Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  “We don’t know for sure,” she said. “But as a developmental psychologist, I think it’s plausible.”

  She described to me the concept of self-efficacy, which, in simple terms, involves an individual’s ability to navigate the world, to experience a problem, a challenge, a setback large or small, and to deal with it effectively. “When something unpleasant or frustrating or disappointing or even really painful happens to you,” she explained, “but beneath those negative feelings you have a sense that you’re going to be okay, that you can ultimately deal with these problems—that’s self-efficacy. And related to this concept is the difference between an internal locus of control versus the external locus of control. Adults who are depressed often feel like they don’t have control over things. They feel that the world is the way it is and they’re at the mercy of all these forces. The more you feel in control, the happier you usually are. So that’s called having an internal locus of control.”

  “I think I have the most external locus of control that is humanly possible,” I admitted. “I feel like my locus of control is on one of those distant moons of Jupiter. I basically feel like I have no control over anything.”

  She told me that if that’s true, research would suggest that I’m not a very happy person.

  “Research doesn’t lie,” I said.

  “Right. People assume that having money makes you happy or having children makes you happy or being married makes you happy … but actually the thing that makes people happy is how much control they have over how they spend their time.”

  I was digesting what she’d said, testing it against memory and experience, when something struck me.

  “Wait,” I said. “If what you say is true, then children must be miserable these days. They have so little control over their time now. They’re so structured. We take them to school. We take them to lessons. We take them to summer camp. We take them to playdates. They get to control when they go to the toilet and that’s about it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “they’re never responsible for anything themselves or in charge of anything. We never even let them go to the store to get a loaf of bread because it’s too dangerous. So they never have the ability to do the right or the wrong thing. Nothing ever happens. They’re being raised like veal, never allowed to take any risks or to be responsible or independent in any way. Or to develop a feeling of worth, of resiliency, of efficacy. Of self-confidence or self-worth or of the excitement of life.”

  “And you think there’s an emotional or psychological cost to this?”

  “Well, again, I haven’t studied it. No one has. But I think it makes sense. I mean, it’s like one of the basic joys of growing up, gradually getting to do more and more on your own. I used to be too little to walk to school or to ride my bike to the store, but now I can. It’s exciting to become more confident and able and free to explore the world. When we massively underestimate what children are capable of or massively overestimate the danger they’re in, when we effectively end up locking them in their houses like prisoners because we’re so afraid … or we surveil them and monitor and manage them all the time, when they’re always under watch, then it seems very plausible this would lead to at least unhappiness if not clinical levels of anxiety.”

  Sarnecka didn’t seem surprised when I mentioned how the National Institute of Mental Health indicated that one in five children either has or has had a seriously debilitating mental disorder, and that anxiety disorders affect as many as one in five kids from thirteen to eighteen years old at some point in their lives.

  “It’s not surprising at all,” she said. And then she tried to illustrate her point with a hypothetical scenario. “Let’s imagine,” she said, “that you’re so terrified of your kid falling down and getting a concussion that you decide it’s just too dangerous to even let them stand up. So you eliminate all danger of them ever falling down by keeping them in a wheelchair. If you’re in a wheelchair, you’re not going to fall down. And even if it’s extremely rare that kids just fall down and die, we say, it happens. There’s 74.2 million kids in America. Somebody fell down and hit their head and died this year. So if we wanted, we could focus on that. Let’s say the media covered it 24/7 and Law and Order made shows about it and fictionalized accounts of it and every time it happened, even in another country, you heard about it, and there were pictures on milk cartons of kids who had fallen down and died. If you can imagine this, you can imagine a situation where parents become so terrified of that situation that they say, whatever the cost, if I can eliminate the risk of this happening to my kid, then it’s worth it. So I’m going to make my kid stay in a wheelchair all the time just to be safe, because better safe than sorry. And so eventually you have a bunch of kids who aren’t disabled being confined to wheelchairs, and at some point you can imagine schools and cops saying, well, a lot of the kids are in wheelchairs anyway, so if a kid falls down and gets hurt on our premises, they’re going to ask why we didn’t have all of them in wheelchairs, so from now on, during the school day, all the kids have to be in wheelchairs. You can imagine it getting to the point where it becomes unusual to see a kid not in a wheelchair, and where you start calling the police saying, ‘I saw a parent walking down the street with a child. The child was not in a wheelchair and could fall down at any moment.’ Let’s just all be grateful that I caught you in time before the kid fell down and died.

  “Now, this is a fantasy. This is a thing we don’t do because we understand that healthy physical development requires children to do things that are risky, things like walking around. We understand that there’s some risk in standing up or climbing or running or jumping, but we think it’s an acceptable risk because it doesn’t happen very often that a kid falls down and dies, and we think the benefits of letting our kids walk and run around are worth the small risk that every once in a very great while a kid falls and dies. We’re willing to take the risk.”

  “For now,” I said.

