NurtureShock_ New Thinking About Children Part 8

Ostrov cross-referenced what his observers recorded with teacher ratings of the children's behavior, the parents' own ratings, and their reports on how much television the children were watching. Over the course of the study, the children watched an average of eleven hours of media per week, according to the parents-a normal mix of television shows and DVDs.

At first glance, the scholars' hypotheses were confirmed-but something unexpected was also revealed in the data. The more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were. The more educational media the children watched, the more relationally aggressive they were. They were increasingly bossy, controlling, and manipulative. This wasn't a small effect. It was stronger than the connection between violent media and physical aggression. They were increasingly bossy, controlling, and manipulative. This wasn't a small effect. It was stronger than the connection between violent media and physical aggression.

Curious why this could be, Ostrov's team sat down and watched several programs on PBS, Nickelodeon, and the Disney Channel. Ostrov saw that, in some shows, relational aggression is modeled at a fairly high rate. Ostrov theorized that many educational shows spend most of the half-hour establis.h.i.+ng a conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving that conflict.

"Preschoolers have a difficult time being able to connect information at the end of the show to what happened earlier," Ostrov wrote in his paper. "It is likely that young children do not attend to the overall 'lesson' in the manner an older child or adult can, but instead learn from each of the behaviors shown."

The results took the entire team by surprise. Ostrov doesn't yet have children, but his colleagues who did immediately started changing their kids' viewing patterns.

Ostrov decided to replicate the study at four diverse preschools in Buffalo, New York. (Ostrov is now a professor at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.) "Given the fact that [the result] was so novel and so surprising, we really wanted to find out that the findings would generalize-that we weren't just finding something with this one set of kids," said Ostrov.

After the first year in Buffalo, Ostrov ran the numbers. The children in Buffalo watched a ratio of about two parts educational media to one part violent media, on average. More exposure to violent media did increase the rate of physical aggression shown at school-however, it did so only modestly. In fact, watching educational television also also increased the rate of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV. And just like in the Minnesota study, educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they'd be to their cla.s.smates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression. increased the rate of physical aggression, almost as much as watching violent TV. And just like in the Minnesota study, educational television had a dramatic effect on relational aggression. The more the kids watched, the crueler they'd be to their cla.s.smates. This correlation was 2.5 times higher than the correlation between violent media and physical aggression.

Essentially, Ostrov had just found that Arthur Arthur is more dangerous for children than is more dangerous for children than Power Rangers. Power Rangers.

Data from a team at Ithaca College confirms Ostrov's a.s.sessment: there is a stunning amount of relational and verbal aggression in kids' television.

Under the supervision of professor Dr. Cynthia Scheibe, Ithaca undergrads patiently studied 470 half-hour television programs commonly watched by children, recording every time a character insulted someone, called someone a mean name, or put someone down.

Scheibe's a.n.a.lysis subsequently revealed that 96% of all children's programming includes verbal insults and put-downs, averaging 7.7 put-downs per half-hour episode. Programs specifically considered "prosocial" weren't much better-66.7% of them still contained insults. Had the insult lines been said in real life, they would have been breathtaking in their cruelty. ("How do you sleep at night knowing you're a complete failure?" from SpongeBob SquarePants SpongeBob SquarePants.) We can imagine educational television might use an initial insult to then teach a lesson about how insults are hurtful, but that never was the case, Schiebe found. Of the 2,628 put-downs the team identified, in only 50 instances was the insulter reprimanded or corrected-and not once in an educational show. Fully 84% of the time, there was either only laughter or no response at all.

The work of Ostrov and Schiebe are but two, of many recent studies, that question old a.s.sumptions about the causes and nature of children's aggression.

The wild kingdom of childhood can be mystifying at times. Modern involved parenting should seem to result in a sea of well-mannered, nonaggressive kids. As soon as an infant shows some indication of cognitive understanding, his parents start teaching him about sharing, kindness, and compa.s.sion. In theory, fighting and taunting and cruelty should all have gone the way of kids playing with plastic bags and licking lead paint, mere memories of an unenlightened time. Yet we read reports that bullying is rampant, and every parent hears stories about the agonies of the schoolyard. Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies rings as true today as when William Golding first penned it. rings as true today as when William Golding first penned it.

