Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (16 page)

Second, research associates involved in any aspect of the assessments were kept ignorant of the fate of the men after adolescence.

Third, we used multiple checks to ensure accurate ratings. Each man’s childhood was assessed by at least two raters, and rater reliability was excellent (that is, multiple raters were highly likely to come independently to similar conclusions).
8
When two senior child psychiatrists reviewed and rated selected cases, their ratings too concurred with, and so further supported, the validity of the assessments of the original raters.

Fourth, we had two complete and independent assessments to cross-check against each other. The men’s childhoods were first assessed in the early 1940s, and were scored on a 1–3 scale, from good to bad. Then, between 1970 and 1972, thirty years after the first assessment, I organized a second independent assessment from the same material (see
Appendix C
). Here’s how it was done. As I’ve said, one constant challenge of research of this kind is the need to transform intuitions and value judgments into statistically useful data. The trick by which we had assessed marital satisfaction worked its magic on the men’s childhoods: we turned a set of concrete behavioral criteria into a numerical scale. This time we rated five separate questions about the men’s early years, to ensure that no single one would be weighted too heavily. These questions were:

• Was the home atmosphere warm and stable?

• Was the boy’s relationship with his father warm and encouraging, conducive to autonomy, and supportive of initiative and self-esteem?

• Was the boy’s relationship with his mother warm and encouraging,
conducive to autonomy, and supportive of initiative and self-esteem?

• Would the rater have wished to grow up in that home environment?

• Was the boy close to at least one sibling?

Based on the material collected when the men were in college, each of these five questions was answered as superior (5), average (3), or poor (1) by two blind raters, and the two scores averaged. The 5-point ratings for the five separate questions were then added together to provide a global rating of childhood environment that could range from 5 to 25. Childhoods in the top quartile were characterized as warm; those in the bottom quartile as bleak; those in the middle two quartiles as so-so. We called the men in the top tenth the Cherished, and those in the bottom tenth, the Loveless.

One potential source of bias was that the new raters were people whose parents had raised them under Spock’s permissive tutelage. They were inclined to understand the much higher strictness quotient of the College men’s childhoods as a sign of parental coldness, rather than simply a reflection of the typical upper-middle-class childrearing climate of the 1920s and 1930s. I compared the new assessments with the original ones of the older raters, who had a better grasp of the mores of the time. And it turned out that I needn’t have worried. The agreement between the two generations of raters was quite good.

As time went on, we were able to use this more nuanced assessment to discover, among other things, that by the time the men were into their seventh decade, the Loveless were eight times as likely as the Cherished to have experienced a major depression. We found that while even warm childhoods were often followed by heavy smoking
or
alcohol abuse or regular tranquilizer use, bleak childhoods were often associated with all three. And—to return to where we started, with money—we found that the fifty-nine men with the warmest childhoods made 50 percent more money than the sixty-three men with the bleakest childhoods. These were significant findings. So was the correlation between warmth of childhood and life satisfaction. But most important of all was the fact that the Cherished were four times as likely as the Loveless—very significantly more likely—to enjoy warm social supports at seventy.

Those are abstractions, however. Here are pictures of what the childhoods of the Cherished and the Loveless really looked like, and of the effects they exerted on the men’s futures.

THE LIFE OF OLIVER HOLMES

Judge Oliver Holmes had one of the warmest childhoods in the Study. He received a score of 23 out of a possible 25 on our Childhood Rating Scale. The important people in his life had made his childhood a pleasure, and their affectionate and empowering warmth lived on in his own parenting and even his children’s. I have told much of Holmes’s story in
Aging Well,
but I will reprise selected portions here because it is such a vivid illustration of the power of love.

Holmes’s childhood placed him firmly amongst the Cherished. His parents were well-off, and they spent their money on music lessons and private schooling for their children, not on luxuries for themselves. At fifty, Holmes wrote, “My parents gave me wonderful opportunities.” His relatives were nurses, music teachers, YMCA directors. No one in his family was known to be mentally ill. The Holmeses were Quakers, but Mrs. Holmes never stood over her children and made them say prayers; she felt, as she explained to Lewise Gregory in 1940, that “religion must be taught by example rather than
by
words.” Besides, she went on, “Oliver was always cooperative and reasonable and almost never had to be punished. He has a delightful sense of humor.”

