Blog Archives

Effects of TV On Children

Posted on November 30, 2009
by

Last week, a new study reported that the TV time for preschool children maybe as high as one-third of their waking hours. The sudden spurt is not caused by some epidemic surge in watching TV, but because previous studies did not account for the time spent at daycare. According to the study, at-home daycare centers were particularly egregious in this matter, with almost three-quarters  reporting they let the kids they cared for watch TV and DVDs while the number was only one-third for the non-at-home daycare centers. More alarming was the amount of time spent watching TV. On average, preschoolers spent 2.4 hours, toddlers 1.6 hours and infants 12 minutes at a home-based day care while the respective numbers for daycare centers were 24 minutes and 6 minutes; non-home daycare centers said they did not allow infants in front of the TV.

According to an article in the British daily, The Guardian, four month old infants in the US gaze at the idiot box for an average of 44 minutes a day. The number shoots up to 1.2 hours for those just under two. Similar data for Australia and the UK also point to significant amounts of time spent viewing TV by young children. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends zero TV and video time for children under 2 and suggests a maximum of 1-2 hours a day for older kids. The Australian Academy of Pediatrics is considering doing the same.

Is this Ludditism or is this news of increased TV time alarming in some way ? Does data back up AAP’s recommendations ? After all, AAP also opposes co-sleeping, the custom of having the infants share the bed with the parents. The answers to these questions are based on several considerations.

The primary concern of most parents with their kids watching TV or DVD is the nature of harm, specifically the effects on cognitive and social skills. Aren’t Baby Einsteins popular ? Aren’t they credited with making kids smarter, increasing some cognitive skill such as language acquisition or spatial reasoning ? The ineffectiveness of these so-called educational DVDs is well documented. They’re so ineffective, Disney, the makers of Baby Einstein, started offering refunds because their products failed to live up to the marketing. Dr. Dimitis Christakis, a paediatrician and researcher at the Seattle Children’s Hospital is oft-quoted for his work on the effect of media on kids. Dr. Christakis became interested in the subject when as a father, he found his toddler son mesmerized by the TV.

His research links too much TV during the preschool years with poorer language acquisition, obesity,  violent behavior and reduced attention spans. One study surveyed 1000 families with children under 2 in Minnesota and Washington. Their conclusion, published in 2007: “for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants understood an average of six to eight fewer words than infants who did not watch them. Baby DVDs and videos had no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies on toddlers 17 to 24 months of age.”  Another study, based on data accumulated over 40 years across 8000 families linked boys between 2-5 years of age who viewed violent programs (cartoons, movies, even football) with a higher probability of aggressive and anti-social behavior later in their life (specifically 7-10 years); examples of such behavior include cheating, being mean, lacking remorse, being destructive, being disobedient at school and having trouble with teachers. An earlier study by his group, in 2004, linked excessive TV watching with attention problems at age 7. An independent study by a group of New Zealand scientists on the same subject concluded: “childhood television viewing may contribute to the development of attention problems and suggest that the effects may be long-lasting.”. Events unfold at a faster pace in TV and videos than they do in real life which sets them up to them expect events in real life to unfold at the same pace. Ergo the lowered attention span.

A little over half of households with kids under the age of six report TV being always on, mostly on or at least on half the time in their house. Studies from Univ of Massachussetts Child Study Center said background TV “may have negative consequences for speech development, playtime and parent-child interaction”.  Another set of data and studies is quoted in the book: “Thinking and Literacy” which looks at data from various educational departments such as the 1980 California Assessment Program and the National Assessment of Educational Progress to conclude that TV viewing leads to reduced academic performance.

Some researchers speak of a media diet to account for quality as well as quantity. For example, programs such as Sesame Street were created with children in mind and by consulting with child development experts. Some studies done on children who viewed such programs show that the children developed a general understanding of the world faster. But none of these studies included infants, only much older kids. Also, how much faster ? Does faster imply better ? Does this faster development continue in later life or do the other kids catch up ? Another criticism of these media studies is that higher socio-economic status and greater educational qualification of parents far outweigh the effects of TV when it comes to measuring the cognitive development of children. That is no criticism. It reminds me of how unfair the advantage is to poorer children, in surmounting their disadvantages in competing with their more well-to-do peers.

