Simplicity Parenting (3 page)

If you looked at the lives of these kids in England, searching for a signature traumatic event, you wouldn’t find it. You might expect to see early childhood losses that would cause them to react with such nervousness and distrust, such lack of resiliency and hypervigilance. What I came to realize, however, was that there were enough of the little stresses, a consistent baseline of stress and insecurity to add up. These little stresses accrue to the point that it makes psychological “sense” for kids to acquire and adopt compensatory behaviors.

The psychological community is in love with acronyms, so I added another—why not?!—to describe what I realized I was seeing: cumulative stress reaction (CSR). It’s similar to what the American Psychological Association now, many years later, calls complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

The psychological community is also beginning to recognize that the attributes and behaviors I was seeing—hypervigilance, nervousness, anxiousness, a lack of resiliency, a lack of impulse control, a lack of empathy, and a lack of perspective taking—all worsen when a child accumulates enough little pieces of stress, with enough frequency. Such a consistent pattern of stress can accumulate into a PTSD-type scenario, or CSR.

CSR describes a reaction to a pattern of constant small stresses, a sort of consistent threshold of stress that may build, but rarely dissipates. Please understand that I am not referring here to the level of stress that is a fact of life. I am not suggesting that stress should not exist for children; it does, and it must. Children experience frustrated desires, illnesses, sorrows, and losses. Their lives are not stress free, and childhood is not a series of “rainbow moments,” each lovelier than the next. Indeed, imagine the six-year-old who, his dream life full of superheroes and superpowers, discovers in a fall from the backyard cherry tree that he can’t fly. His broken left arm is very painful, scary to see, and there is also the frantic trip to the hospital emergency room. Such childhood accidents can be awfully stressful at the time. Yet the next day, and with each retelling as a family story, the episode becomes a classic tale of bravery, of fears calmed by concern, of strength and heroism. (Not the flying variety of heroism—alas—but the kind Ralph Waldo Emerson described: “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”)

The level of stress described by the term CSR, in its frequency, is very different from the stresses that occur quite regularly and normally in a child’s everyday life. In day-to-day life a child’s moods and well-being
are like a seesaw; stress acts like a weight on one end, but once the stress is gone the overall balance returns. The “gift” of a scraped knee, an argument with a friend, five days flat out with the flu—these can strengthen a child’s resilience and their awareness of their own abilities. Such normal stresses are examples of “necessary resistance.” We all, including children, need to meet resistance in life in order to learn how to understand it, work through it, and move on. Such stresses may be worrying, but not damaging if we learn we have the skills and the support to deal with them, and move beyond them. Stress that is damaging is either too large, or too constant to move beyond. If our abilities (or a child’s abilities) can’t match it, then he or she can’t understand it, or work through it, and they become stuck in a reoccurring cycle of stress reactions.

CSR is characterized not by the severity of a traumatic event, but rather by the consistency or frequency of small stresses. What was the cumulative effect of these stresses on the children’s psyches, and behavior? What I came to understand was that little stresses, collectively, drag on a child’s ability to be resilient: mentally, emotionally, and physically. They interfere with concentration, with an emotional baseline of calm, with a sense of security that allows for novelty and change. They interfere with focus, not just for the item or task at hand. These stresses distract from the focus or “task” of childhood: an emerging, developing sense of self.

What has also become increasingly clear to me is that so much of this stress is what we now call daily life. It is the life that surrounds our children, a daily life that is unfortunately not that distinct from those we lead as adults. A daily life submerged in the same media-rich, multitasking, complex, information-overloaded, time-pressured waters as our own.

This is a fairly depressing notion, really, to think of childhood being under attack. It is also difficult to unravel, or pin down. I don’t believe the attack is a result of conscious effort. There doesn’t seem to be a “bogeyman” among us, a sinister force at work. No particular being,
company, or entity bears responsibility for this. Philip Morris, General Mills, the all-pervading marketers and advertisers, the technophiles promoting cellphones to eight-year-olds—which among these can we blame? All or none, really. I don’t think there are any culprits who consciously equate what they’re selling or promoting with an assault on childhood.

As a society, however, we’ve signed on wholeheartedly to the notion that more, bigger, newer, and faster all mean better. We’ve done so as a sort of survival mechanism. It is a very basic, primitive drive (albeit with its own particularly manic, modern, Western spin). At its most basic level it is understandable, though it no longer serves its original purpose, and we’ve taken it to the point where it actually threatens, rather than ensures, our survival.

