NurtureShock (21 page)

This makes sense, yet it’s a very controversial finding, because in our society today we are warned not to be pushovers; we’re
advised that giving in breeds a nation of whiners and beggars. Even Nancy Darling’s Mod Squad study showed that permissive
parents are not successful parents.

So the science seems to be duplicitous—on one hand, parents have to be strict enforcers of rules, but on the other hand, parents
need to be flexible or the ensuing conflict will be destructive to teens’ psyche. Will the scientists please make up their
minds? Or is there some finer distinction we’re missing?

Well, the narrow definition of pushover parents are those who give in to their kid because they can’t stand to see their child
cry, or whine. They placate their children just to shut them up. They want to be their kid’s friend, and they’re uncomfortable
being seen as the bad guy. That’s not the same as a parent who makes sure her child feels heard, and if the child has made
a good argument for why a rule needs to be changed, lets that influence her decision.

Nancy Darling found the same distinction. The type of parents who were lied to the least had rules and enforced them consistently,
but they had found a way to be flexible that allowed the rule-setting process to still be respected. “If a child’s normal
curfew is eleven p.m., and they explain to their parent something special is happening, so the parent says, ‘Okay, for that
night only, you can come home at one a.m.’—that encourages the kid to not lie, and to respect the time.” This collaboration
retains a parent’s legitimacy.

It has taken the psychological establishment decades to narrow in on this understanding. Dr. Laurence Steinberg at Temple
University articulates this history in his books and papers. Until the early 1970s—an era when psychology was driven more
by theory than by empirical studies—“parents were told to expect oppositionalism and defiance. The absence of conflict was
seen as indicative of stunted development,” Steinberg writes. In other words, if your child wasn’t fighting and rebelling,
something was wrong with him. This perspective was articulated throughout the 1950s and 1960s by theorists such as Anna Freud,
Peter Blos, and Erik Erikson, who coined the term “identity crisis.” But they almost exclusively studied teenagers in clinics
and therapy—they were oversampling the problem teens.

In the mid-1970s, a variety of studies sampled adolescents drawn from schools, not clinics. “These studies found that 75%
of teenagers reported having happy and pleasant relationships with their parents,” described Steinberg. Rebellion and conflict
were not normal after all. In 1976, a seminal study by Sir Michael Rutter—considered by many to be the father of modern child
psychiatry—found that the 25% of teens who were fighting with their parents had been doing so long before hitting puberty.
Becoming a teenager wasn’t the trigger.

At that point, the narrative of adolescence bifurcated. Pop psychology, fueled by the new explosion of self-help publishing,
continued to pump out the message that the teen years are a period of storm and stress—and certainly, for many, they are.
This was the dominant perspective presented in movies and in music, and there were no shortage of experts who worked with
teens suffering from depression or conduct disorder to testify that angst was the norm. In the self-help aisles, Steinberg
pointed out, the babies are all cuddly and the teens are all spiteful.

But for the next two decades, the social scientists kept churning out data that showed traumatic adolescence was the exception,
not the norm.

Only in the last decade has the field sorted out these dual competing narratives and found an explanation for them. Essentially,
the pop psychology field caters to parents, who find having a teenager in the home to be really stressful. But the social
scientists were polling the teens, most of whom didn’t find adolescence so traumatic. This is exactly what Tabitha Holmes
learned—that parents rate all the arguing as destructive, while teens find it generally to be productive.

“The popular image of the individual sulking in the wake of a family argument may be a more accurate portrayal of the emotional
state of the parent, than the teenager,” Steinberg writes. “Parents are more bothered by the bickering and squabbling that
takes place during this time than are adolescents, and parents are more likely to hold on to the affect after a negative interaction
with their teenagers.”

In the popular media, the dual contrasting narratives of adolescence continue. According to many news stories, teens are apathetic
and unprepared. These stories mention that alcohol abuse is high, teen pregnancy is ticking back up, and huge numbers of high
school seniors are failing their state exit exams even though they supposedly passed all their classes. The California State
University system, for example, admits the top third of the state’s high school seniors. Yet six out of ten CSU students have
to take remedial classes; half are not academically prepared to be in college.

Then, to hear other stories, today’s teens are so focused on success that it’s alarming. The rate of kids in high school taking
advanced math and science courses has leapt 20%. Colleges are drowning in applications from driven teens: the majority of
teens now apply to at least four schools. In the last 35 years, enrollment in the nation’s colleges has skyrocketed from 5.8
million to 10.4 million. Sure, a sizeable portion of them need remedial help—but it’s a smaller portion now than in the 1980s.
Their overachieving isn’t limited just to their academics, either. Surveys of incoming college freshmen find that 70% of them
volunteer weekly, and 60% hold down jobs while in school. Voting is up, for those eighteen and older, and the proportion who’ve
participated in an organized demonstration is at 49%, the highest in history. The students who entered college in 2008 were
engaged in more political dialogue than any class since 1968.