Gregory saw Judge Holmes’s mother as “a rather serious person with a great deal of kindness and gentleness,” and she noted an example.

During the interview Holmes’s younger brothers were in and out of the living room, playing football on top of us, aiming BB guns at our heads, but it didn’t take Oliver’s mother long to have the situation well in hand. I would call her a wise person, an intelligent mother, and calm in emotional makeup.

Oliver got into frequent fights with other boys when he was in grammar school. One time he was knocked unconscious with a rock, but—ever the optimist—he reassured his parents that the other fellow had gotten the worst of it! In college, even while he was a member of the Pacifist Society, he still enjoyed aggressive games, and belonged to the judo club and to a debating team. It is easier to grow up to be a Quaker if when you are young your parents can accept your assertiveness—and have a sense of humor. It’s easier to grow up to be a confident and competent individual, too.

Holmes’s father had put himself through medical school. He became a top orthopedic surgeon, and Mrs. Holmes said about him that “his fellow physicians don’t see how he can be so genuinely concerned about his patients. . . . He has so much sympathy for people who are ill and in trouble.” Holmes described his father as “generous and never encroaching on a person’s individuality.”

The Holmeses were a close-knit family, and Holmes considered his parents among his best friends. After Oliver completed law school,
his
father bought him a house in Cambridge, just fifteen blocks away from his own. Oliver’s wife’s parents lived even nearer; for just as greatly as Holmes admired his father did Cecily admire hers. At age sixty-five, Judge Holmes described his brother’s family as “so nice that one would have to be a stone not to enjoy it.” Yes, his brother lived in Cambridge too.

I can hear my readers muttering, “I knew it. This guy is a patrician judge. His father bought him an expensive house. No wonder he’s a picture of contentment in his old age! What did he ever have to worry about?” This reaction is exactly why social science needs statistics as well as evocative case histories. We found that contentment in the late seventies was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man’s own income. What it
was
significantly associated with was warmth of childhood environment, and it was very significantly associated with a man’s closeness to his father. Holmes was very fortunate, there’s no doubt about that. But the best part of his good fortune was not financial.

When I re-interviewed the Holmeses at seventy-eight, Judge Holmes was still working several days a week in an effort to reform the Massachusetts judicial system. He and his wife had recently sold their Cambridge house and were living in a retirement complex. Their living room was warm and welcoming, with an upright piano and a working fireplace, and the walls were covered with Cecily Holmes’s very good watercolors and photographs of the children and grandchildren.

Judge Holmes in old age was a tall, slightly balding man. At first he reminded me of a distinguished but very uptight professor of neurology I had once known, but as he talked the depth and complexity of his humanity came through. Holmes always focused on the positive side of people—not as someone who sees the world through rose-colored glasses, but in the way that a clear-eyed but loving parent appreciates
his child. I was struck by how comfortable I felt with the Holmeses. Our interview lasted three hours, but they betrayed no impatience. They laughed frequently, and it wasn’t nervous or social laughter, but the kind that comes straight from the belly.

This was a responsible and venerated judge, still working at seventy-eight. He knew how to stand up for himself. But he knew how to play, too, and he knew how to depend on others, as his interactions with his wife made very clear. Unlike many of the Study men who could barely list one intimate friend, Holmes listed six with whom he shared “joys and sorrows.”

Seven years later, at eighty-five, Judge Holmes still experienced his health as “good” and his energy as “very good,” although he could no longer walk for two miles or climb stairs without resting. He had to get up three times to urinate during the interview, but his description of his medical problems displayed what his college interviewers had recognized as “whimsical humor” sixty-five years before. It was his prostate, Holmes explained dryly. “My doctor admires its size.” When Holmes was eighty-nine, and I was summarizing for this book the hundreds upon hundreds of marriage ratings we had collected over seven decades (see
Chapter 6
), his marriage scored among the four best in the Study. For the last ten years Judge Holmes in counterpoint to Cecily’s painting has been writing beautiful love poetry to his wife.