Another facet on the effect of media on young children is the contribution to the consumerization of childhood, a subject about which I’ve written in the past. The majority of advertisements to children involve food and toys. The advertisements for food all involve unhealthy food such as sugary drinks (like Coke), sweets (candies, sweetened cereals etc.) and fat (potato chips, nachos etc.). Like the perfunctory warning sign posted on the outside of cigarette packs and tobacco stores, some advertisements exhort children to eat vegetables and fruits, to eat healthy, by the way. But the combination of advertisements, school vending machines and peer behavior make it almost impossible for kids to stay off these unhealthy food. To top that, young children’s brains crave sweet, salt and fat; even their own biology makes it hard for them to avoid sweets. Other advertisements start promoting fashion at an early age. The US market for infant, toddler and preschool kids clothing is about $15 billion dollars according to a report published in 2003. Specifically girls begin to develop an skewed, abnormal sense of their bodies. A growing body of work documents the commercialization of childhood and its effects, a body that includes books such as Juliet Schor’s Born to Buy, Pamela Paul’s Parenting Inc., Sharon Beder’s This Little Kiddy Went to Market,  online essays such as “Commodifying Kids” and online websites such as “Campaign For a Commercial Free Childhood” and movies such as “Consuming Kids”. A good summary of the effects is narrated by Henry A Giroux in  “Commodifying Kids”:
“American society in the last thirty years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children – one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. This is culture that does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, “there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets.”(2) Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market.”

Another facet of the effect of TV on children are the consequences to parent-child interaction. TV is increasingly taking the place of active involvement of caregivers with their children. As Americans work longer and longer (a trend that seems to be also afflicting other parts of the world, especially India), they find themselves coming home tired and in need of a break. A TV provides a convenient cop out. Marketeers effectively use this knowledge to sell more products such as educational DVDs and programs to parents using techniques such as selective quoting of scientific publications, funding of studies to show results in favor of their products and anecdotal evidence. Parents rationalize the choice of seating their infants and toddlers in front of TV watching these so called educational programs. We’re all creatures of habit. Once we get into a habit of watching TV together as the way to spend time together, we have difficulty breaking this habit, especially since the habit is so easy to sustain. They take the place of conversations and other means of social interaction and enquiry. TV quickly subsumed all other forms of interaction when introduced in places like Bhutan, where TV was originally banned.

TV is the elephant in the living room. In a recent article about the deleterious effects of TV on children in the British daily, The Guardian, a telling paragraph discusses the size and nature of this elephant :
“Aric Sigman, a UK psychologist and author of The Spoilt Generation, a broadside against permissive parenting, says while governments are happy to offer advice on suncream and portions of fruit and vegetables, they are less willing to provide guidelines about TV. “Of course they don’t want to because it is a vote-loser,” he says. “It is society’s favourite pastime and it makes parents feel guilty. The convenience of us parents is seen as paramount as opposed to the wellbeing of our children. When it comes to our childrens’ wellbeing, our guilt as parents has to come second.”

Aw, you say, I grew up on a steady diet of love and TV. Did I turn out so badly ? TV for children today is a vastly different phenomenon than when I was growing up. Disney’s Mickey and Donald or Tom and Jerry were harmless, moral-empty romps in the park, the kind children usually indulge in. No pat messages about trusting your instinct, obeying your parents, loving your nation and such. Even the Lion King is hardly like the cartoons of the older days. Aric Sigman continues his missive in the Guardian article:
“Part of the problem, argues Sigman, is we have a nostalgic view of our own experience of television when we were young. “We say, ‘I watched Blue Peter and I’m OK’,” says Sigman. “But the editing speeds and the colours and the number of hours spent watching TV and the age at which TV watching starts are a whole different thing now. We can’t compare now with before.”

The debate is not completely over and more data points are always welcome. For Shanthala and I, however, this is enough evidence to throw TV out of our house. To own a TV or not was the first argument of our married life. She was against and I was for. For a while, we owned a TV exclusively  for movies. But when Maya was due, we got rid of it. So far, neither one of us regrets the decision.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Leave a Reply ?

