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Schooling and Education: Part 2

Posted on May 23, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” – Sir Ken Robinson

Growing up, the unstated goal of schooling was to get into a good college which was a necessary requirement for a good life. This long term goal was translated into the near term goal of topping the class. Topping the class in the monthly, quarterly exams was practice that would enable me to top the class in the final examination. Topping the class in the final exam in the first grade, second grade and so on, was practice for besting the class, the city in high school. This in turn would lead to brilliant performances in university entrance exams which would lead to my being selected into a good engineering or medical college.

In the India I grew up in, you could get into undergraduate college based on your academic ability, as measured by tests such as the 2nd year pre-university exam, the engineering entrance examination and so on. The elite engineering and medical schools of the country had their own special entrance exams. The alternate form of entry was by paying a lot of money (called capitation fee) to get into private colleges. My parents couldn’t afford to pay for my entry, though I was sure my father would’ve somehow managed to raise the money, if that was the only choice left. But, i knew what a good child would do: enter on his own academic power rather his father’s economic might, real or borrowed.

“Every education system in the world has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn’t matter where you go. .. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.” – Sir Ken Robinson

If I didn’t want to become an engineer or a doctor, then I was already on the road to failure (loser, if I knew the term then), a life away from the glitter and the glory. The whole thing was so ingrained in me, I involuntarily smirked at those who went to the arts school or to study say diploma. They were the paths of those who weren’t good enough. Also, arts was at the very bottom of the academic hierarchy. Saying that you had a B.A. or an M.A. was to declare your non-brahmanical status. While my dad yearned for me to learn the guitar, he was clear that he didn’t want me to pursue that as a career choice. As much as he encouraged me to write, he never suggested that writing could by vocation as well as my avocation.

I couldn’t stand the sight of blood and so engineering was my only other choice. Electronics and computers were becoming the subjects that students aspired to get into. For kids like me, in awe of gadgets such as TV and video and computers, these engineering fields were the way to do cool things, to impress girls. Of course, I didn’t consciously think like this. I thought that I loved to study about computers, to become a software engineer (I was enamored by software, not hardware as much). And I do love software. But like breathing air and never feeling it in the rush of daily living, I had unconsciously absorbed that the mansion on the hill was on the road to happiness and a good life and to get to that mansion, I had to study hard and be an engineer. That I liked the subject only made the task more enjoyable.

But what about those whose kids are not interested in the subjects that lead far more directly to the mansion on the hill ? What if they’ve decided that the mansion on the hill is not a sign of freedom, but bondage to a way of being ?

“And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.” – Sir Ken Robinson.

For sure, the kids these days have more choices than the duopoly of engineering and medicine, but that’s also because there are a few more subjects (such as finance)  that lead to what many consider a successful life. But even otherwise, teenagers seem to be aware of far more choices to pursue as a vocation. But even now, if the choices don’t lead to an hugely successful life, I see parents dissuade their children from pursuing them. In a subsequent TED talk, given a few years after his popular TED talk on how schools kill creativity, Sir Ken Robinson narrates the story of a person he met at a book signing event. That person was a fireman, had wanted to be a fireman from a very early age. But in school, a teacher made fun of him, of squandering his talent if he wanted to be a fireman. A friend told me the story of a school mate of his, someone who was brilliant with his hands and automobiles, but couldn’t get straight grades to get past high school. Today, he runs a successful auto mechanic store in Mumbai. I know of several people who fit this category of being borderline when it comes to academic ability, but are otherwise brilliant with their hands-on intelligence in the same subject.

Many might interject at this point arguing that schooling provides the opportunities, not the guarantees. That if the kids are not bright, then there is nothing that can be done. Look at all the brilliant kids who’ve come out of schooling, look at how they’ve changed the world. I have two questions for them. First, did they succeed despite schooling or because of it ? Second, how many equally talented children have we left behind because of schooling ? If you doubt this argument, think of what Einstein, considered by many to be the very idea of genius, said:
“One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.“

Sir Ken Robinson narrates the story of Gillian Lynne, the choreographer of musicals such as Andrew Llyod Webber’s Cats and Phantom of the Opera. She was underperforming in school and was classified as having learning disability (these days she might be labeled as having ADHD and given Ritalin). The doctor her mother took her to discovered her gift for dancing and asked her mother to enroll in a dancing school instead of a regular school. Lest you think this is uncommon, teachers are how most people learn that their kids have ADHD (read this CNN article or this one or read the brilliant Anatomy of an Epidemic).

