The Social Animal (10 page)

After about twenty minutes playing Benjamin Spock and watching the kiddies, Rob got the urge to join in. He sat down with the boys, grabbed some figures, and joined Harold’s team.

This was a big mistake. It was roughly the equivalent of a normal human being grabbing a basketball and inviting himself to play a pickup game with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Over the course of his adult life, Rob had trained his mind to excel at a certain sort of thinking. This is the kind that psychologist Jerome Bruner has called “paradigmatic thinking.” This mode of thought is structured by logic and analysis. It’s the language of a legal brief, a business memo, or an academic essay. It consists of stepping back from a situation to organize facts, to deduce general principles, and to ask questions.

But the game Harold and his buddies were playing relied on a different way of thinking, what Bruner calls the “narrative mode.” Harold and his buddies had now become a team of farmers on a ranch. They just started doing things on it—riding, roping, building, and playing. As their stories grew and evolved, it became clear what made sense and what didn’t make sense within the line of the story.

The cowboys began to work together and they began to squabble. Cows were lost. Fences were built. The cowboys formed teams when the tornados came through, and split apart when the danger passed.

And then the Invaders came. The narrative mode is a mythic mode. It contains another dimension, not usually contained in paradigmatic thinking—the dimension of good and evil, sacred and profane. The mythic mode helps people not only tell a story, but make sense of the emotions and moral sensations aroused by the story.

The boys reacted to the Invaders with alarm and dread. They scrambled about on the carpet, and lined up their plastic horses against the Invaders, but they screamed at one another, “There are too many of them!” All seemed lost. Then Harold produced a giant white horse, ten times larger than the other toys they were playing with. “Who’s this?” he cried, and answered his own question: “It’s the White Horse!” And he charged off into the Invaders. Two of the other boys switched teams and began hurling Invaders at the White Horse. An apocalyptic battle raged. The Horse crushed the Invaders. The Invaders bloodied the Horse. Before long the Invaders were dead, but the White Horse was dying, too. They put a cloth on his body and had a mournful funeral, and the Horse’s soul went up to heaven.

Rob was like a warthog in a frolic of gazelles. Their imaginations danced while his plodded. They saw good and evil while he saw plastic and metal. After five minutes, their emotional intensity produced a dull ache in the back of his head. He was exhausted trying to keep up.

PRESUMABLY
,
ROB
ONCE
HAD
the ability to perform these mental gymnastics. But then, he reflected, maturity set in. He could focus his attention better, but he could no longer put together odd juxtapositions the way he once had. His mind couldn’t jump from association to association anymore. Later, when he told Julia he couldn’t think in the random way Harold did, she simply replied, “Maybe he’ll grow out of it.”

Rob tried to agree. In the meantime, at least Harold’s stories always ended happily. Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone, which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well or badly (depending on their childhood). They lay down a foundation of stories in which goals are achieved, hurts healed, peace is restored, and the world is understood

After bedtime, Harold would be up in his room talking to his characters. His parents would be downstairs, exhausted and unable to hear exactly what he was saying. But they could hear the rise and fall of his voice as the stories danced in the air above him. They would hear him calmly explaining something. Reacting with alarm. Rallying his imaginary friends. He was in what Rob and Julia used to call his Rain Man mode, lost in his own spacey world. They’d wonder when exactly Harold would start joining the human race, if ever. But upstairs, while tutoring his monkeys, Harold drifted off to sleep.

ATTACHMENT

ONE
DAY
,
WHEN
HAROLD
WAS
IN
SECOND
GRADE
,
JULIA
CALLED
him from the playroom to the kitchen table. She rallied her energy and told him it was time to do his homework. Harold ran through his normal gospel of homework avoidance. First, he told her he hadn’t been assigned any homework. When that small fib cracked, he told her he’d already done it at school. This was followed by a series of ever lessplausible claims. He had done it on the bus. He had left the assignment at school. It was too hard, and the teacher had told the class they didn’t have to do it. The homework was impossible because the teacher hadn’t covered the material. It was not due for another week, and he would do it tomorrow, and so on and so on.

Having completed his nightly liturgy, he was asked to march to the front hall and retrieve his backpack. He did so with the energy of a convicted killer on his way to the execution chamber.

Harold’s backpack was an encyclopedia of boyhood interests and suggested that Harold was well on his way to a promising career as a homeless person. Inside, if one dug down through the various geological layers, one could find old pretzels, juice boxes, toy cars, Pokemon cards,
PSP
games, stray drawings, old assignments, worksheets from earlier grades, apples, gravel, newspapers, scissors, and copper piping. The backpack weighed slightly less than a Volkswagen.

Julia pulled Harold’s assignment folder from amid the wreckage. It is said that history moves in cycles, and this is true when it comes to the philosophy of homework-folder organization. In some ages, the three-ring binder is in vogue. In others, the double-sided cardboard folder prevails. The world’s great educators debate the merits of each system, and their preferences seem to alternate according to some astrological cycle.

Julia found his assignment sheet, and realized with a sinking heart that the next sixty-five minutes would be spent completing the ten-minute assignment. The project’s requirements were minimal—Harold would merely need a shoebox, six colored markers, construction paper, a three-foot display board, linseed oil, ebony, the toenail of a three-toed sloth, and some glitter glue.

Julia dimly suspected, and research by Harris Cooper of Duke University confirms, that there is only a tenuous correlation between how much homework elementary students do and how well they do on tests of the material or with other measures of achievement. She also suspected that this nightly homework ordeal served other purposes—to convince parents that their kids are getting a suitably rigorous education; to introduce the children to their future lives as spiritually crushed drones; or, more positively, to introduce children to the study habits they would need later in life.