I Still Don’t Understand…

Posted on October 9, 2009
by

Mind Hacks, one of the blogs I frequent, put out a link to this article by the British Psychological Society, asking a some leading psychologists to write a few words about the one thing that they still don’t understand about themselves. I found their words a mix of the interesting and mundane, some even disappointing. Some common themes echoed by more than one psychologist are:

Time Management: Why do we indulge in magical thinking (wishing will make it so) when it comes to taking on additional work or estimating how long any activity will take ? Why do we overcommit ?

Knowledge and Realization: Despite having published many articles on the subject, why do these psychologists fail to apply the conclusions of that research to their own lives ? As Norbert Schwarz puts it: “What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind? “

The Nature of Individual Differences: Why are some of us better at some things and not others ? Have more self-control and discipline about some activities, but not others ? Why do two children growing up in the same household turn out so different ?

I was underwhelmed by the statement of Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist in the news recently:
“I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. … We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes.”

I was also puzzled by her statement: “I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go.”

That she could not be attribute this to culture surprised me. In India and many other non-First world countries, parents live in extended families with their children or at least close enough that they’re never far away from their children and they’re happy with that arrangement. And in the case of parents of immigrants like us, the sadness at not seeing their children and grandchildren frequently and being a more integrated part of our lives is as great as the distance that separates us, nay much greater.

A funny observation is made by Richard Wiseman: “My guess is that the creation of comedy will remain a mystery for centuries, although at some point in the not too distant future, I suspect someone will carry out functional MRI scans of comedians creating jokes, and claim to have identified the part of the brain responsible for producing humour. Now, that will be funny.”

Powered by ScribeFire.

Leave a Reply ?

Frenetic Existence

Posted on July 20, 2009
by
Wednesday, July 15.

Went to bed early last night, woke up early this morning, had a half hour of solitude before Maya woke up. fed her and put a new diaper when she woke up and she fell asleep immediately, had an undisturbed shower and shave, checked email and got the first meeting canceled as the agenda was not clear. Maya woke up for good. She was in great spirits as she was not hungry and had a good full 10 hours of sleep. This is going to be a beautiful day, I thought to myself. And then the wheels started coming off.

When we had moved to our friend’s house in Palo Alto, I offered Ginez a choice: to either come at 8:30 so that I could catch a bus to the train station or to come at 8:45 so that she could drop me at the station. She preferred to drop me off at the station as it gave her fifteen more minutes of sleep.

8:38. Ginez called to say that she was stuck in traffic. A car was on fire on the freeway and after getting off the highway, the internal expressway was also a giant parking lot. She was at least 15 minutes away. This set off a domino in my head. 15 minutes late meant that I’d probably not get to the train station on time which meant that I’d miss the company shuttle to work which meant taking the light rail. Taking the light rail meant changing trains to reach my office, which meant that I maybe at work only by 10:15 or so instead of 9:30. Was I glad that I had canceled my meeting at 9:30 ? Nay. I was a little anxious that I’d be late.

8:42: I called Ginez to ask her where she was. She had come up to Middlefield Road and said she’d take that exit to come home. I asked her to hurry.

8:47 I was getting a little nervous. I had no meeting till at least 11. Why was I in a tizzy ? I diapered Maya, picked up my backpack and went outside to wait for Ginez.

8:50. I called Ginez again. She was at Alma and Churchill. She said even these residential roads were choked. She asked if I could come to the corner of El Camino and Park Ave to make up for the lost time. I said yes and started hurriedly walking with Maya in my arms.

8:55 Got to the corner of El Camino and Park. No Ginez. Called her again. She said that she was getting onto El Camino and that she’d be there in a minute or so.

8:57 Ginez is at the light, waiting for the U turn. With no traffic on my side of the road, I hurry across the road, strap Maya in and get inside. Ginez is apologetic, saying that she starts early enough to avoid traffic delays, but that today was really bad. I tell her not to worry, that if I miss the train, I miss it, that it is not the end of the world.

8:58 The light changes and we hurry to Palo Alto Caltrain station. I’m quite confident now that I’ll miss the train. We’ve only 3 minutes left. I imagine jumping into the waiting train just as the door are about to close, without validating my ticket. What will I tell the conductor if they ask for tickets, I wonder.