How many more unsung people are out there, damaged or hobbled by schooling ?

Some say that the point of schooling is about imparting basic skills. But, schools fail to impart such basic skills as critical thinking and a deep understanding of the scientific method and basic scientific principles that we can use in our daily lives. How many of us are able to explain why intelligent design is not a scientific theory or separate pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo from real science. Books such as Innumeracy talk of our basic inability to even comprehend numbers in a meaningful way, something that is exploited in a subtle, subterfuge way by politicians and marketeers. Literacy maybe one skill that is taught by schooling, but it is clear that many public schools in this country, the US, fail even at that basic level.

So what is schooling good for then ?

“Our education system has mined our minds the way we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future it won’t serve us.” – Sir Ken Robinson.

I’ve often wondered if the schools are a rehearsal for the work life to come. Children have to be broken (similar to how dogs are house broken) to give up their aimless pursuit of wonder and trained to sit still in classrooms, much as we adults tend to do in cubicles and offices. The whole thing is so systemic, we don’t even see it as a problem. Just that sometimes in the night, or in the minutes just before we’re fully awake, we sense an undefined, vague malaise. But, of course, this is the small price for the comforts of our life, at our successes.

But, the world is changing far too rapidly than in the past, too rapidly for the ways of our parents and even our generation for us to accurately predict what the future will be like. Paths that were almost certain roads to middle class and beyond, are no longer so. When I was in India a couple of years back, I fell into a conversation with a stranger on the local city bus. He was lamenting how despite his getting a B.E in computer science from a locally reputed college, there were no jobs to be found, thanks to the recession. He mentioned how, a few years back, such a degree was a surefire path to success. Sir Ken Robinson calls this steady rise in the qualifications needed to get a job, academic inflation. So, in the coming world, creativity and critical thinking are far more important than pursuing well established ladders to economic success. Academic excellence may not be the best use of our children’s talents and abilities.

So then, how are we as parents to think about education ? What are we to do ?

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Spring Morning Ruminations On Parenting

Posted on April 7, 2011
by Dinesh Dutt

I sit here on a gloriously fickle spring morning. Two days ago, it was so hot, we had to throw open all the windows. Today, the mercury reads 53 F and its probably colder because of the frigid, gusty wind. Jeff Buckley is singing a brilliant rendition of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah on the stereo. Three quotes about childhood catch my eye.

The first was on our changing attitudes on misbehavior from an entry in the popular Mind Hacks blog:

“During the 19th and 20th centuries, a new conceptualization of childhood and how children ought to behave emerged in both popular culture and the medical world. A model child embodied the ideals necessary for the new industrial economy: self-regulated behavior and orderly social relations.

Childhood became the critical period for learning restraint and developing a proper social identity in order to grow up to be a successful adult. This prevailing characterization of a good child generated its opposite: the troublesome child. A broad range of social problems fell into this category of misbehavior and could include difficulty in schoolwork, fighting, and failure to obey authority.”

The second is a quote from Alison Gopnik’s “The Philosophical Baby”. She writes in the introduction:

“Children and adults are different forms of Homo Sapiens. They have very different, though equally complex and powerful, minds, brains, and forms of consciousness, designed to serve different evolutionary functions. Human development is more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterfiles than like simple growth – though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path.”

The third is a quote by George Orwell. He’s been whipped at his boarding school for wetting his bed again. He writes:

“The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt  that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

As I flounder sometimes on the rocks of parenthood, I struggle with the message in these quotes. A fairly standard way of thinking about children is that they’re primitive, incomplete, adults and that a chief task of a parent is to turn them into well formed adults. What we consider normal of children and therefore tolerate and what we consider misbehaving and therefore punish has a strong societal factor, and is something that changes with time (another example is that letting children cry themselves to sleep would be abhorrent in any other time or society, it seems evolutionarily maladaptive). And children struggle to make sense of the world, trying to establish patterns that’ll help them predict how they can get more of what they want. Punishing them as they struggle in this task is traumatic and incomprehensible to them (and incomprehensible to us how it can be incomprehensible to them). After all, they’re not being defiant to frustrate you, but they’re trying to figure out how the world works. If I can help them understand what patterns will not get them what they want (such as crying and throwing a tantrum) and what patterns will, is that a better approach or is punishing one way of ensuring that they learn the lesson much more quickly. Is learning quickly the right thing or just the more convenient thing ?

