Young Sociopaths Next Door, Part 2

So, I was telling you about the pre-pubescent sociopaths next door, BUT.  There is more.

"Mom," A. Peevie said, "Curly (formely known as A.Boy) took C.Peevie's game and M.Peevie's game, and he won't give them back."

I am starting to get tired of conversations that begin with, "Curly took..." or "Curly did..." or "Curly said..."

"How do you know Curly took them, A. Peevie?" I asked.

I just know, he insisted, so I suggested that he tell C. Peevie and M. Peevie to go to Curly and ask for the games back.  Less than an hour later, he was back.

"Mom," A. Peevie said, his eyebrows crawling toward each other other below a line of worry on his forehead, "Curly gave the games back." 

"Well, that's good, right?" I said.

"Not exactly," he said. "He said he found them in the grass.  He lied, Mom. He stole them, and then he lied about finding them in the grass."  The heartbreak of betrayal and disillusionment spread across A. Peevie's face.  Again.

"Wait just a cotton-pickin' minute," I said.  "He said he found BOTH games outside in the grass?"  That was enough to trigger my inner closer, and I headed over to confront the little miscreant.  He was standing on his porch next to his mother.

"Curly," I said, trying not to sound like a Guantanamo interrogator, "A. Peevie told me that we were missing two DS games, and that you found them in the grass.  Is that right?"

"Uh huh," he agreed, looking away.

"Curly, look at my eyes," I said, "C. Peevie's game was missing, and you found it in the grass.  M. Peevie's game was missing and you found it in the grass.  You're telling me you found two game boy games in the grass?"

He looked into my eyes briefly, but couldn't hold his gaze there. "Yeah," he said, unconvincingly.

"Where did you find them?" I asked him, figuring that the more lies he had to tell, the easier it would be to trip him up.

It didn't work.  "I found one over there by the street, but in the grass," he said, still not making eye contact, and pointing to the curb, "and the other one here, by the garden."

"Hmmm," I said.  I looked at him.  He glanced at me, and looked away.  "Curly, are you sure you didn't borrow the games without asking, and then you said you found them in the grass because you wanted to give them back?"

"No," he said.  "I didn't borrow them."

"OK," I said.  I was out of gas, and my career as an interrogator was going down the toilet.  But then his mom saved me.

"What do you say, Curly?" she asked him.  I was a little taken aback.  Why did she ask that question?  But Curly fell into her inadvertent trap.

"Sorry," he said softly, looking at his shoes.

"What are you sorry for, Curly?" I said, my new career back on track.  "Are you sorry that you borrowed the games without asking?  If you tell me the truth, I won't be angry with you."  Well, ironically, that last bit was sort of a lie.

"Yes," he admitted.  Then we had a little conversation about not "borrowing" things without asking, and about if you do something wrong, you just make it worse if you lie about it.  The fact that Curly could barely make eye contact during the whole conversation is a good sign, I think.  Perhaps he is not (yet) a sociopath.  But his mom better start taking this stuff seriously, or he is going to end up in jail whether he is a sociopath or not.

The most disturbing thing about this whole situation is that Mom was sitting there the whole time, and even at the end, she never said anything to me about her son stealing our stuff and then lying about it; and as far as I know, she never gave him any consequences for his antisocial behaviors.

And now I wonder if C. Peevie's mysteriously missing $80 baseball glove is upstairs in Curly's room.

The Faulty Science of Self-Esteem

All praise is not equal, but some praise is more equal than other praise.

This is the conclusion of recent research on the effect of praise on students in New York schools. The article How Not to Talk to Your Kids (New York Magazine, Feb.11, 2007) deconstructs the faulty science of self-esteem and offers practical, evidence-based suggestions for how parents can encourage and support their kids without inadvertently sabotaging their confidence or causing them to become risk-averse.  Parenting Science also deals with the topic of how to praise your kids. This unique website provides evidence-based parenting and child development information--complete with citations from scientific and medical literature.

"Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting," suggested Po Bronson in the New York Magazine article.  "We put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments."  Or we praise more in order to ease our own separation anxiety over relinquishing their care for all or part of the day.

The guy who exponentially kick-started the whole "praise your kids until they think they're one notch below Jesus" philosophy of parenting--which I have, until recently, uncritically embraced--was Nathaniel Branden with his seminal work, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (1969).  This is what started the whole ridiculousness of giving a trophy to every child who signs up for soccer, among other ill-advised self-esteem-building maneuvers.

So we all started hemorrhaging praise-talk to our kids:  "Oh, you drew such a pretty picture!" and "Oh! you're so smart!" and "My! what a huge booger you pulled out of your nose!"--and now, apparently, we've gone and done it.  We've screwed them up in new and improved ways:  for example, the article suggests that some students turn to cheating because they haven't developed a strategy for handling failure.  I don't necessarily buy this argument, though:  cheating has been around way longer than the psychology of self-esteem.

I do buy, however, the argument that excessive and inappropriate praise could rewire a child's brain to become risk-averse, and to give up rather than trying harder.  The article suggests that students "who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort."  One study demonstrated that those who were taught that the brain is a muscle showed improved study habits and math grades.  Persistence, it turns out, is "more than a conscious act of will; it's also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain." The brain can be taught, or rewired, through intermittent reinforcement, to choose persistence.

The culture of praise-parenting persists in spite of the research, one researcher said, because "When [parents] praise their kids, it's not that far from praising themselves." Hmmm. And ouch. I feel the sting of truth in that statement.

So what's a parent to do?  Stop praising and start ridiculing?  Heh.  No, silly.  Praise is still good--but it should meet certain criteria in order to avoid the Praise Pitfalls.  Praise should

• be specific
• be sincere
• be about things the child can control--like effort rather than ability.  "Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control [the researcher] explains. "They come to see themselves as in control of their success"
• be less about accomplishments that come easily to them, and more about perseverance and hard work
• not involve a comparison with other kids.

Now I have to go undo all the damage I've done by telling my kids that they are smart enough to cure cancer, athletic enough to win MVP in the big leagues, and creative enough to invent the Next Big Technology Thing.

Book Review: Notes on a Scandal

I received Notes on a Scandal as a white elephant gift for Christmas. Turns out, it was the opposite of a useless white elephant (a black mouse?)--it's a beautifully written psychological case study. I loved it because it's not really about what it is ostensibly about--a forty-ish woman having an illicit affair with an under-age student; rather, it narrates the sometimes subtle, always disturbing socio-pathology of a controlling, narcissistic, messiah-complected personality.

It's brilliant.

What's amazing to me is that someone read this book and saw movie potential in it. I haven't seen the movie, but the story is so acutely internal--there are literally NO explosions!--that I cannot even fathom how a movie translation would do it justice. (I hear it does, though.)

Barbara Covett (her name, and the names of other major characters, represent intentional literary allusions) is the intensely observant, randomly opinionated, pedantic first-person narrator who nurtures a scary, subversive friendship with a younger woman. Whether or not Barbara is a repressed lesbian is totally beside the point. She becomes obsessed with her younger colleague, the alluring Bathsheba Hart, who joins the faculty at a small private English school as a pottery instructor.

With cool certainty, Barbara describes their inevitable friendship as "spiritual recognition," and she waits patiently for what she anticipates will be an "uncommon intimacy." She observes precise and intimate details of Sheba's body, mannerisms, and relationships; she becomes jealous when Sheba develops a close friendship with another woman.

Zoe Heller develops her protagonist with a subtlety that makes you know, without realizing why you know it, that Barbara is creepily malevolent to Shakespearean proportions. For example, Barbara describes Sheba's friend Sue Hodge as

the sort of woman who wears Lady-Lite panty liners every day of the month, as if there is nothing her body secretes that she doesn't think vile enough to be captured in cotton wool, wrapped in paper bags, and thrust far, far down at the bottom of the wastepaper bin. (I've been in the staff toilet after her and I know.)