9:02 As we pull into the station, I see the train on the platform with the doors shut. I think, OK, I’ve missed it. As I get out, I realize that it’s the northbound train. I leap for joy. I can still catch my train. I see the southbound train pulling in. I leap out, wish Ginez a good day, don’t even kiss Maya goodbye and start running. Time enough to validate the ticket, I think.

9:03 I get into the train along with a horde of others. I hear an announcement that the train will not stop till Santa Clara. I’m surprised, then relieved that maybe this is the earlier train. I get out along with others, some looking confused as they check their watches. I hurry up to the conductor, who doesn’t even look at me as he says “The Mountain View train is right behind”. I guess a lot of folks have already asked him the question.

9:05 I call Ginez and tell her that the trains are all delayed, that the commute is messed up everywhere today. I wonder if the company shuttle will wait for me as I pace the platform. I call a friend in India to say hello. They’re watching a thriller. I hang up. I notice that the northbound train hasn’t yet moved. I look down the tracks and see another train, up ahead, stopped. Stuck due to engine trouble, I think. I pity the northbound commuters.

9:10 No sign of the train that is “right behind”. People start pulling out their cell phones and start rescheduling their day.

9:20 A southbound train pulls in. I get in and seat myself. I hear an announcement that this train will stop at all stations between here and San Jose. I’m surprised. What train is this, I wonder. I hope that the company shuttle is still waiting for me. That the driver would’ve noticed the previous train zip by without stopping and realized that he had to wait some more. I hope their policy is to wait for the train, and not give up within a few minutes or so and depart.

9:30 I arrive at Mountain View station, am glad to see the company shuttle still waiting. Rush to it, get in, greet the driver and settle down, happy that I’ll be at work before 10.

Why did I have to rush about like a headless chicken, when I knew that I had no meeting till 11 ? Habit ? Just the pace of modern life ? My own personality ? As I was doing this mindless jiggle, a part of me was observing me doing it and telling me, rather gently, that I had no reason to act this way. But the part that seemed in control, went about anyway.

A growing chorus of voice say that modern psychology is looking for the problem in the wrong place or in the wrong person. They evince that psychology asks people to learn to cope with the existing system rather than realizing that the existing system is broken and that is the reason so many people need psychological help. It is a continuation of the Western philosophy that elevates the individual and free will above that of the society that the individual is a part of.

The modern world is in a sense, a world gone mad. When the founding fathers of the US spoke of everyone’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, I think they emphasized happiness, not the pursuit. But pursuit is what we’ve decided we’re after, happiness be damned. Why do we indulge in such behavior ? It is as cliche as cliche can be that many on their deathbed say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family”. We watch movies such as the brilliant American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, but never succeed to apply the lessons to our life. The Revolutionary Road is as good a movie about the madness of the American Dream as any I’ve seen. Despite a chance to get out of the humdrum of existence, an existence so boring that it kills all joy, the male protagonist allows himself to be sucked back into the rat race with devastating consequences. As I watched the movie, I recognized that given the right circumstances, I could be that character played so well by Leonardo di Caprio (and Kate Winslet deserved an Oscar for her performance in this movie, not The Reader). Yes, we’ve somewhat out of the rat race today, having opted to work part time, for less money and to stay at home caring for Maya. But still in experiences like the one that started off this entry, I betray the deeply ingrained habit.

As I was sitting in the train, my mind also went back to a book that I had recently read, Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis”. Not highly recommended, but the initial chapter was a riveting description of the madness that is modern life. A man on his way to work on a beautiful summer morning loses his memory. His memory returns a few days later, but his entire body starts to go numb. He is sucked into the medical establishment with its plethora of tests to determine the cause of his numbness. A scene in the waiting room at his doctor’s room, I also consider brilliant. Almost the entire first chapter is available online at Random House’s website.