We cram more and more into our homes (even as we’re building them bigger) and our lives (even while suffering from busyness and lack of sleep) and our awareness (twenty-four-hour CNN, blogs, BlackBerries, constant online news updates). According to a consumer research group study, the average age at which American kids start using mainstream technology gadgets, such as cellphones, MP3 players, and DVD players, is now 6.7 years.
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As our worlds accelerate to mach speeds, we not only pull our children along, we also project some of our anxieties about the speed onto them. Is there anything that we don’t feel the need to hurry? Anything that we don’t feel the need to enrich, improve upon, advance, or compete over? While we haven’t figured a way around the nine-month human gestation period, once that baby is born, its childhood seems to be “fair game” for acceleration.

To look at our society’s assault on childhood another way, let’s take sleep as an analogy. Most of us acknowledge the need for a good chunk of it—seven to eight hours—nightly. Yet many of us would love to be able to function well on significantly less. Some feel that they manage very well on four hours a night. Thomas Roth of the Henry Ford Sleep Disorders Center in Detroit would doubt that, however: “The percentage of the population who need less than five hours of sleep per night, rounded to a whole number,” says Roth, “is zero.” Robert Stickgold, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist specializing in sleep research, recounted how a psychiatrist in private practice called to ask whether he knew of any reason not to prescribe modafinil, a new wakefulness-promoting drug, to an undergraduate during exam time. “No—no reason at all not to,” Stickgold told the psychiatrist. “Not unless you think sleep does something.”
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Does sleep do something, besides mark the time between wakefulness? Does childhood do something, other than mark the time until adulthood? We die without sleep, which should render the question moot, but scientists still argue over which processes occur exclusively during sleep. Mental and emotional clarification and improvement of motor skills (a kind of mental “practicing” of movements) take place as we sleep, and some feel sleep helps maintain homeostasis in the brain. The immune system doesn’t work properly without sleep, and we know that lack of sleep impairs speech, memory, and innovative, flexible thinking. Rats deprived of sleep die in seventeen to twenty days: Their hair falls out and their metabolisms kick into high gear, burning lots of calories while the rats are just standing still.
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Scientists are learning the biological “purpose” of sleep by studying what happens when we’re deprived of it. Sleep deprived, people are much less able to retain or use what they learn while awake. They lose resiliency—mental and physical—as their immune system falters. Still we wonder, can we skip it? Can we do without it, or shortchange it in some way, to reclaim the third of our lives that is “lost” to slumber? As a society we seem to be asking the same questions about childhood. What purpose does it serve? Can we speed it up? Can we better prepare our children for adulthood by treating them more like adults?

I worry that we’ll understand the “purpose” of childhood by seeing, increasingly, what people are like when they’ve been rushed through theirs. And I don’t think that will be a pretty picture. Childhood has its own mysterious processes, its own pace. When we ask children to “keep up” with a speeded-up world, I believe we are unconsciously doing them harm. We are depriving them of exactly what they need to make their way in an increasingly complex world: well-being and resiliency. And yet I sincerely believe that there are many things we can do as parents to buffer and protect our children’s childhoods.

I was giving a lecture recently and on my way heard a report about global warming. Now James, the dear little fellow I describe earlier, had taught me quite a bit about the subject. But I was thinking as I drove
that when problems seem overwhelming, we often rush at them in a state of pure anxiety. Off we go (walking) to the hardware store for recycling bins and fluorescent lightbulbs, stopping first to look at hybrid cars (conveniently, on the way), while picking up trash and making a silent vow that from this day forward organic cotton will be the only fabric to ever touch our children’s skin. Why must we do all of this—and more—immediately, if not sooner? To plug up that bloomin’ hole in the ozone, of course! Yet our actions would be so much more consistent and ongoing if our motivation were not anxiety, but compassion: a desire to protect the earth.

This reminds me of a man who came to one of my lectures. This guy came under duress, I’m quite certain, at his wife’s insistence. Afterward we happened to be standing next to each other, and he turned to me. “Well done!” he said, kindly, about my talk, though I’m not sure he was awake through all of it. “Food for thought, isn’t it? I’m a Harvard man myself, and I doubt my Ben will be following my lead unless we get his attention up to snuff! I’ll make up a simplification list right away. He has exams next year; do you think that’s enough time to get this all turned around?” Now, this man was too well rested to be anxious, but the point is … he was missing the point. Acting out of anxiety doesn’t usually lead to long-term efforts, or changes, much less large-scale transformations. The point of simplification is not to improve Ben’s SAT scores (much as we wish the boy well). Ben’s well-being is the goal. Imagine the motivation and inspiration we can bring to our efforts with the larger goal of protecting our beloved children’s childhoods? Childhood is also an all-important environment, with its own systems, its own natural processes. And society is poking quite a few holes in the protective filter that should surround childhood to buffer it from adult life and concerns.