  “For now. But let me tell you something. As a developmental psychologist, I think the benefits of kids having age-appropriate amounts of independence and unsupervised time is just as important as the physical benefits of letting them walk around. I think the benefits are worth the very small risk that at some point a child has a tragic accident or a crime committed against them. I think we are grossly underestimating the benefits of independence and overestimating the risks.”

  “And doing so is taking a psychological toll on our kids?”

  “Well, again, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know how much. But to put that in perspective, we also don’t know exactly what the toll would be on forcing nondisabled kids to stay in wheelchairs all day. We don’t do that experiment because it would be unethical. But in a way, we’re doing the experiment to see what happens when you don’t let kids have any independence. We’re doing it right now to an entire generation of children.”

  “Using them as guinea pigs.”

  “In a sense, yes. And you could argue that what we’re seeing in this experiment we’re doing on our children is acute amounts of obesity, acute amounts of depression and type 2 diabetes, acute amounts of anxiety, and all kinds of other very, very bad things.”

  There’s an increasing amount of evidence to support Sarnecka’s claim. In her book How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims highlights a number of recent studies on the connection between overparenting and mental health problems in teens and young adults. She writes how, “In a 2013 survey of college counseling center directors, 96 percent of respondents said the number of students with significant psychological problems is a growing concern on their campus; 70 percent said that the number of students on their campus with severe psychological problems has increased in the past year; and they reported that on average 24.5 percent of their student-patients were taking psychotropic drugs such as antidepressants, antipsychotics, ADHD stimulants, mood stabilizers, and anti-anxiety medications.”

  In 2012, an earlier version of the same survey repo
rted a 16 percent increase in visits to student mental health centers since 2000. And in 2013, the American College Health Association surveyed 100,000 students on 153 college campuses and learned that 83.7 percent had felt overwhelmed at least one time within the past twelve months by all they had to do; 79.1 percent felt exhausted; 59.6 percent felt very sad; 55.9 percent felt very lonely; 51 percent felt overwhelming anxiety; 46.5 percent felt things were hopeless; 37 percent felt overwhelming anger; 31.3 percent felt so depressed that it was difficult to function; and 8 percent had seriously considered suicide. A 2013 Journal of Child and Family Studies survey of 297 college students found that college students with helicopter parents reported “significantly higher levels of depression and less satisfaction in life, and attributed this diminishment in well-being to a violation of the students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy and competence.”

  Lythcott-Haims writes that because these mental health crises are happening to kids who end up at hundreds of schools in every tier, “they appear to stem not from what it takes to get into the most elite schools but from some facet of American childhood itself.” She concludes that “when a seemingly perfectly healthy but over-parented kid gets to college and has trouble coping with the various new situations they might encounter … they can have real difficulty knowing how to handle the disagreement, uncertainty, the hurt feelings, or the decision-making process. This inability to cope—to sit with some discomfort, think about options, talk it through with someone, make a decision—can become a problem unto itself.”

  A friend who works in the administration of a highly selective university in the Midwest echoes all of this. “There are still a lot of clever, curious, ingenious little minds out there, far smarter than I’ll ever be. But so many of them come in to school already carrying burdens. This got a lot worse after the crisis back in ’08, so I think there’s definitely a financial factor. Tuition makes that nearly inevitable. Mom and Dad have let Johnny know he’s been securitized. He’s an investment. That’s an incredible weight to place on the back of someone who developmentally isn’t that far removed from daydreaming about playing in the NFL.

  “But then there’s also this feeling that these kids have been programmed to win. All their lives, probably going back as far as they can remember, they’ve been told how spectacular they are. You get into a college whose acceptance rate is like negative 3.6 percent. Everything that’s happened to you has affirmed this idea of how awesome you are. Just set aside for a moment how damaging that can be to someone’s sense of self. These kids eventually have to face the twin existential monsters of ‘I got a C; this is the worst moment of my life’ (I’ve had those exact words spoken in my office) and ‘Now what? I got into this great school, everything my life has led up to, now what?’ They get to campus and for a number of them the ground falls out from beneath them. Getting in has been the thing that matters, and it can be so disheartening to realize this isn’t any sort of finish line at all. I mean, the end of youth is apocalyptic in plenty of ways, but I don’t think it has to be quite so explicit.”

  * * *

  Sarnecka wasn’t surprised by my friend’s experience, or by any of this data. She finds it deeply disturbing and adds that “there’s a real human rights issue here. We’re used to thinking it’s acceptable to make rules for children that we wouldn’t or couldn’t make for adults. And in many ways, this is right. Kids can’t drink, they can’t vote, they can’t drive, and it’s appropriate to make these rules. But the idea that we’re protecting someone from something does not give us carte blanche to take away all of their mobility and all of their independence and all of their rights. There are countries where women are not allowed to drive, and I’m sure there are people in these countries who say, ‘Well, we’re concerned about women’s safety.’ If Donald Trump announced that women were not going to be able to drive anymore because no one respects women more than he does and driving is very dangerous, people would say, ‘Fuck you, Donald! We’ll take that risk, thank you very much.’ But when we have these debates about kids, we need to remember that there was a time in history when women were not allowed to vote and women were not allowed to drive and women were not allowed to make basic choices about how they spent their time or did x, y, and z, and a lot of the rhetoric surrounding these issues was about protecting them from a dangerous and daunting world.”