Why is modern parenting failing in its mission to create a more civilized progeny? Earlier in this book, we discussed how the praised child becomes willing to cheat, and how children's experiments with lying can go unchecked, and how racial bias can resurface even in progressively-minded integrated schools. Now we turn the spotlight on children's aggressiveness-a catchall term used by the social scientists that includes everything from pus.h.i.+ng in the sandbox to physical intimidation in middle school to social outcasting in high school.

The easy explanation has always been to blame aggression on a bad home environment. There's an odd comfort in this paradigm-as long as your home is a "good" home, aggression won't be a problem. Yet aggression is simply too prevalent for this explanation to suffice. It would imply a unique twist on the Lake Wobegon Effect-that almost every parent is below below average. average.

Aggressive behavior has traditionally been considered an indicator of psychological maladaptation. It was seen as inherently aberrant, deviant, and (in children) a warning sign of future problems. Commonly cited causes of aggression were conflict in the home, corporal punishment, violent television, and peer rejection at school. While no scholar is about to take those a.s.sertions back, the leading edge of research suggests it's not as simple as we thought, and many of our "solutions" are actually backfiring.

Everyone's heard that it damages children to be witness to their parents' fighting, especially the kind of venomous screaming matches that escalate into worse. But what about plain old everyday conflict? Over the last decade, that question has been the specialty of the University of Notre Dame's Dr. E. Mark c.u.mmings.

c.u.mmings realized every every child sees parents and caregivers carping at each other over such ba.n.a.lities as who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, pay the bills, or whose turn it is to drive the carpool. In studies where c.u.mmings has parents make a note of every argument, no matter how small or large, the typical married couple was having about eight disputes each day, according to the moms. (According to the dads, it was slightly less.) Spouses express anger to each other two or three times as often as they show a moment of affection to each other. And while parents might aspire to s.h.i.+elding their kids from their arguing, the truth is that children are witness to it 45% of the time. child sees parents and caregivers carping at each other over such ba.n.a.lities as who forgot to pick up the dry cleaning, pay the bills, or whose turn it is to drive the carpool. In studies where c.u.mmings has parents make a note of every argument, no matter how small or large, the typical married couple was having about eight disputes each day, according to the moms. (According to the dads, it was slightly less.) Spouses express anger to each other two or three times as often as they show a moment of affection to each other. And while parents might aspire to s.h.i.+elding their kids from their arguing, the truth is that children are witness to it 45% of the time.

Children appear to be highly attuned to the quality of their parents' relations.h.i.+p-c.u.mmings has described children as "emotional Geiger-counters." In one study, c.u.mmings found that children's emotional well-being and security are more affected by the relations.h.i.+p between the parents than by the direct relations.h.i.+p between the parent and child.

So are parents distressing their children with every bicker? Not necessarily.

In c.u.mmings' elaborate experiments, he stages arguments for children to witness and monitors how they react, sometimes taking saliva samples to measure their stress hormone, cortisol. In some cases, two actors go at it. In others, the mother too is a confederate. While waiting with the child, the mother gets a phone call, ostensibly from the "father," and she begins arguing with him over the phone. (Her lines are mostly scripted.) In other variations of this experiment, the child just watches a videotape of two adults arguing, and she is asked to imagine the on-screen characters are her parents.

In one study, a third of the children reacted aggressively after witnessing the staged conflict-they shouted, got angry, or punched a pillow. But in that same study, something else happened, which eliminated the aggressive reaction in all but 4% of the children. What was this magical thing? Letting the child witness not just the argument, but the resolution of the argument. When the videotape was stopped mid-argument, it had a very negative effect. But if the child was allowed to see the contention get worked out, it calmed him. "We varied the intensity of the arguments, and that didn't matter," recalled c.u.mmings. "The arguments can become pretty intense, and yet if it's resolved, kids are okay with it." Most kids were just as happy at the conclusion of the session as they were when witnessing a friendly interaction between parents.