Self-deception and self-righteousness cloud Barbara's narrative about her friend's illicit entanglement as she manipulates every fact and every rumor to strengthen the ties of her predatory friendship with Sheba. But Heller develops Barbara's character through her relationships with other characters as well, and through Barbara's own subtle self-revelations. "According to my notes," Barbara writes, "Sheba had no further contact with Connolly after the disastrous H.C. encounter until a couple of weeks into spring term."

According to her notes? Creepy!

Barbara never misses an opportunity for a caustic observation, and her sociopathology ultimately costs her any chance for true intimacy. Early in the book, in two abstruse and easily overlooked paragraphs, Barbara describes a close friendship that had ended abruptly and mysteriously. It's such a subtle hint at a history of social and personal dysfunction that every time the friend's name comes up later in Barbara's Notes about her new friend's troubles, many readers won't connect the dots of pathology unless they re-read the forgotten episode on page 36.

This book is the fictional version of The Sociopath Next Door: it's both brilliant and disturbing. One review quoted on the back cover suggested that the perfection of Heller's voicing of Barbara's subtly malevolent sociopathology was literary ventriloquism. It makes me wonder how Heller acquired such penetrating insight into Machiavellian psychology. Hmmmmm?

It's a Boy Thing. No, Wait. It's a Girl Thing, Too.

M. Peevie and I walked around the neighborhood on July 3, looking for the best places to see local (illegal) fireworks displays. As we were walking toward an alley that seemed to be the source of promising booms and flashes, we caught up with another mom and kid, seeking the same thrills.

We found a safe spot to watch the rockets' red glare, and M. Peevie immediately started talking to the little boy, who appeared to be nine or ten years old. "Do you like Pokemon cards?" she asked him. "My brother likes Pokemon cards, and he gives me some of his cards."

Neighbor-mom--let's call her Rhonda--said, "Oh, yes, Matthew loves Pokemon cards. It's a boy thing."

M. Peevie continued, without taking a breath or waiting for an answer from Matthew. "Do you like baseball cards? A. Peevie like baseball cards, too. He collects them. He has about a thousand. He even has a Babe Ruth card."

The boy may have tried to get a word in edgewise, but between M. Peevie's chatter and the frequent explosions, he really didn't stand a chance.

"She's a chatterbox," I told the mom. "She'll talk his ear off."

"Oh, that's what girls do," the mom said. "Boys don't talk as much."

Mmmmmkay, I thought. She's never met C. Peevie, obviously. Then, a few minutes later, the boy/girl comparison came up again. The boy was getting too close to the action for the mom's comfort level. "Matthew, come back here," she cautioned him, and then she turned to me. "Boys!" she said, noticing that M. Peevie had stayed back in the safe zone. "They're just so careless."

While we watched the backyard pyrotechs ignite Roman candles and aerial repeaters, Rhonda and I talked about schools, neighborhoods and parenting. Four or five more times she made references to boy/girl differences: "Oh, that's because he's a boy," she'd say; or "It's a girl thing."

It's strange to me that Rhonda assumed that so much of what happens around her, so much of what other people do, is directly tied to their gender. I wondered if she felt that way about adults, too, or if it was just children's actions that could be boxed up and labeled so neatly. It made me feel a little sad on behalf of her children, who are probably being short-changed by their mom's unconscious labeling.

It also bothered me in a sociological kind of way. If it's not just Rhonda, but it's a pervasive way of looking at the world, then I think this kind of thinking is not just inaccurate, but also disturbing and dangerous. If we assume that boys behave a certain way because they're boys, we're saying that they're not really responsible for their behaviors and choices. Same with girls.

If we say boys are good at certain things, and girls are not--or vice versa--we're unnecessarily limiting our expectations for them, and also probably limiting the opportunities and experiences that we expose them to. We won't urge our daughters to excel at math and science, for example; or we will nudge our boys away from nurturing career paths like social work and teaching--when these might actually be where their gifts lie. What an unnecessary waste!