In any case, Julia, trapped in the overpressured parenting life that everybody in her social class ridicules but few renounce, girded herself for the bribery and cajolery that would follow. She would, over the next few minutes, present Harold with an ever more elaborate series of incentives—gold stars, small pieces of candy, BMWs—all to induce him to do his homework. When these failed, as they inevitably would, she would wheel out the disincentives—threats to cut off TV privileges, to take away all computer games and videos, to write him out of her will, to imprison him in a cardboard box with nothing to eat but bread and water.

Harold would be able to resist all threats and incentives, either because he was not yet capable of calculating long-term pain versus temporary inconvenience, or because he knew his mother had no intention of ever cutting off the TV privileges, and thus putting herself in the position of having to entertain him all week.

In any case, Julia sat Harold down with his homework assignment at the kitchen table. She turned her back to get a glass of water, and 7.82 seconds later Harold handed her a sheet of paper claiming his homework was done. Julia looked down at the homework sheet, which looked like it contained three or four indecipherable markings that seemed to be in early Sanskrit.

This would mark the beginning of the nightly redo phase of the homework, when Julia would explain it was necessary to do his work slowly and carefully and in English if possible. Harold went through his normal protests, fell into another of his cycles of misery and internal chaos, and Julia knew that it would be another fifteen minutes of turmoil and disorder before he was in any mental shape to do the homework. It was as if she and Harold had to endure a phase of internal riot and protest before Harold would capitulate and be in a state capable of steady work.

One modern view of this situation is that Harold’s freedom was being crushed by the absurd strictures of civilization. The innocence and creativity of childhood was being impinged and bound by the conformities of an overwrought society. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.

But looking at her son, Julia didn’t really get the sense that the unsupervised Harold, the non-homework Harold, the uncontrolled Harold was really free. This Harold, which some philosophers celebrate as the epitome of innocence and delight, was really a prisoner of his impulses. Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

Harold wanted to do his homework. He wanted to be a good student and please his teachers and his mother and father. But he was just unable. He somehow couldn’t help that his backpack was a mess and his life was disorganized. Sitting at the table, he couldn’t control his own attention. Something would happen by the sink and he’d check it out. Some stray thought would drive him toward the refrigerator, or to an envelope that happened to be lying near the coffee machine.

Far from being free, Harold was now a victim of the remnants of his own lantern consciousness, distracted by every stray prompt, unable to regulate his responses. He was smart enough to sense that he was spinning out of control. He could not reverse the turmoil welling up inside. So he would get frustrated and think he was bad.

Some evenings, to be honest, Julia made these moments worse by losing patience. At these tired, frustrated moments, she just told Harold to buckle down and get it over with. Why couldn’t he complete these simple assignments, which he knew how to do, which should have been so easy for him?

That never worked.

But Julia had other resources. When Julia was young, her family moved around a lot. She switched schools and sometimes had trouble making new friends. At those times, she threw herself at her own mother, and relied on her company. They would take long walks together, and go out for tea together, and her mother, who was lonely, too, in the new neighborhood and had nobody she could talk to, would open up. She would tell young Julia about her nervousness in the new place, what she liked about it and what she didn’t, what she missed and what she looked forward to. Julia felt privileged when her mother opened up in this manner. She was just a little girl at the time, but she had access to an adult viewpoint. She felt she was being admitted into a special realm.

Julia lived a very different life than the one her mother did. It was much easier in many respects. She spent an insane amount of time on superficialities—shopping for the right guest-room hand towels, following celebrity gossip. But she still had some of those internal working models in her head. Without thinking about it, without even realizing that she was replicating her mother’s behavior, Julia sometimes would share her own special experiences with Harold. She wouldn’t really think about it, but often when they were both on edge, when times were hard, she would just find herself talking about some adventure she’d had when she was young. She would give him privileged access into her life.

This particular evening, Julia saw Harold strangely alone, struggling with the stimuli and the random impulses within. She instinctively pulled him in, and brought him a bit inside her own life.

She told him a story. She told him, of all things, about a drive she had taken across the country with some friends after college. She described the rhythms of that drive, where they had stayed night after night, how the Appalachians had given way to the plains and then the Rockies. She described what it was like to wake up in the morning and see mountains in the distance and then drive for hours and still not reach them. She described the string of Cadillacs she had seen planted upright along the highway.

As she did this, his eyes were rapt upon her. She was treating him with respect and letting him into that most mysterious region—the hidden zone of his mother’s life that had existed before his birth. His time horizon subtly widened. He got subtle intimations of his mother’s girlhood, her maturity, his arrival, his growth, this moment now, and the adventures he would someday have.

And as Julia talked, she was tidying up. She was clearing space on the counters, removing the boxes and stray letters that had piled up during the day. Harold leaned in toward her, as if she were offering him water after a thirsty walk. Over the years, Harold had learned how to use her as a tool to organize himself, and during their little random conversation he started to do just that.

Julia looked over at Harold and noticed he had his pencil dangling from his mouth. He wasn’t really chewing on it, just letting it hang softly between his teeth in the way he automatically did when he was thinking about something. He suddenly looked happier and more collected. With her story, Julia had triggered something—an implicit memory of what it was like to be calm and in control. She’d engaged him in the sort of extended conversation that he was still incapable of performing on his own. It was like a miracle, and Harold soon got his homework smoothly done.

But of course it wasn’t a miracle. If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.