themselves in a family’s home. These architects, with the help of recording technology—mainly webcams—observe, scrutinize, and analyze a particular family’s dysfunctional (or, as they would put it, “maladaptive”) culture and style of communication. Embedded in a home over a period of months or even years, a Cognition Builders team, for the cost of several college educations, aims to help parents succeed in whatever capacity they feel they’re failing their children.

  The mere existence of such a company came as a revelation to me. The time I first heard about it, through a friend of Elizabeth’s, I was already eyeball-deep in my research on the modern state of anxious parenthood, and I’d assumed at that point that I’d more or less seen it all. In the course of my research, I’d come to the conclusion that the average American parent was devoting more time, money, resources, attention, and planning than at any other point in American history; that we had literally reached a moment of peak parenthood, and that there was simply no way to further escalate or intensify our communal quest for parental control without resorting to the development of exo-uterine technology and retrofitting mothers as marsupials. I’d read about and interviewed parents who spent well into the five figures each year on childcare, private school tuition, enrichment activities, tutoring, educational consulting, therapy, specialty summer camps, and life coaching. I knew parents—and I had been one myself—who spent their negligible amount of free time reading books and consulting experts about the best way to shepherd children into adulthood. I’d internalized the fact that if you were struggling with a particular parenting challenge, there was probably a product or service designed to fix that specific problem. Cognition Builders, however, stretched the limits of my imagination.

  A small company that, every year since its founding, has grown exponentially by nothing more than word of mouth, Cognition Builders rests on the premise that whether one is dealing with a neuroatypical child’s debilitating outbursts, an adolescent’s internet addiction, a teenager’s refusal to go to school or poor study skills, or the more universal challenges of temper tantrums and sibling rivalry, a solution can be achieved through an unprecedented level of parental intervention.

  To many parents, these problems—and problems very similar to them—are unavoidable, even predictable, or not even problems at all but rather standard bumps in the road, and the idea that someone might spend in the neighborhood of a gazillion dollars to make them go away would seem the pinnacle of capitalist indulgence. Not only are the parents indulging their children when the matter could be settled with a firm hand and some tough love, but the parents are indulging themselves, refusing to be the bad guy, refusing to believe that whatever plagues their child must be clinical in nature.

  But it’s also not hard to understand how for a family with sufficient resources who feels sufficiently overwhelmed, a service such as Cognition Builders would feel nothing short of lifesaving. The experience of despair over a child’s struggles certainly varies by socioeconomic status, but it cannot erase the despair. And like anxiety, despair is an emotion we’ll give almost anything to get rid of.

  * * *

  On the first day the assigned family architects were scheduled to arrive in her home, Elizabeth had worked hard to prepare her children for their arrival. Shep had just returned from two months at a therapeutic wilderness camp out West, and she’d explained to his three younger siblings that the architects were coming to help him settle back in to their home, but also to teach them all how to get along better as a family. The team would be in the house whenever the kids were there, and sometimes they’d come along when they went out to do errands or activities. The “FAs,” as they’re called, would spend a lot of time watching the family, but they’d also help Jason and Elizabeth establish and enforce a set of house rules. They’d put in place a system of positive reinforcement (points) for when rules were followed and contingencies (strikes) for when they were broken. They’d help everyone learn to communicate better and more effectively and would provide the kind of structure Shep needed to live successfully at home.

  “Are they going to live here?” her youngest son had asked.

  “No,” she told him.

  Some family architects did live with families, but theirs would be around only during the day. However, even when they weren’t physically present in the house, they’d still be there in a sense. Nest Cams would be installed in all the home’s common areas. The cameras would record everything the family said and did, and at any time the family architects or other members of the Cognition Builders team could log on to a computer and see how things were going with Elizabeth and Jason’s family. If the kids’ behavior went south—a tantrum, a meltdown, a sibling fight, or a refusal to do homework—the FAs could see for themselves just what had happened and how it had been handled. They could even offer, through the speaker function of the Nest Cam, real-time verbal feedback on their parenting, in addition to a more detailed follow-up by email or text.

  For weeks, Elizabeth had tried to imagine what it was going to be like, this immersive, super-intensive parent coaching. She was still trying to get her head around it when the doorbell rang. Shep followed her into the front entryway. The women at the door were in their early twenties, pleasant, professional, energetic. Elizabeth greeted them. Shep said nothing. He looked down at the floor, then retreated to the back of the house.

