NurtureShock (25 page)

The work of Ostrov and Schiebe are but two, of many recent studies, that question old assumptions about the causes and nature
of children’s aggression.

The wild kingdom of childhood can be mystifying at times. Modern involved parenting should seem to result in a sea of well-mannered,
nonaggressive kids. As soon as an infant shows some indication of cognitive understanding, his parents start teaching him
about sharing, kindness, and compassion. In theory, fighting and taunting and cruelty should all have gone the way of kids
playing with plastic bags and licking lead paint, mere memories of an unenlightened time. Yet we read reports that bullying
is rampant, and every parent hears stories about the agonies of the schoolyard.
Lord of the Flies
rings as true today as when William Golding first penned it.

Why is modern parenting failing in its mission to create a more civilized progeny? Earlier in this book, we discussed how
the praised child becomes willing to cheat, and how children’s experiments with lying can go unchecked, and how racial bias
can resurface even in progressively-minded integrated schools. Now we turn the spotlight on children’s aggressiveness—a catchall
term used by the social scientists that includes everything from pushing in the sandbox to physical intimidation in middle
school to social outcasting in high school.

The easy explanation has always been to blame aggression on a bad home environment. There’s an odd comfort in this paradigm—as
long as your home is a “good” home, aggression won’t be a problem. Yet aggression is simply too prevalent for this explanation
to suffice. It would imply a unique twist on the Lake Wobegon Effect—that almost every parent is
below
average.

Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological maladaptation. It was seen as inherently
aberrant, deviant, and (in children) a warning sign of future problems. Commonly cited causes of aggression were conflict
in the home, corporal punishment, violent television, and peer rejection at school. While no scholar is about to take those
assertions back, the leading edge of research suggests it’s not as simple as we thought, and many of our “solutions” are actually
backfiring.

Everyone’s heard that it damages children to be witness to their parents’ fighting, especially the kind of venomous screaming
matches that escalate into worse. But what about plain old everyday conflict? Over the last decade, that question has been
the specialty of the University of Notre Dame’s Dr. E. Mark Cummings.

Cummings realized
every
child sees parents and caregivers carping at each other over such banalities as who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, pay
the bills, or whose turn it is to drive the carpool. In studies where Cummings has parents make a note of every argument,
no matter how small or large, the typical married couple was having about eight disputes each day, according to the moms.
(According to the dads, it was slightly less.) Spouses express anger to each other two or three times as often as they show
a moment of affection to each other. And while parents might aspire to shielding their kids from their arguing, the truth
is that children are witness to it 45% of the time.

Children appear to be highly attuned to the quality of their parents’ relationship—Cummings has described children as “emotional
Geiger-counters.” In one study, Cummings found that children’s emotional well-being and security are more affected by the
relationship between the parents than by the direct relationship between the parent and child.

So are parents distressing their children with every bicker? Not necessarily.

In Cummings’ elaborate experiments, he stages arguments for children to witness and monitors how they react, sometimes taking
saliva samples to measure their stress hormone, cortisol. In some cases, two actors go at it. In others, the mother too is
a confederate. While waiting with the child, the mother gets a phone call, ostensibly from the “father,” and she begins arguing
with him over the phone. (Her lines are mostly scripted.) In other variations of this experiment, the child just watches a
videotape of two adults arguing, and she is asked to imagine the on-screen characters are her parents.

In one study, a third of the children reacted aggressively after witnessing the staged conflict—they shouted, got angry, or
punched a pillow. But in that same study, something else happened, which eliminated the aggressive reaction in all but 4%
of the children. What was this magical thing? Letting the child witness not just the argument, but the resolution of the argument.
When the videotape was stopped mid-argument, it had a very negative effect. But if the child was allowed to see the contention
get worked out, it calmed him. “We varied the intensity of the arguments, and that didn’t matter,” recalled Cummings. “The
arguments can become pretty intense, and yet if it’s resolved, kids are okay with it.” Most kids were just as happy at the
conclusion of the session as they were when witnessing a friendly interaction between parents.

What this means is that parents who pause mid-argument to take it upstairs—to spare the children—might be making the situation
far worse, especially if they forget to tell their kids, “Hey, we worked it out.” Cummings has also found that when couples
have arguments entirely away from the kids, the kids might not have seen any of it but are still well aware of it, despite
not knowing any specifics.

Cummings recently has shown that being exposed to constructive marital conflict can actually be good for children—if it doesn’t
escalate, insults are avoided, and the dispute is resolved with affection. This improves their sense of security, over time,
and increases their prosocial behavior at school as rated by teachers. Cummings noted, “Resolution has to be sincere, not
manipulated for their benefit—or they’ll see through it.” Kids learn a lesson in conflict resolution: the argument gives them
an example of how to compromise and reconcile—a lesson lost for the child spared witnessing an argument.