What this means is that parents who pause mid-argument to take it upstairs-to spare the children-might be making the situation far worse, especially if they forget to tell their kids, "Hey, we worked it out." c.u.mmings has also found that when couples have arguments entirely away from the kids, the kids might not have seen any of it but are still well aware of it, despite not knowing any specifics.

c.u.mmings recently has shown that being exposed to constructive marital conflict can actually be good for children-if it doesn't escalate, insults are avoided, and the dispute is resolved with affection. This improves their sense of security, over time, and increases their prosocial behavior at school as rated by teachers. c.u.mmings noted, "Resolution has to be sincere, not manipulated for their benefit-or they'll see through it." Kids learn a lesson in conflict resolution: the argument gives them an example of how to compromise and reconcile-a lesson lost for the child spared witnessing an argument.

This is obviously a very fine line to walk, but it's not as thin as the line being walked by Dr. Kenneth Dodge, a professor at Duke University. Another giant in the field, Dodge has long been interested in how corporal punishment incites children to become aggressive.

At least 90% of American parents use physical punishment on their children at least once in their parenting history. For years, the work of Dodge and others had shown a correlation between the frequency of corporal punishment and the aggressiveness of children. Surely, out-of-control kids get spanked more, but the studies control for baseline behavior. The more a child is spanked, the more aggressive she becomes.

However, those findings were based on studies of predominately Caucasian families. In order to condemn corporal punishment as strongly as the research community wanted to, someone needed to replicate these results in other ethnic populations-particularly African Americans. So Dodge conducted a long-term study of corporal punishment's affect on 453 kids, both black and white, tracking them from kindergarten through eleventh grade.

When Dodge's team presented its findings at a conference, the data did not make people happy. This wasn't because blacks used corporal punishment more than whites. (They did, but not by much.) Rather, Dodge's team had found a reverse correlation in black families-the more a child was spanked, the less aggressive the child over time. The spanked black kid was all around less likely to be in trouble.

Scholars publicly castigated Dodge's team, saying its findings were racist and dangerous to report. Journalists rushed to interview Dodge and the study's lead author, Dr. Jennifer Lansford. A national news reporter asked Dodge if his research meant the key to effective punishment was to hit children more frequently. The reporter may have been facetious in his query, but Dodge and Lansford-both of whom remain adamantly against the use of physical discipline-were so horrified by such questions that they enlisted a team of fourteen scholars to study the use of corporal punishment around the world.

Why would spanking trigger such problems in white children, but cause no problems for black children, even when used a little more frequently? With the help of the subsequent international studies, Dodge has pieced together an explanation for his team's results.

To understand, one has to consider how the parent is acting when giving the spanking, and how those actions label the child. In a culture where spanking is accepted practice, it becomes "the normal thing that goes on in this culture when a kid does something he shouldn't." Even if the parent might spank her child only two or three times in his life, it's treated as ordinary consequences. In the black community Dodge studied, a spank was seen as something that every kid went through.

Conversely, in the white community Dodge studied, physical discipline was a mostly-unspoken taboo. It was saved only for the worst offenses only for the worst offenses. The parent was usually very angry at the child and had lost his or her temper. The implicit message was: "What you have done is so deviant that you deserve a special special punishment, which is spanking." It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society. punishment, which is spanking." It marked the child as someone who has lost his place within traditional society.

It's not just a white-black thing either. A University of Texas study of Conservative Protestants found that one-third of them spanked their kids three or more times a week a week, largely encouraged by Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family. The study found no negative effects from this corporal punishment-precisely because it was conveyed as normal.

Each in its own way, the work of c.u.mmings and Dodge demonstrate the same dynamic: an oversimplified view of aggression leads parents to sometimes make it worse for kids when they're trying to do the right thing. Children key off their parents' reaction more than the argument or physical discipline itself.