  “Interactions with adults have always been hard for him,” Elizabeth would later tell me. “He’s fine with kids, but his social anxiety spikes when he’s around adults.”

  She’d gotten in the habit of warning him to go upstairs when a friend of hers was coming over so he wouldn’t have to endure the awkwardness of a greeting. It was such a long-established habit that she didn’t even think about it anymore, not until one of the architects called her out that very first day.

  “Hold on,” the architect said. “What just happened? An adul
t you’ve invited into your home comes inside, and without any greeting or acknowledgment, your fourteen-year-old runs away. This is not acceptable behavior.”

  Rule number one was thus established. When an adult comes into the room and says hello to one of the children, the child stops what he or she is doing, looks the adult in the eye, shakes his or her hand, returns the greeting, and asks the adult how she is doing. This is the new expectation. If any member of the household fails to meet this expectation, he receives a strike.

  Elizabeth was stunned, but also impressed. This dual impression of admiration and disbelief would persist for much of the time she worked with Cognition Builders. It persisted when they printed out, laminated, and posted house rules all around their home. It persisted when they installed the Nest Cams that would record her family’s every move. It persisted when they intervened in the multitude of small misbehaviors she would have typically let slide. It persisted when they told her that the family architects needed to be there with them not just in the house but also as they went about their business in the world, riding with them when they drove to Staples for school supplies, observing them as they went to sports practice or a playdate.

  As mentioned earlier, their idea, as Elizabeth explained to me later, is that to truly change the way a person parents, you need to be there as they’re parenting. She told me it reminded her of running: “I can run sprints, but only if a workout instructor is standing over me. If no one’s watching me, my sprints look a lot like an intense jog with a lot of arm movement.”

  Elizabeth wanted to clarify that it wasn’t as though she hadn’t had rules for her kids before Cognition Builders: “I never had kids who played video games whenever they wanted or ate whatever they wanted out of the pantry. But what Cognition Builders pointed out to me was all the ways I was basically turning my children into mass negotiators whenever I let the rules slide.” Family architects didn’t allow for such sliding. They insisted that from now on, Shep would greet adults politely when they arrived. “While they were telling him this,” Elizabeth recalled, “I was cringing, like, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to be in the corner shaking—he doesn’t do this well.’ But they forced my hand. They oversaw that I was following through. [Cognition Builders] basically comes in and they point out to you all those times the kids are running the show, all the times the kids have all the control. They’re right there beside you to talk you out of all your bad parenting habits.”

  “And how did the kids respond to these changes?” I asked her.

  She told me their reaction was mixed. Shep was nervous, but he knew that if he was going to continue to live at home instead of going to a therapeutic boarding school, he and his parents needed help. Their daughter, the youngest, was too little to really understand what was happening. Shep’s twelve-year-old brother was probably the least accepting of the project, the one most likely, as Elizabeth put it, “to rattle the cage.”

  One afternoon, not long after the family architects settled into their home, he was feeling rebellious and decided to grab a footstool and put his face right up to one of the Nest Cams. “Hey, buttholes!” he said. “Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  At first, nothing happened. Then, a crackle of static followed by the voice of a Cognition Builders employee on the other end. “That’s a strike,” it said.

  As I interviewed different families who had used Cognition Builders, all of them well educated and affluent, I couldn’t help but think about how many people around the country were struggling terribly to provide their children with food, shelter, a decent education, basic health care, the most basic necessities for a decent life and future. Who in the world did these Cognition Builders parents think they were, paying strangers hundreds of thousands of dollars to come live in their home and set up cameras to help them monitor and manage their every interaction with their child in the hope of somehow ensuring their child’s happiness and success? The very existence of such a company seemed to demonstrate something deeply wrong not only with American parents, but with America. This was what one part of me thought about Cognition Builders.

  The other part thought, if I had a gazillion dollars, I would absolutely pay these people to come and help me figure out how to handle my kids. I thought of all the difficult moments—the grocery-store meltdowns, the bedtime tantrums, the challenges at school, all the small hurts and failures I’d experienced, the feelings of inferiority I’d had when comparing myself with other parents, all the moments as a parent when I didn’t know the right thing to say or do and had to just make it all up to the best of my ability. How amazing it would be to have a family architect of my very own to help me become the best possible parent I could be. I admit it. I was horrified and covetous all at once.