Holmes’s is as good an example as we have in the Study of a warm childhood. How do we know that it predicts success, though? And how can we know how much it was the security of warmth and how much the security of money that allowed Holmes to become what he did? Furthermore, what contribution do genes and hormones (oxytocin, for example) make to mental health and the capacity for empathy and love? We don’t know exactly (yet) what the interplay among these factors is. Certainly good fortune in any aspect of the
“nature”
lottery may exaggerate the effects of a warm childhood on later outcome, and I will use Study statistics to untangle some of these threads as we go on. In the meantime, suffice it to say that the powerful effects of a caring family can sometimes be discerned best in their absence, as the following life story shows.

THE LIFE OF SAM LOVELACE

When he first entered the Grant Study in 1940, Samuel Lovelace was scared. “Sam’s anxiety is far in excess of the average Grant Study man,” the examining physician wrote. Even at rest, his pulse was 107. The Study staff described him as an immature lad who “tires rather easily,” and they were disturbed by his diffidence and his “inability to make friends.”

Six years into the Study, a staff member summed Lovelace up as “one of the few men to whom I would assign the adjective
selfish
. . . . It was as if he were looking out of a very small gun barrel.” That was a warning; “selfishness” in the Grant Study men appears to have been the result not of too much love in childhood, but of too little. More on this shortly.

No one looking at Sam Lovelace’s whole life could possibly regard him as selfish. Even when he was in college, there were some Grant Study staff who were touched by him. They called him a “nice boy . . . intelligent, warm, open chap . . . with potential ability that has not yet found an avenue through which he could direct it.” But his childhood environment score was 5 out of 25, a score that put him in the bottom 2 percent of the Study for childhood warmth. Even Godfrey Camille’s childhood got a 6.

Sam Lovelace entered life as the result of an accidental pregnancy in a family that was solidly middle-class, even if it didn’t possess quite the wealth of the Holmeses. But remember that while warm childhood
correlated very significantly with a high Decathlon score, social class was statistically unrelated. And class was the least of Sam’s problems. By his mother’s own testimony, he never got much attention, even of the most fundamental and presumably nonnegotiable kinds. Asked by Lewise Gregory what she would do over again in bringing him up, she replied, “I would try to provide better care and feeding during infancy . . . and more companionship.” She also said of her two sons that she had “always expected them to be adults.” When asked at thirty what he wanted his children to have that his childhood had lacked, Lovelace replied, “A richer environment in terms of stimuli.”

Sam grew up feeling that he “didn’t know either parent very well,” and recollected “little demonstration of affection from either of them.” They, in turn, dismissed him as “too dependent.” But the most independent and most stoical men in the Grant Study were the men who came from the most loving homes; they had learned that they could put their trust in life, which gave them courage to go out and face it. I use the term
stoical
to indicate people who use the adaptive involuntary defense of suppression, which I’ll discuss in
Chapter 8
. As a child, Sam spent most of his time with his dog, and he “grew apart” from his only brother. His mother believed that “people like Sam more than he likes them.”

Sam got all A’s in high school and was editor of the school newspaper. To the Grant Study staff he appeared “graceful and coordinated.” But his parents focused on their belief that he was “not good at sports, and he hates those that he does.” For many years Sam Lovelace was a stranger to games; only late in life did he learn how to play.

In the early interviews of his college years, Sam described his mother as “very moody, unpredictable, and given to worry. . . . I don’t feel too close to her.” He had little respect for his father. At forty-seven, he remembered his mother as “pretty tense and high-strung,”
and
his father as a “remote, anxious, tired” man and a bigot. He visited his parents often as an adult, but not so much out of love as out of his fear that they would soon die. Often they ended up in arguments over politics, which reduced his conservative parents to tears and left the more liberal Sam feeling once more on the other side of an unbridgeable gulf. He took little vacation time—“play” still wasn’t easy for him—and spent most of it in dutiful visits to relatives.