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah – Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

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Another Riff On The Myths Of Success

Posted on September 10, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

Image via Wikipedia

Sometime in the middle of my pre-university (what is the final 2 years of high school in the US), I may have sensed that I was not going to be an Einstein. Not even close. I was bright, stood out from the crowd, but that was mostly because I was in a small pond. Tackling the problems of the entrance examination to the elite Indian engineering colleges, IIT, I must’ve sensed my limits. Around the same time, I fell in love with Ludwig van Beethoven and Ivan Lendl.

Beethoven’s dramatic symphonies caught my ear. I couldn’t stop listening to his fifth and ninth symphonies. They seemed so full of life, rebellion and vigor that they seemed far more attractive than Mozart, whose music has been described as “grace under pressure”. The movie Amadeus, about the life of Mozart, was making rounds around then. I recall reading how talented Mozart was and how Beethoven had to struggle to compose his works while Mozart did them effortlessly, thanks to his innate talent. The movie made that abundantly clear, especially in the scene where Antonio Salieri‘s painstakingly composed piece is improvised and improved while Mozart plays it. I also recall reading that Mozart’s music was less popular than it deserved, thanks largely to the music of Beethoven. How accurate these statements were, I didn’t question. They were after all printed in the newspapers and popular weeklies.

Ivan Lendl came to my attention because he seemed to lose every Grand Slam final, an eventuality that seemed as certain as his reaching the final. John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors mocked him and sportswriters questioned whether he had the mental fitness to win a Grand Slam. I loved underdogs and that was what I thought attracted me to Lendl. But, the sportswriters also hinted at the abundant talent of McEnroe and Lendl’s lack of it. Lendl reportedly tried to overcome his talent handicap by working harder than just about everyone in the tennis circuit. I still remember the feel of the paper and where I stood when I read of Lendl’s back-from-the-dead 5-set victory over McEnroe at the French Open. That year, he defeated McEnroe at the US Open too, a far more impressive victory than the French Open one. That was the start of his ruthless domination of the tennis world.

I cheered Lendl on, staying up late to watch the finals he played in, scouring the papers for news of his latest victory or defeat. The victories brightened my day while my heart sank at his defeats. To this day, I can again recall where I was (practising with a college music band) and what I was doing (waiting in the hallways between a break) and the time (around midnight) and the face of the guy (a fellow fan) who brought the news that Boris Becker had defeated Lendl in a five setter at the Wimbledon semi-finals. That was Lendl’s best performance on grass. The papers were again full of how Lendl’s game was unsuited to grass and his lack of talent. I find my anger and despair at these reports easy to recall.

I never again felt the connection, the drama as if it was I playing the match, as I felt in those days with Lendl. No sport, no player ever elicited that kind of response.

What I was battling with each ball that Lendl struck and each note Beethoven composed, was despair. Despair that because of my middling talent, I’d never amount to anything. Each screaming winner, each triumphant note was hope that if I tried hard enough, I’d prevail, that effort triumphed talent. I hated school because I was told topping the class was what mattered. Nobody said that learning was not important, just that all the emphasis was on topping the class, acing the tests.

Tonight, at the ungodly hour of 3 am, I came across an article in an NYT blog titled “Sweating Your Way To Success“. The author, Peter Orszag, talks about a book by a two time Olympian table tennis player, Matthew Syed. The author says that the book shatters several popular myths about success. He writes:
“Too many of us believe in the “talent” myth — that top performers are born, rather than built. But Syed shows that in almost every arena in which tasks are complex, top performers excel not because of innate ability but because of dedicated practice.”

By stylizing the argument as hard work over talent, I fear that we’re condemning scores of people to unrealistic (and therefore disappointing) expectations of life. Kids are pressured into unsustainable study and practice schedules, especially in this what seems like an enormously competitive and pressure cooker world of education and now justification for the pressure will be buttressed with one more reason! Kids scarcely have a free moment these days, their lives overflowing with activities, the weekends consumed in shuttling between piano lessons and Bharatanatyam classes, swimming and karate practice and on and on.