If we can accept that children will be exposed to some parental conflict-and it may even be productive-can we say the same thing for interactions with their peers? Is there some level of conflict with peers that kids should learn to handle, on their own, without a parent's help?

Dr. Joseph Allen, a professor and clinician at the University of Virginia, says that many modern parents are trapped in what he calls "The Nurture Paradox."

"To protect kids is a natural parental instinct," Allen explained. "But we end up not teaching them to deal with life's ups and downs. It's a healthy instinct, and fifty years ago parents had the same instinct, just that they had no time and energy to intervene. Today, for various reasons, those constraints aren't stopping us, and we go wild."

At the Berkeley Parents Network, an online community, this struggle is vividly apparent. Parents anguish over whether jumping into the sandbox is appropriate to defend their children from a toy-grabber. Other parents confess that their once-cute child has become socially aggressive, which they find abhorrent and are at a loss to stop. The message board is full of stories of children being teased and ostracized; the responses range from coaching children to be less of a target to advocating martial arts training to reminding children they won't be invited to every birthday party in life. n.o.body has the perfect answer, and it's clear just how torn the parents are.

The Nurture Paradox has moved many parents to demand "zero tolerance" policies in schools, not just for bullying, but for any sort of aggression or hara.s.sment. There is no evidence that bullying is actually on the increase, but the concern about its effects has skyrocketed.

In March 2007, the British House of Commons Education and Skills Committee convened a special inquiry on school bullying. For three days its members called a variety of witnesses, from school princ.i.p.als to academic scholars to support organizations. The testimony ran a full 288 pages when printed. No laws were written, and no systemwide policies were forced on all the schools, but that wasn't really the goal of the inquiry. Rather, the entire exercise was conducted to make one important categorical declaration, meant to guide the national culture: "The idea that bullying is in some way character building and simply part of childhood is wrong and should be challenged." Any sort of name-calling, mocking, gossiping, or exclusion needed to be condemned.

Most scholars have agreed that bullying can have serious effects, and that it absolutely needs to be stopped. However, they've balked on the "zero tolerance" approach.

A task force of the American Psychological a.s.sociation warned that many incidents involve poor judgment, and lapses in judgment are developmentally normative-the result of neurological immaturity. All of which was a fancy way of saying that kids make mistakes because they're still young. They noted that inflicting automatic, severe punishments was causing an erosion of trust in authority figures. As the chair of the task force later explained, "The kids become fearful-not of other kids, but of the rules-because they think they'll break them by accident." During the new era of zero tolerance, levels of anxiety in students at school had gone up, not down. In Indiana, 95% of the suspensions weren't for bullying, per se-they were for "school disruption" and "other." The APA task force warned especially against over-applying zero tolerance to any sort of hara.s.sment.

Yet zero tolerance is becoming ever more common. According to one poll by Public Agenda, 68% of American parents support zero tolerance. From Florida to New York, schools are expanding their lists of what gets zero tolerance treatment to include teasing, cruelty, name-calling, social exclusion, and anything that causes psychological distress. One small Canadian town even pa.s.sed a new law making these behaviors expressly illegal, punishable by fine.

According to the science of peer relations, there's one big problem with lumping all childhood aggression under the rubric of bullying. It's that most of the meanness, cruelty, and torment that goes on at schools isn't inflicted by those we commonly think of as bullies, or "bad" kids. Instead, most of it is meted out by children who are popular, well-liked, and admired.

The connection between popularity, social dominance, meanness and cruelty is hardly a surprise to any teacher-the dynamic is plainly visible at most schools. It's long been an archetype in literature and movies, from Emma Emma to to Heathers Heathers and and Mean Girls. Mean Girls. In some languages, there's a separate word to distinguish the kind of popular teen who diminishes others-in Dutch, for instance, the idiomatic expression In some languages, there's a separate word to distinguish the kind of popular teen who diminishes others-in Dutch, for instance, the idiomatic expression popie-jopie popie-jopie refers to teens who are b.i.t.c.hy, s.l.u.tty, c.o.c.ky, loud, and arrogant. refers to teens who are b.i.t.c.hy, s.l.u.tty, c.o.c.ky, loud, and arrogant.