Why do we do this ? The reasons are probably many and complex. But one factor that I had not considered occurred to me when I ran across an interesting article over at Mind Hacks, another neuroscience blog that I track every now and then. The article talks about a recent experiment concerning the reward circuit in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly associated with pleasure, and with reward. We’re animals seeking rewarding activities. Unlike the popular myth however, researchers are finding that as much dopamine is released on the expectation of a reward as on a real reward. The article described an experiment conducted on people involved in a gambling game. The study found that near misses (you almost hit jackpot) released about as much dopamine as real wins, but the overall experience was awful. In other words, dopamine was released even when the outcome was not pleasurable.

All this is fine, you say. What has this got to do with why we pursue modern life despite knowledge of its ills ? Let me quote directly from the article:

Interestingly, although near-misses were experienced as aversive they increased the desire to play the game but only when the person had some perception of control, by choosing what the ‘lucky’ picture would be.

Of course, like choosing ‘heads or tails’, it’s only an illusion of control because the outcome is random anyway.

But because of reward expectancy the dopamine system is most active when we think we can control the outcome and modify our strategy next time, even if that sense of control is completely false.

In other words, we run the treadmill because we think we can change the outcome. Something special, something unique about us, our situation, our spouses, our children, our work that will change the typical outcome .

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day. – W.H Auden

[ 2 Replies ]

Are Parents Irrelevant ?

Posted on June 2, 2009
by

“Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality ? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no”.

Thus began an article published in 1995 in the eminent psychology journal, Psychological Review. In 1997, the American Psychological Association awarded the author of the article, the George A. Miller Award for “outstanding recent article in psychology”. A book based on the article titled “Nurture Assumption” was declared a NYT Notable Book and went on to become a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Steven Pinker, in a glowing foreword for the book, called her work “truly rare” and said, “I predict that it will come to be seen as a turning point in psychology”.

The iconclastic author was not a distinguished academic or considered an expert in the field. She was a former writer of college psychology textbooks. Many years ago, she had been rejected from pursuing her doctorate in Psychology at Harvard University by George A. Miller, of the very same George A. Miller award. Described as an “elfin, fragile grandmother”, the author’s story of rise from obscurity to fame was itself eye-catching.

I ran across a reference to “Nurture Assumption” via the usual, often visited Frontal Cortex. I was struck by the argument that parents are not particularly important in determining a child’s behavior (and only as an footnote or afterthought is it mentioned that “parents are not important in determining the child’s behavior outside of the home”). Was this just a “cherished cultural myth” as Harris put it ?

Even at a very superficial level, the statement that parents don’t matter rang false. Just take genes. But, I like to think I’m open minded and give every idea some measure of my consideration before discarding it. Of course, being a parent and thinking that this was one of my greatest responsibilities in life made my curiosity more than academic (and may even have biased my opinion). So, I checked out the book from the local library.

Harris writes lucidly and cogently. She wastes no time in getting to the bone of her contention: “‘Heredity and environment’ – that’s what we called them back then. Nowdays, they’re more often referred to as ‘nature and nuture’…. Nature and nurture rule. Nature gives parents a baby; the end result depends on how they nurture it. Good nurturing can make up for many of nature’s mistakes; lack of nurturing can trash nature’s best efforts. …. Nurture is not a neutral word: it carries baggage. … The use of nurture as a synonym for environment is based on the assumption that what influences children’s development, apart from their genes, is the way parents bring them up. I call this the nurture assumption. … My first job is to show that the nurture assumption is nothing more than that: simply an assumption“.

Ahh! I said to myself, she’s already modified her eye-catching start. She’s replaced “parents” with “parenting”. But even the modified hypothesis felt a little too far-fetched. Here I am, struggling to this day with neuroses caused partly, I think, by attitudes instilled in me by my parents. I see my sister struggle with her share of them and Shanthala too. And we’re not the only ones. You read (and hear) about abused kids becoming abusive in their later lives, of the culture of fathers abandoning their responsibility, begetting generations with such behavior. So, is “any parenting” good enough ? Everything I’ve read makes me think that parenting is part biology, part culture. Was she addressing aspects of middle class, white American culture ?