  “Of course,” I said, “there is a difference between the rights of adult women and the rights of children.”

  “Of course there is. And I’m obviously not saying that children should have all the rights that adults have. But I do think they have some rights, and not just to safety. They have a right to some freedom, to some independence and efficacy. They have a right to try things and to fail at them and to try other things and succeed. They have a right, like all of us, to a little bit of danger.”

  We can deny them that right, as we’ve been doing, but as with everything, there is a cost—for us, for society, and for them. William Deresiewicz sees one of these costs in colleges that “are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic, and no idea what to do next.” In the end, he observes that “all the values that once informed the way we raise our children—the cultivation of curiosity, the inculcation of character, the instillment of a sense of membership in one’s community, the development of the capacity for democratic citizenship, let alone any emphasis on the pleasure and freedom of play, the part of childhood where you actually get to be a child—all these are gone.… We are not teaching to the test; we’re living to it.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t get this idea of living to the test—and also, of parenting to the test—out of my mind. I recalled how Felix was not even two years old when I began noticing that he was a little behind the other babies in his developmental milestones. It was nothing drastic, but I observed that he sat up a little later, talked a little later, pointed at things a little later. He hadn’t bonded to a specific transitional object when the books said he was supposed to, and in the evenings I’d sometimes hold him and talk to him about the wonderful quality of this or that special soft toy. Don’t you want to bond to soft little turtle? Don’t you want to carry teddy bear around with you? Teddy would make a very good transitional object. When my pitches didn’t land, and later, when his preschool teacher complained that he seemed to be demonstrating some “sensory-seeking behavior,” I did what at least half the parents I know have done at one point or another. I took him to an occupational therapist for an evaluation. Perhaps it was unnecessary. Perhaps it was a waste of time and money. But it wasn’t an invasive or painful procedure. It couldn’t hurt. And if it turned out that he did need it, and I didn’t give it a try, imagine how I’d feel then.

  I discussed this with Erin Anderson, an occupational therapist who runs a practice on Chicago’s north side. Anderson’s practice offers services from occupational therapists, speech and language pathologists, psychologists, and social workers. She told me that many of the parents who come to their practice do so for reasons that are similar to those that had brought me in.

  I observed to her that these days, it seems as though every other parent I meet has a child receiving occupational therapy or speech therapy or social therapy or some kind of therapeutic service. I told her I suspected that practicing pediatric occupational therapy today must be quite different from how it was practiced twenty or thirty years ago. Certainly, I said, better screening and education had something to do with the ever-increasing number of clients, but I asked Anderson if she thought parental fear and this new style of intensive or anxious parenting might also play a role.

  “I think it’s both,” she said. “I’m seeing more and more mothers who had careers, who were in business, and now they have kids and decide to stay home. And what I see is many of them doing for their children as they might have done in their job. So the kids are very scheduled, they’re in classes, the paren
ts are super-educated, reading how to parent on the internet instead of trusting instincts.”

  I recalled to her how nervous I had been during the first few years I spent at home with my children. “I didn’t grow up in a house with five siblings or cousins,” I said. “I babysat a little, but not for infants or toddlers. So I remember that when I had kids of my own, there was this anxiety about just being in the house with them. I know this sounds awful, but it’s true. I mean, I wanted to be with them. But it was always easier to say, ‘Let’s go to Target, let’s go to the music class, let’s go on a playdate.’ Constant movement was much easier than just sitting in a house with a baby or small kid. And so this is a big change. Where I grew up, there wasn’t a lot of culture or a lot of things to do. It was hard to get around. I think there was a lot of boredom. But as a kid, I remember playing in the yard, playing in the cul-de-sac, walking over to this friend’s house, walking over to that friend’s house. Nobody was at camp. Nobody was doing classes. Some of the moms worked. A lot of them worked part-time. Often a neighbor would watch the kid whose mom worked. Most of my memories are just sort of hanging out, certainly watching a lot of TV, which wasn’t great, but also riding my bike, going to the pool in the summer, doing weird things, trying to find our parents’ porn or trying to shoplift crappy earrings from Claire’s Boutique or seeing how many Krispy Kreme doughnuts we could eat before we puked or whatever. Occasionally getting in trouble, but usually not.”

  “So what you were doing was you were exploring, you were taking risks, you were problem-solving because there wasn’t someone watching over you. You were doing time management, you were taking mitigated risks, maybe doing some things that were unsafe, but you realized that and it was within a realm of safety because you were in the neighborhood and you were supporting each other. But because our kids are in classes so much, even at young ages, because society is telling us we should expose them, if you have the financial means, to music, to gymnastics, to soccer, to ballet; because we’re scheduling them so much, you do take away that problem-solving, that learned independence, that self-esteem to make it across the street with a friend, or mastering the monkey bars or figuring out how to take turns on the slide.