This is obviously a very fine line to walk, but it’s not as thin as the line being walked by Dr. Kenneth Dodge, a professor
at Duke University. Another giant in the field, Dodge has long been interested in how corporal punishment incites children
to become aggressive.

At least 90% of American parents use physical punishment on their children at least once in their parenting history. For years,
the work of Dodge and others had shown a correlation between the frequency of corporal punishment and the aggressiveness of
children. Surely, out-of-control kids get spanked more, but the studies control for baseline behavior. The more a child is
spanked, the more aggressive she becomes.

However, those findings were based on studies of predominately Caucasian families. In order to condemn corporal punishment
as strongly as the research community wanted to, someone needed to replicate these results in other ethnic populations—particularly
African Americans. So Dodge conducted a long-term study of corporal punishment’s affect on 453 kids, both black and white,
tracking them from kindergarten through eleventh grade.

When Dodge’s team presented its findings at a conference, the data did not make people happy. This wasn’t because blacks used
corporal punishment more than whites. (They did, but not by much.) Rather, Dodge’s team had found a reverse correlation in
black families—the more a child was spanked, the less aggressive the child over time. The spanked black kid was all around
less likely to be in trouble.

Scholars publicly castigated Dodge’s team, saying its findings were racist and dangerous to report. Journalists rushed to
interview Dodge and the study’s lead author, Dr. Jennifer Lansford. A national news reporter asked Dodge if his research meant
the key to effective punishment was to hit children more frequently. The reporter may have been facetious in his query, but
Dodge and Lansford—both of whom remain adamantly against the use of physical discipline—were so horrified by such questions
that they enlisted a team of fourteen scholars to study the use of corporal punishment around the world.

Why would spanking trigger such problems in white children, but cause no problems for black children, even when used a little
more frequently? With the help of the subsequent international studies, Dodge has pieced together an explanation for his team’s
results.

To understand, one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child.
In a culture where spanking is accepted practice, it becomes “the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does
something he shouldn’t.” Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it’s treated as ordinary
consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spank was seen as something that every kid went through.

Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved
only for the worst offenses
. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: “What you have
done is so deviant that you deserve a
special
punishment, which is spanking.” It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.

It’s not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of Conservative Protestants found that one-third of
them spanked their kids three or more times
a week
, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment—precisely
because it was conveyed as normal.

Each in its own way, the work of Cummings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads
parents to sometimes make it worse for kids when they’re trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents’ reaction
more than the argument or physical discipline itself.

If we can accept that children will be exposed to some parental conflict—and it may even be productive—can we say the same
thing for interactions with their peers? Is there some level of conflict with peers that kids should learn to handle, on their
own, without a parent’s help?

Dr. Joseph Allen, a professor and clinician at the University of Virginia, says that many modern parents are trapped in what
he calls “The Nurture Paradox.”

“To protect kids is a natural parental instinct,” Allen explained. “But we end up not teaching them to deal with life’s ups
and downs. It’s a healthy instinct, and fifty years ago parents had the same instinct, just that they had no time and energy
to intervene. Today, for various reasons, those constraints aren’t stopping us, and we go wild.”

At the Berkeley Parents Network, an online community, this struggle is vividly apparent. Parents anguish over whether jumping
into the sandbox is appropriate to defend their children from a toy-grabber. Other parents confess that their once-cute child
has become socially aggressive, which they find abhorrent and are at a loss to stop. The message board is full of stories
of children being teased and ostracized; the responses range from coaching children to be less of a target to advocating martial
arts training to reminding children they won’t be invited to every birthday party in life. Nobody has the perfect answer,
and it’s clear just how torn the parents are.

The Nurture Paradox has moved many parents to demand “zero tolerance” policies in schools, not just for bullying, but for
any sort of aggression or harassment. There is no evidence that bullying is actually on the increase, but the concern about
its effects has skyrocketed.

In March 2007, the British House of Commons Education and Skills Committee convened a special inquiry on school bullying.
For three days its members called a variety of witnesses, from school principals to academic scholars to support organizations.
The testimony ran a full 288 pages when printed. No laws were written, and no systemwide policies were forced on all the schools,
but that wasn’t really the goal of the inquiry. Rather, the entire exercise was conducted to make one important categorical
declaration, meant to guide the national culture: “The idea that bullying is in some way character building and simply part
of childhood is wrong and should be challenged.” Any sort of name-calling, mocking, gossiping, or exclusion needed to be condemned.