Harris rested her focus on the field of developmental psychology and it’s practitioners whom she terms “socialization researchers”. She writes: “Socialization research is the scientific study of the effects of the environment – in particluar, the effects of the parents’ child-rearing methods or their behavior toward their children – on the children’s psychological development. It is a science because it uses some of the methods of science, but it is not, by and large, an experimental science. … Since socialization researchers do not, as a rule, have any control over the way parents rear their children, they cannot do experiments. Instead, they take advantage of existing variations in parental behavior. … In other words, they do correlational studies.”

She goes on to write a withering criticism of socialization research as a science because correlation is not causation,  because they ignore the effects of genes in arriving at their conclusions. She also, quite validly, talks of the “effects of the effects of genes”. She says, “A child’s timidity causes his mother to reassure him, his sister to make fun of him, and his peers to pick on him. A child’s beauty causes her parents to dote on her and wins her a wide circle of admiring friends.” In other words, parents are more patient with happy children than grumpy children, parents tend to show off their cute, smiling bundle than sensitive, crying infants. Did the child smile more because the parents were patient with her or the other way around ?

Harris postulated that compared to parenting, genes and “peer groups” are more predictable factors for how children turn out. In the modern nuclear family, with overspent and overworked parents, the effect of peer groups on the ever increasing number of latchkey kids seems quite logical. I wondered how this theory held up in other cultures. In small tribal groups where the shared values of the group are much higher than in modern urban neighborhoods, the effect of peers and parents is probably identical. The same can be said of traditional societies like the one I grew up in, where people from a common caste share a ritual and tend to spend time together. In such a system, even at school, kids tend to mix with others “like them”, are encouraged to do so by their parents and elders.

The history of parenting in America makes for interesting reading. Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America” is an excellent, well-written and detailed guide on this subject. In the Introduction, she writes: “Raising children has rated very near to sex – and to success – as an American fixation, especially since the start of the twentieth century and particularly among the middle class. ‘In no other country,’, one historian noted in the 1950s, ‘has there been so pervasive a cultural anxiety about rearing of children.’” Among the books I browsed soon after Maya was born, I recall one of the authors commenting on how strange it is, this modern tradition of women going to hospitals to give birth, armed with books rather than with mothers and grandmothers. My speculation is that this is not unusual for a country based entirely on immigrants. In many cases, the immigrants landed without their elders or relatives, without the benefit and wisdom of their prior experience in raising kids. Subsequent generations moved away from their parents in search of opportunity. Homesteaders faced the task of raising kids almost alone. The industrial revolution had ushered in a new belief in technology and in white coated scientists dispensing wisdom in subjects that fixed assembly lines, diseases and parenting. So, coupled with the isolation from the parenting wisdom of prior generations, turning to the experts for guidance on parenting became commonplace.

Ann Hulbert writes that national conferences on parenting peppered the past century, with support coming, in many cases, from no less an authority than the White House, conferences such as the National Congress of Mothers in 1899, Conference on Modern Parenthood in 1925, Midcentury White House Conference on Youth and Children in 1950, White House Conference on Families in 1980 and White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in 1997. The goal was to find the scientific underpinning of parenting and use them to guide a new generation of parents. Ann Hulbert writes: “At the successive meetings, each marking a new generation of parents and of expertise, the verdicts grew more mixed and alarmed: scientific lore was spreading, yet hand in hand with rising expectations of parents’ and children’s performance went rising apprehensions of failure as the American family, everyone agreed, fought for survival in a society rapidly encroaching on its hallowed terrain. … As the new millenium approached, ‘raising a scientifically correct child’, … risked becoming a ‘neurotic national pastime’.” Books such as Parenting Inc. document the continuing neuroses.

Much of American psychology was dominated by behaviorism and empiricism, ideas based on the assumption that we’re born blank slates, that who we become is largely (if not solely) based on environment (or nurture as the word became more commonly used). Proponents of this school such as James Broadus Watson famously proclaimed that given a dozen children and complete control of raising them, he could turn them out to be whoever he wanted them to be: engineer, doctor, beggar-man, thief. These experts decried mothers against kissing and cuddling their babies, warning them that this would result in adults ill-suited to the demands of an impersonal, urban, modern world. Ironically, a few years later, some of these very same experts then charged that autism was caused by “frigid”, emotionally aloof mothers. What a mess! Behaviorism is in severe decline, but by no means completely dead. In many fields such as socialization research, it apparently plods on. People continue to believe that their bad parenting is a principal cause in their children turning out to be bad.