Another blog on NYT tells a different story. Linda Greenhouse in “An Invisible Chief Justice” makes the case that the current Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, John Roberts, ascension to the most powerful position in the US (and maybe the world) legal system came about largely by chance, by a series of random events that put him in the right place at the right time, not because he was the most talented or the most capable of the job.

It seems to me that we continue to suffer from a surfeit of (what I consider) simplistic either-or thinking. Success is either because of talent or because of hard work. Parenting is either about nurture or about nature. This style of thinking seems rife in today’s world. In our personal relationships, at work, I see the either-or style of thinking, as “I’m right, you’re wrong”, whether it be a marital disagreement or technical, work-related difference of opinion. Even our legal system is all predicated on someone being right and someone being wrong (and ensuring that each side does what is required to make their argument win, even if it means that the truth is lost).

Another false construction that we Americans are especially prone to is ignoring the role of the ecosystem in shaping the outcome, focussed as we are on personal responsibility, on being the masters of our fate. In most accomplishments, there is nary a mention of random chance, of circumstances, of societal forces. In India, on the other hand, we’re overly focused on chance compared to personal responsibility. If something good happens, it is that person’s good karma, the toil mentioned only as an afterthought. Wouldn’t it be more accurate and nuanced to construct arguments using “and” (I can hear an immediate “Sure, I’m right and you’re wrong”) ? Talent and hard work both matter, nature and nurture both matter, personal responsibility and the environment both matter, good luck and preparation both matter.

Maya on the shores of Donner Lake

I’ve written about our conceptions of success before. That was before Maya was born. But tonight, my thoughts are colored by the backdrop of recent articles that highlight the intensely competitive world that children come into, a world where parents hire nannies because they speak a foreign language, or hire private tutors to ace tests. On the Indian shore, I have friends whose kids have a comparatively pressure free life (compared to their peers say in the Cupertino school district). One of the common themes around dinner and wine with friends was that growing up in the US, our children don’t have to feel the pressure that their peers in India go through. That we could keep learning fun. But these articles seem to indicate that that world has made a strong landfall on these shores. I worry sometimes in such a competitive world, if Maya is maybe at a disadvantage with our attitude. What course of action is sensible as a parent, if I want to keep alive the joy and wonder in her eyes ?

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Behavioral Sciences are WEIRD (and MYOPICS)

Posted on August 12, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

The thought first occurred to me, back in the fall of 2008, as I was reading Dan Ariely’s very readable and fascinating book, “Predictably Irrational”. Chapter after chapter is peppered with conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on students studying at some of the best institutions in the US. I wrote an email to a couple of the authors of what I thought were well-respected blogs about the brain and behavior. I wrote:

“The more I read about our cognitive biases or irrationality, the more I’m struck by how many decisions have been reached using what seem fairly limited samples, many of them just college students. I don’t doubt that we’ve cognitive biases but I wonder are there any studies that go across cultures, socio-economic strata and age in determining the cognitive biases ? I googled and couldn’t find anything relevant. Is it that we all have the same cognitive biases but different ones are brought to the fore by culture ? ”

I did not get any responses to my question (they probably were optimistic that I’d learn to google better). But the feeling never went away as I encountered many new fascinating conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on college students in this country. As I was writing my entry about the death of languages, I noticed an article in that excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. While the title caught my eye, I didn’t really go back to checking the article until a few days later. The entry is titled: “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?“. WEIRD turns out to be an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The article was based on a paper (then) recently published paper titled The weirdest people in the world? by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

There are two main points to this paper. The first is that a lot of conclusions in behavior science are based on experiments on WEIRD people, essentially undergrad students at Western, mostly American, universities. The second thrust of the paper is to show that WEIRD people are not representative of most of humanity when it comes to behaviors.

From the abstract of the paper:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.  Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.”

Two pieces of data from the article reflect the level of skewness in the papers related to behavior science:

  • “A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population.”
  • “In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008).”