However, social scientists didn't really get around to studying the connection between popularity and aggression until this decade. That's largely due to the fact that the focus on the archetypal negative results of aggression helped papers get published and research dollars flow: grants were readily available to study the plight of aggressive kids, in the hope the findings might help society prevent aggressive kids from becoming our future prison population. The 1999 Columbine High School ma.s.sacre opened more floodgates for grant dollars, as the government made it a priority to ensure students would never again open fire on their peers.

There was also a tendency, according to Dr. Allen, for social scientists to a.s.sume bad behaviors are uniformly a.s.sociated with bad outcomes; aggression was considered bad behavior, so scientists were really only looking for the negative consequences of it.

Few research grants were available to study the popular kids systematically-chiefly because it was a.s.sumed popular kids are doing fine. Then, a few scholars who had been conducting long-term studies of adolescents reported on a connection between popularity and alcohol use. Lo and behold (not really any surprise), popular kids drink more and do more drugs.

For the first time, scientists were concerned about the kids who were doing well socially-they were at risk of becoming addicts, too! Suddenly, federal grant dollars began to flow into the science of popularity. Soon, the social forces of popularity were linked to aggression as well (especially relational aggression), and, finally, the social scientists caught up to the schoolteachers and screenwriters.

Today, the field of peer relations is in the process of doing an extraordinary backflip-with-twist, as scholars adapt to the new paradigm.

Ostrov's mentor, Dr. Nikki Crick of the University of Minnesota, has contradicted decades of earlier research that claimed girls weren't aggressive. She proved that girls can be just as aggressive as boys-only they're more likely to use relational aggression.

Similarly, Dr. Debra Pepler has shown that at the elementary school age, the "nonaggressive" kids are far from saintly-they still threaten to withdraw their friends.h.i.+p and threaten and push, just not as frequently as the more aggressive kids. So rather than the nonaggressive being the "good" kids, it might just be that they lack the savvy and confidence to a.s.sert themselves as often.

As University of Connecticut professor Dr. Antonius Cillessen explains, it's now recognized that aggressiveness is most often used as a means of a.s.serting dominance to gain control or protect status. Aggression is not simply a breakdown or lapse of social skills. Rather, many acts of aggression require highly attuned social skills to pull off, and even physical aggression is often the mark of a child who is "socially savvy," not socially deviant. Aggressive kids aren't just being insensitive. On the contrary, says Cillessen, the relationally aggressive kid needs to be extremely sensitive. He needs to attack in a subtle and strategic way. He has to be socially intelligent, mastering his social network, so that he knows just the right b.u.t.tons to push to drive his opponent crazy. Aggression comes as "early adolescents are discovering themselves. They're learning about coolness-how to be attractive to other people."

This completely changes the game for parents. When parents attempt to teach their seven-year-old daughter that it's wrong to exclude, spread rumors, or hit, they are literally attempting to take away from the child several useful tools of social dominance. "This behavior is rewarded in peer groups," observed Cillessen, "and you can say as a parent, 'Don't do this,' but the immediate rewards are very powerful." As long as the child is compulsively drawn to having cla.s.s status, the appeal of those tools will undermine the parent's message. Children already know that parents think these behaviors are wrong-they've heard it since they were tots. But they return to these behaviors because of how their peers peers react-rewarding the aggressor with awe, respect, and influence. react-rewarding the aggressor with awe, respect, and influence.

The mystery has been why. Why don't kids shun aggressive peers? Why are so many aggressive kids socially central, and held in high regard?

Two reasons. First, aggressive behavior, like many kinds of rule breaking, is interpreted by other kids as a willingness to defy grownups, which makes the aggressive child seem independent and older-highly coveted traits. The child who always conforms to adults' expectations and follows their rules runs the risk of being seen as a wimp.