The pendulum on personality is swinging on the momentum of nature today. Newspapers and blogs proclaim on a regular basis how a gene has been found that is considered responsible for some behavior such as alcoholism and even novelty-seeking behavior. People who emphasize genetics more than environment are called psychological nativists. Steven Pinker is a prominent nativist.

Parenting has largely been the domain of women with men acting as interested bystanders and more concerned with “bread winning”. The swinging pendulum of parenting advice struck mothers squarely in the face, barely registering a glancing blow on the fathers. The experts speaking from the “scientific” podium only heightened the guilt the women felt, making parenting seem an onerous burden. With the rise of feminism, the women began to fight back. In the process, they sometimes threw the baby out with the bath water, rejecting attachment theory, aspects of evolutionary parenting traits, the benefits of breast milk etc. as proclamations of a male dominated world designed to enshackle women in permanent slavery.

Judith Rich Harris stepped into this climate to relieve parents of their burden by pointing out that many of these so-called sciences, had really no basis in science, were more about correlations than causes, using statistical mumbo-jumbo to reach inconclusive conclusions, ignoring many critical factors such as genes and interaction with peers. However, in the true style of an American, she went entirely in the opposite direction and proclaimed that parents hardly matter in the final psychological development of a child and that peers were “everything”, a theory which she admits doesn’t have much evidence either. Ann Hulbert writes that Harris’ theory conformed to the Western faith in personal responsibility and in an unbroken continuity between past and present.

Recently, the simple nature vs nurture debate has been taking a beating. For a fascinating insight into this debate, two wonderfully erudite and readable guides are Matt Ridley’s “Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human” and Robert Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv: And other essays on our lives as animals”. In one particularly brilliant chapter, “The Madness of Causes”, about the search for the causes of mental disorders such as schizophrenia and manic-depression, he seesaws back and forth between genetic and environmental causes, showing how impossible it is to separate the effects of genes and environment. The first section of Sapolsky’s book is similarly illuminating, and with much more humor. Sapolsky says that we must use the term “gene/environment” to refer to their combined effect. He writes: “Genes don’t cause behaviors. Sometimes, they influence them. … What that means is that the effects of a gene on an organism will usually vary with changes in the environment, and the effects of the environment will vary with changes in the genetic makeup of the organism.“

Returning to Harris, does she think parents are completely insignificant ? In a chapter titled “What Parents Can Do”, Harris writes: “.. it wouldn’t be fair – and it wouldn’t be accurate – to leave you with the impression that parents are wallpaper”. She talks of treating kids well because that’s what you do to sustain a good relationship. She ends the chapter with: “Don’t worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. … Relax. How they turn out is not a reflection of the care you have given them.”

Many years ago, when we first began to try conceiving, a friend advised me that “children are not like algorithms. You cannot expect predictable output based on specific input”. A common joke goes “Before I had kids, I had three theories on parenting. Now, I have three kids and no theories”. Given the modern world and its demands, the nuclear family and its consequences, parenting is hard. Why should I spend time with Maya when I can be busy at work, seeking the next promotion, the next patent, the next accolade ? I’ll certainly be more acknowledged for that rather than caring for Maya (a friend pointed out that even Buddha abandoned his responsibility as a parent). Why should I bother spending time with Maya instead of setting her in front of a TV and writing this entry at 6 PM instead of 2 AM ? Because I hope that in the process, I can teach her something about valuing people more than objects, about how I valued her and my time with her. I can only hope that all this will lead to us being close twenty, thirty years from now, that she can cherish this relationship and use it as a guide for her future relationships. Beyond doing our best and hoping, what more can we do ?

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.” – Kahlil Gibran

Leave a Reply ?

(P)raising Kids

Posted on April 21, 2009
by
My sister sent me a link to a recent article published in New York Magazine, “How Not to Talk to Your Kids”. The article is based on the work of a Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, about the effect of praising your kids. She found that if kids were praised for their effort, they were willing to take up much harder challenges than if they were praised for being smart or somehow naturally talented. In other words, praising them for what they did rather than what they were thought to be, resulted in happier kids, kids willing to raise up to a challenge.