  Luckily, this contradiction was resolved by the fact that I didn’t have a gazillion dollars to spare. I didn’t even have enough money for the new vacuum cleaner I’d been eyeing, much less a family architect of my own. And so, at the end of my visit, after interviewing Elizabeth and Jason, the nanny and the manny, after talking to the family architects and the educational consultants and the director of curriculum and on and on, I asked if, before I left, I could speak with Shep, the little boy at the center of the storm. I hoped that in talking to him, I’d come to some conclusion about what my own kids were missing and what the future might hold for the next, most affluent generation of American children.

  He came across as a sweet, sensitive kid, small for his age, a little shy and awkward, but bright and good-natured. He sat across from me on the large leather sofa in his ten-bedroom home on his family’s plot of attractive, fallow land.

  “What did you think about the people who came here, the family architects?” I asked him.

  “I liked some of them,” he said. “There were four of them.”

  “What kind of stuff did they do?”

  “They mostly just made me write down what I had to do all the time. They helped me be able to do better in school and behave better.”

  I told him that sometimes I argued with my own kids and asked if he and his parents ever argued.

  “Mostly just about doing my homework. Getting on my back about doing my homework. Because I didn’t do it last year.”

  I asked him if it was hard coming back to America from abroad, how things were different.

  “When I lived abroad, I could always take a walk to my friends’ houses. I could do more stuff on my own. Here, everyone lives miles away. Here, we have to drive and organize way long before. The only really socializing I get here is at school or on my phone or video games or Xbox. In the games, I can play with my friends. That’s where I talk to my friends the most. There, I could see them every day, but here I can’t.”

  I asked him what he thought the best thing about being a kid was, and the worst.

  “I think the best thing is being able to talk to my friends and my family. And the worst thing is definitely having a lot of homework. I’m taking a lot of honors classes and it’s really stressful. If I don’t have a quiz or a test, then I have two to three hours a day. And then I have therapy once a week, drums once a week, tutoring twice a week, and an executive functioning tutor once a week.”

  I was going to ask him another question, but for some reason, I couldn’t. I sat there for a moment. A terrible sadness came over me. I told him it was great to meet him and thanked him for chatting with me, and then I sat back on the soft leather sofa and sipped the glass of Pinot Grigio Elizabeth had brought me, and I tried to breathe in and around the immense sadness welling up inside me.

  I looked at this little boy and tried to smile, to ignore the feeling I had at that moment that something was wrong, not with him but with all of us; that something, as my friend had put it, was amiss. A kid, I thought. He should be out wading in rivers and climbing trees and learning the world with his arms and legs and senses, not at a wilderness camp for $500 a day, but always. Sitting there on the sofa amid his schoolwork and devices, he seemed so frail and unce
rtain, a creature better suited for a setting starkly different from the place he’d ended up. I wished there were some way I could help him escape it all—or help my own kids escape it, or myself. I felt my whole soul rattling the cage.

  But what could I do? The interview was over. Phones were beeping and screens were buzzing and cars were starting and the family’s life swirled onward, outward, hurrying and reaching toward everything and nothing, as did my own. The moment of sadness passed, or morphed into something closer to compassion. He was just a kid, not bad but lost, and yet sitting there, it wasn’t a child he resembled, but a small, frightened animal, moving through a machine. And as he spoke, I recalled what Elizabeth had said about how badly Shep had resisted coming back to America. How he told her he’d rather stay in Europe on his own, that he’d run away and live in the subway tunnels, getting his friends to sneak him food—a young boy’s fantasy of freedom and danger, the fantasy of being unobserved.

  * * *

  I was still thinking about Shep and about Cognition Builders when I reached out to Barbara Sarnecka, the social scientist at UC–Irvine, for the second time. I’d originally spoken to Sarnecka about the role of judgment on risk assessment, but I wondered what she had to say about the role that our excessive monitoring and intervention might be having on kids themselves, if this fear and judgment could be impacting children as well as parents and parenting culture. Was it possible these new expectations surrounding child supervision were impacting the way children develop psychologically, that in our determination to protect them, we were exposing them to other, less obvious dangers?