These papers and their conclusions are not just academic papers published in academic journals for the consumption of academics. As the authors write: “In top journals such as Nature and Science, researchers frequently extend their findings from undergraduates to the species – often declaring this generalization in their titles. These  contributions typically lack even a cautionary footnote about these inferential extensions.”

The authors compare WEIRD people at four levels: western, industrialized countries vs what they term “small scale socieities”, Western industrialized countries vs non-Western, industrialized countries, American vs other western countries and finally university-educated Americans vs non-university-educated Americans. The authors base their comparisons on different aspects of behavior ranging from visual perception and spatial cognition to ideas of independence and inter-dependence and moral reasoning.

The main paper is a well written (I confess here that I only read sections of it, given my limited time and domain-specific competence) 22 pages or so. The reminder of the paper is a collection of responses from various peers to their paper and the authors’ response to the responses. Many of the responses apply the criticism to other areas such as neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and the anthropocentric and ethnocentric attitudes related to comparing humans with other animals. Many responses question whether WEIRD is weird enough. For example, the author of the Neuroanthropology post writes:
“I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea.”

A small section of the peer commentary argued against the conclusions of the article with one author even stating “WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature”.

In the main paper, the authors don’t attempt to explain the reasons behind the extreme differences in behavior of the WEIRD folks. But in their response to the various pieces of peer review, they touch upon this subject. They suggest two possible reasons. One is the primacy of the English language. They write: “English-bias may be impacting theorizing in the cognitive sciences, while Machery and Stich show that it has impacted philosophical inquiry”.

The second cause they speculate has to do with the relative strangeness of American middle and upper class child-rearing techniques. They write: “Lancy lays the groundwork by highlighting the relative strangeness, in a broad global and historical context, of modern middle- and upper-class American beliefs, values, cultural models, and practices vis-a-vis childrearing. Fernald and Karasik et al. review evidence that is beginning to document how these practices impact cognitive, linguistic, and motor development, including long-term cognitive outcomes.”

We’ve been here before. Many times have we encountered the notion of researcher bias and skew caused by the nature of the samples studied.

I first encountered the idea of researcher bias many years ago when I was reading Dorothy Rowe’s insightful book, “Friends and Enemies: Our Need To Love and Hate”. She writes: “An American researcher observing a number of white, middle-class American babies, or an English researcher observing a number of white, middle-class English babies can easily fail to draw the simple conclusion that this is what American or English middle-class babies do and instead generalize their observations to say that this is what all babies do.”

A more tragic story is narrated by Robert Sapolsky in his essay “Poverty’s Remains” from his book, “The Trouble With Testosterone”. Much of our understanding of human anatomy was initially based on cadavers of poor people whose internal organs were differently shaped and sized because of the way they suffered and died. Sapolsky quotes several examples of this from the thymus gland which is very small in people who live in chronically stressful conditions to the adrenal gland which is much larger in people living under stressful conditions. So, at the turn of the 19th century, the doctors had a misconceived notion of the “normal” size of organs.

Before SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was called SIDS, an Austrian pathologist named Richard Paltauf concluded – after several autopsies of healthy infants who had died of unexplainable causes in their crib – that the cause of death was an enlarged thymus that pressed down on the trachea, strangling a sleeping infant. SIDS, which had been nameless thus far, was called status thymicolymphaticus and as far as into the 1950s, the preferred preventive treatment for SIDS was to irradiate the throats of infants. While not helping SIDS, the treatment resulted in causing thyroid cancer in tens of thousands of people. Sapolsky writes: “It is a chilling experience to wander the dusty lower floor of a medical library, reading forgotten seventy-year-old pediatric texts with their dry discussions of status thymicolymphaticus. The technical details of the disorder, the plausible etiology, the photographs of the “enlarged” thymuses, the confident recommendation for treatment – all wrong, page after page.”

More recently, at the start of the year, NYT published an article titled “The Americanization of Mental Illness”:
“AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.”

I cannot recommend the WEIRD paper highly enough to anybody engaged in an enquiry of human behavior, as a vocation or an avocation. I’ve saved a copy of the paper for a more thorough reading. I also recommend reading the post on Neuroanthropology for some additional insightful commentary.

Sapolsky concludes his essay “Poverty’s Remains” with a powerful and eloquent statement: “Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now made it supremely difficult to ever look at an exception to that supposed norm and see it objectively.”