Why did this happen ? According to Carol Dweck, “When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”

The article further states: “Scholars from Reed College and Stanford reviewed over 150 praise studies. Their meta-analysis determined that praised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

Carol Dweck has written a book about her work, “Mindset“, and even has a website devoted to the subject. Dividing the world into two camps (ever since Descartes, it seems that the West is forever carving up the world into two camps): those with a “fixed mindset” and those with a “growth mindset”. From the website:

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Coincidentally, I was talking with a friend of mine who mentioned that he had heard about a research on the radio in which they found that kids who were praised for being smart were found to lie more often to not disabuse the belief that they were smart.

Not picking up harder challenges to avoid the cognitive dissonance that arises should they fail at accomplishing the task, lying to calm the cognitive dissonance already awakened, all because they were praised for being smart. For a long time, I was haunted by the passages in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that described the brilliance of one of the main protagonists, Francisco D’Anconia. How I longed to be that brilliant. To effortlessly master a task. Here I was, bumbling my way through life.

Growing up, I learnt quite quickly that getting into my parents’ good books was easy if I topped the class. Everytime I stood first in the class, smiles were aplenty from my mom and my dad. If I came in second, I was grilled about what I did wrong, who had beaten me, to study their weaknesses and beat them the next time around. While they did say “Don’t worry, study harder and come first the next time, you’re smart”, it was quite evident that what mattered was coming first. In the Indian school system with monthly tests, quarterly and annual exams, there were lots of opportunities either win their affection or lose it.

Unconsciously, I equated being loved to being the first in whatever I did, beating everybody else. Inadvertently, my parents had pushed me into the comparison game, a game at which satisfaction was always transitory. It was like attempting to overtake vehicles on a highway; there was always somebody else ahead to overtake. It was exhausting.

In my attempt to top the class, I took to rote memorization of the subject. Sometimes, if I was very tense, I’d mix up the question and answer at first and had to work extra hard to undo the mistake and still finish the exam on time. To this day, I can expound on evolution, neuroscience and network protocols, but my basic physics is practically nil as is my basic chemistry and math. I memorized the rules without ever understanding them enough to know when to apply them in everyday life. It is a constant source of amusement to Shanthala who says that I got into college without ever passing through school.

This attempt to top the class also made me very competitive and jealous of anybody who could beat me at the game. It was in Davangere that I first learnt that there are other ways of learning, of being. When I topped the class the first time, Shanthala and another friend congratulated me enthusiastically. Surprised at what seemed like genuine praise, I asked them, “Are you not even a little jealous that I beat you to it ?”. Dumbfounded, they said no. I couldn’t believe my ears.

With the growing years, this urge to compete at everything, the urge to win every argument, to have the last word, made me a fairly abrasive individual. How I made the good friends that I have, I’ll never know.

I was never happy with where I was. Happiness and peace were always ahead of me, never with me. One day, a few years back, I was biking to work. A kid was biking ahead of me. He turned and saw me, and decided to peddle hard to stay ahead. Automatically, I picked up my pace and raced past the kid, who looked sad as I effortlessly passed him. A little later, I was horrified at what I had done.

I was talking to a close friend at work, many years my senior, about my competitive reflex. He told me a story that happened when he was new in the industry, and working at one of US’ premier research labs in computer science. His boss had just been listed by the Time magazine as one of the top 25 innovators in the country. The week after that article had come out, they were in a meeting with one of the gods of computer science, of distributed computing. My friend, Michael, told me how his boss, a publicly acknowledged paragon of brightness and innovation, stammered and fumbled through the meeting because he wanted this established figurehead to think that he was smart.

I was the same. I realized that if I didn’t give up this quest to top everybody and everything, I’d die unhappy, unsatisfied, malcontent. Since that day, I’ve worked to enjoy what I do, to focus on the process and not the end result.

I had resolved very early on that in raising Maya, I would never focus on the end result, only on the process. The research by Carol Dweck indicates that praising for what you do as opposed to what qualities you possess is another parenting mistake to avoid.

[ 1 Reply ]