It even bugs me when I purchase a kid meal at a fast-food joint, and the drive-through cashier asks me if I want a toy for a boy or for a girl. I have tried to keep that kind of toy sexism out of our family lexicon--but alas! it has crept in. My boys have very definite opinions about what is acceptable for a boy to play with--and the only way they'd be seen playing with a Barbie is if they were playing a game that involved throwing, mutilating, or dismembering it.

(Toy sexism doesn't go the other way in our household, though. M. Peevie is perfectly happy to play with anything that her brothers enjoy: Pokemon cards, action figures (the male-acceptable version of dolls), Hot Wheels, and tiny green army guys.)

But back to my point: I wonder if there is actual data that supports Rhonda's assumption that boys and girls are so inherently different (or possibly, that they are typically socialized so differently) that you can associate certain behaviors with their gender. Anyone?

I've read a couple of good books about parenting boys that, if I remember correctly, dispute those narrow, gender-based notions. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys by Dan Kindlon, and Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from they Myths of Boyhood by William Pollack. Maybe I'll try to post a review of these books in the next week or so for those of you who are parenting boys and who would like some sociological perspective.

I'm sure there's at least two of you out there.

Finding Happiness

I'm always skeptical about social science research. Or should I say, social "science" research. I'm even more skeptical of news reports about social science research. It seems that editors care more about the catchiness of a lead sentence than about its accuracy. For example, these widely divergent and occasionally misleading lead sentences all introduced articles covering the same topic: a research study published in the March edition of Psychological Science:

"You can't buy happiness, but it looks like you can at least inherit it, British and Australian researchers said on Thursday." (Reuters on Yahoo News.)

"Though most of us spend a lifetime pursuing happiness, new research is showing that that goal may be largely out of our control." (Time Magazine.)

"People tend to be hardwired for happiness, and new genetic research may help explain why." (WebMD Medical News.)

"If you think a new car or the perfect partner is going to make you happy think again, as new research says this is only possible with the help of your genes." (ABC News Australia.)

And somewhat shockingly, "The right genetic mix might lead to a lifetime of happiness, a new British study suggests." (The National Institutes of Health, Medline Plus.) It does?

I don't have access to the full published report, but I assume these reporters did. It's interesting, isn't it, how they all have a slightly--or in some cases, widely--different take on what the researchers actually concluded? Depending on your preferred news source, you might develop unrealistic expectations about a "lifetime of happiness," or you might decide to drink the special Kool-Aid.

The researchers concluded that half the differences in happiness levels among pairs of identical and fraternal twins were genetic. This conclusion, from what I can tell, arises from the fact that fraternal twins were only half as similar as identical twins in "personality and well-being," according to the Reuters article; and the researcher suggests that this difference "strongly implicates genes."

Researchers say, first of all, that personality traits like "being sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious" are genetically determined. They've also concluded from studies of identical twins that these traits have a causal effect on happiness; ergo, happiness is at least partially genetically determined.

The reports all mention that happiness seems to be inversely related to anxiety or worry. Well, duh. What will they reveal next--the shocking connection between happiness and gratitude? Oh, wait--they already confirmed this: "Count your blessings" in order to be happier, researcher Timothy Bates advised.

Interestingly, findings suggested that circumstances did not alter the happiness curve. Income, marital status, education--even devastating life events like the death of a spouse or the loss of a limb--didn't have long-term effects on happiness levels. Rich people and married people are not necessarily happier than poor people or single people.

I'm still trying to figure out what this research means to you and me. What's the big "so what"? Are you doomed to a lifetime of glumness if you're not naturally outgoing and conscientious? Can you learn optimism? Can you cultivate calmness?

Just to indulge the tiny preacher inside me, I'll leave you with two counter-intuitive passages from the Bible about finding happiness, one from the Old Testament, and one from the New:

Blessed [happy] is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night.(Psalm 1:1-2)

Blessed [happy] are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:3-10)