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The Sorrows Of A Modern Parent

Posted on July 19, 2010
by Dinesh Dutt

“Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of the ‘empty next syndrome’ is increased smiling”.

I read this sentence back in 2006 or so, when I first encountered the brilliant mind of Daniel Gilbert in the pages of his bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The book was an eye opener on so many levels that I filed the sentence away in some corner of my brain’s attic and forgot about it. I wasn’t yet a father then and given the difficulty we were having conceiving, I probably sniggered at this statement, thanked my fate and moved on to the next eye opener.

Even then, however, the statement stayed with me because it flew in the face of the popular culture. Everybody I knew who had children thought the world of them and wouldn’t have it any other way. So despite my parent’s covert and overt references to how proud they were of having raised me, I attributed their pride to how I turned out, not their accomplishment in parenting a brat.

Last year, I noticed one of our neighbors, who had just entered the empty nest phase, look at Maya several times with what I thought was wistfulness and a little tear. The look in his eyes stayed with me.

Of course, parenting would be hard, I knew at some intellectual level, having heard that statement from my peers who were far more successful than we were in figuring out how to make babies. But I didn’t realize the depths of despair I could sink into sometimes, the relentlessness, the almost complete lack of time for myself and the total ennui of reading the same book over and over again. Being in the here and now with a child can be mind-numbing.

I attributed this difficulty to the insular life we lead here in the civilized, developed, West. Back in India, grandparents, neighbors, friends and other people pitched in to look after the baby, providing the parent with some much needed breathing time. Further, women of my mother’s generation were raised to expect the life they grew into. They had neither TV to glue their eyes to nor much money to spend. Cook, clean, make babies and raise babies was their life. They were not promised much and most didn’t expect much more. Here in the West, our expectations are much higher as is our sense of control and freedom.

Last week, New York Magazine carried an illuminating article that provided a comprehensive analysis of This Parenting Life. Titled “All Joy and No Fun”, it went behind the scenes to dissect Daniel Gilbert’s statement and in the process explores the cultural and psychological landscape of modern parenting.

The article, written by Jennifer Senior, starts with a study published in a scholarly journal last year that challenged Gilbert’s view. “Contrary to much of the literature, our results are consistent with an effect of children on life satisfaction that is positive, large and increasing in the number of children”, said the paper. The kick in the story however is that the author withdrew the paper a few months later when he discovered that his analysis was based on a coding error.

The article posits that a large factor in this Unhappy Parent Syndrome is that the experience of parenting has fundamentally changed. From a time when we thanked the gods for letting our children see the light beyond the first year of their life, we’ve come to a place where anything less than admission to a top school, a high paying job and a trophy wife is considered a failure. And to this end, parents have to do everything. Nothing is too much. Thinking that we’re solely responsible for how our children turn out, we rush them to expensive private schools (or expensive homes with good public homes), swimming lessons, karate classes, dance and a host of other activities designed to give them a leg up over the others. The stress to be the perfect parent is one major factor in what ruins the joy of parenting.

Other factors that affect our experience of parenting include the the later ages at which we have children and the support we get as parents from society such as extended time off when babies are born and decent childcare and public schools. According to the author, the only study that showed happy parents came from Denmark, where the state provides substantial support for parents.

Another key observation of the article is that parents tend to be unhappy in the daily moments of parenting, but look back on parenting as a most rewarding time. The author quotes two studies that lead to this conclusion. One is a study in which people categorized activities along the dual quadrant of pleasurable and rewarding. Activities such as work were considered rewarding, but not pleasurable while activities such as eating and watching TV were considered pleasurable but not rewarding. Raising children ranked behind volunteering and prayer as activities that were both pleasurable and rewarding. Another study found that childless couples were more depressed than couples with children and that single fathers without the custody of their children were the most depressed.

The author thus questions whether all these studies that conclude with the happy empty nest syndrome are those that define happiness as the immediate experience of positive feelings instead of being concerned with eudaimonia, of having lived a good life.

I liken parenting to running a marathon. No one who runs it can consider the experience painless. But after it is over, the euphoria of accomplishment is so overwhelming that many rush to run another one.

In any case, do read the article. Highly recommended.

Happy Maya

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