I suppose this split-personality is natural; both narratives exist because we need them to echo our experience at any particular
time. They compete, but they both persist. We carry dual narratives whenever a phenomenon can’t be characterized by a singular
explanation. We now have dual narratives not just of adolescence, but of the twenty-something years and of being unmarried
at forty. In the eyes of some, these reflect an unwillingness to accept reality; to others, they reflect the courage to refuse
a compromised life.

The danger is when these narratives don’t just reflect, they steer. Wrong from the start, comprising only half the story,
these narratives nevertheless become the explanatory system through which adolescents see their life. I can only wonder how
many teens, naturally prone to seeing conflict as productive, instead are being taught to view it as destructive, symptomatic
of a poor relationship rather than a good one. How many like their parents just fine, yet are hearing that it’s uncool to
do so? How many are acting disaffected and bored, because showing they care paints them as the fool? How many can’t tell their
parents the truth, because honesty is just not how the story goes?

Developers of a new kind of preschool keep losing their grant money—the students are so successful they’re no longer “at-risk
enough” to warrant further study. What’s their secret?

W
hen I was growing up in Seattle, I participated in a sort of national rite of passage: I spent the autumn of my sophomore
year in high school taking a Driver’s Education class.

I vividly remember my instructor. A tall, aged gentleman who wore thick glasses, bright cardigans, and plaid pants, he was
the only one of our teachers who let us address him by his first name, Claude. He doubled as the school’s golf coach. I’d
never thought of him as particularly kind or consoling, but he must have had the patience of a saint to teach teenagers both
to drive a car and drive a golf ball.

Because I’ve had only one accident, I’d always credited Claude with successfully teaching me to drive. And since it’s the
way I learned to drive, I’d assumed that Driver’s Ed
works
. I’m not alone in that presumption: seventeen states today allow those who’ve passed Driver’s Ed to skip, outright, the driving
portion of the licensing test.

But put to the test of scientific analysis, a different story emerges. Studies have compared accident data before and after
schools implemented driver education. These reports have consistently found no reduction in crashes among drivers who pass
a training course. At first, it was hard for me to believe the studies. After all, Driver’s Ed seems like such a quintessential
high school experience—there has to be a reason for it. Then I started remembering some of my friends who were in Driver’s
Ed with me. They’d had accidents soon after they’d gotten their licenses: Claude’s careful coaching hadn’t prevented them
from getting into accidents. I flashed back to my own near-misses—when I was a teen who thought cutting across three lanes
of traffic sounded like a really fun game.

Students who take Driver’s Ed do learn the rules of the road. They learn to steer a car, apply brakes steadily, signal for
turns, and park. But for the most part, mastery of the rules or motor skills isn’t what prevents accidents. Instead, accidents
are caused by poor
decision
skills. Teens get into a few more minor fender-benders, but many more serious accidents: statistically, teenagers get in
fatal crashes at twice the rate of everyone else.

This isn’t just a matter of experience at the wheel—it’s really a matter of age and brain wiring in the frontal lobe. So schools
can’t on their own turn teens into safer drivers. Instead, they make getting a license such an easy and convenient process
that they increase the supply of young drivers on the road. In 1999, the School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University
reported that nine school districts that
eliminated
Driver’s Education experienced a 27%
drop
in auto accidents among 16- and 17-year-olds.

Research like that has convinced states that school driving classes aren’t the answer; what really reduces auto accidents
are graduated-licensing programs which delay the age at which teenagers can drive at night or with friends in the car. These
decrease crashes by 20 to 30 percent.

In our schools, kids are subjected to a vast number of well-meaning training programs that sound absolutely great, but nevertheless
fail the test of scientific analysis. Schools take seriously their responsibility to breed good citizens, not just good students—but
that sometimes means that good intentions are mistaken for good ideas. The scarier the issue, the more schools hurriedly adopt
programs to combat it. For example, D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

Developed originally in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, D.A.R.E. sends uniformed police officers into junior high
and high schools to teach about the real-life consequences of drugs and crime. And we’re not talking about just a single assembly,
either—in its full form, students participate in a 17-week school curriculum complete with lectures, role playing, readings,
and the like. It seemed like such a promising idea, D.A.R.E. spread like wildfire. Within two decades, some form of D.A.R.E.
was present in 80% of the public school districts in the United States. It claims influence over 26 million students, at an
estimated annual budget of over $1 billion. As a society, we believe in the way D.A.R.E. delivers its message. Teachers support
it incredibly strongly; 97% give it a “good” or “excellent” approval rating. Parents do, too: 93% believe it effectively teaches
children to say no to drugs and violence.

However, any program that popular, which receives that much government support, attracts extensive scientific analysis. Throughout
the 1990s and 2000s, studies randomly assigned students to a D.A.R.E. class or not. In some studies, D.A.R.E. shows a very
slight decline in cigarette use, alcohol use, or drug use immediately after the training, but in all studies it shows no comparative
reduction long-term.