The other reason aggressive kids can remain socially powerful is that-just as the less-aggressive kids aren't angels-aggressive kids aren't all devils, either.

"A vast majority of behavioral scientists think of prosocial and antisocial behavior as being at opposite ends of a single dimension," explains University of Kansas professor Patricia Hawley. "To me, that oversimplifies the complexity of human behavior."

In the canon of child development, it's long been taken as gospel that a truly socially-competent child is nonaggressive. Hawley questions that orientation.

Hawley studies kids from preschool up through high school. She looks specifically at how one kid makes another do his bidding-whether it's through kind, prosocial behavior, or antisocial acts-threats, violence, teasing. Contrary to those who expected kids high in prosocial behavior to be low in antisocial acts, and vice versa, she finds that the same kids are responsible for both-the good and the bad. They are simply in the middle of everything, or, in the words of another researcher, "They're just socially busy."

Hawley calls the children who successfully use both prosocial and antisocial tactics to get their way "bistrategic controllers." These kids see that, when used correctly, kindness and cruelty are equally effective tools of power: the trick is achieving just the right balance, and the right timing. Those who master alternating between the two strategies become attractive to other children, rather than repellant, because they bring so much to the party. Not only are they popular, they're well-liked by kids, and by teachers, too (who rate them as being agreeable and well-adjusted).

Hawley's data suggests that at least one in ten children fits the bistrategic description. But inspired by her approach, several other scholars have done similar a.n.a.lyses. Their subsequent findings suggest that the proportion is even higher-around one in six.

Jamie Ostrov has been finding kids with a similarly mixed pattern of prosocial and aggressive behavior in his preschool research. In his television-use study, the children who watched a lot of educational television were far more relationally aggressive, but they were vastly more prosocial to cla.s.smates as well.

"The lesson from these children is that it might not make sense to look at aggression alone," Hawley stated. "Bistrategics can use unsettling levels of aggression without suffering the same consequences of those using only aggression." It's an exhibition of their nascent ambition.

For her part, Hawley's only problem is that her bistrategics are so successful, in school and in life, that she still can't get a grant to follow them long-term.

We began this chapter by asking why modern parenting has failed to result in a generation of kinder, gentler kids. It turns out that many of our enlightened innovations have had unintended consequences.

When we changed the channel from violent television to tamer fare, kids just ended up learning the advanced skills of clique formation, friends.h.i.+p withdrawal, and the art of the insult.

In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.

We thought that aggressiveness was the reaction to peer rejection, so we have painstakingly attempted to eliminate peer rejection from the childhood experience. In its place is elaborately orchestrated peer interaction. We've created the play date phenomenon, while ladening older kids' schedules with after-school activities. We've segregated children by age-building separate playgrounds for the youngest children, and stratifying cla.s.ses and teams. Unwittingly, we've put children into an echo chamber. Today's average middle schooler has a phenomenal 299 peer interactions a day. The average teen spends sixty hours a week surrounded by a peer group (and only sixteen hours a week surrounded by adults). This has created the perfect atmosphere for a different strain of aggression-virus to breed-one fed not by peer rejection, but fed by the need for peer status and social ranking. The more time peers spend together, the stronger this compulsion is to rank high, resulting in the hostility of one-upmans.h.i.+p. All those lessons about sharing and consideration can hardly compete. We wonder why it takes twenty years to teach a child how to conduct himself in polite society-overlooking the fact that we've essentially left our children to socialize themselves.

One more factor that contributes to children's aggression needs to be mentioned.

Dr. Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan did a study of parenting styles, and how they relate to aggressiveness and acting out at school. The fathers in her study fell into three camps-the Progressive Dads, the Traditional Dads, and the Disengaged Dads.

We might expect that the Progressive Dads would smoke their compet.i.tion. No longer inhibited by gender roles, and very involved in child rearing from the moment of birth, Progressive Dads are regularly shown in the research to be an almost universally good phenomenon. Children of these coparenting fathers have better sibling relations.h.i.+ps, feel good about themselves, and do better academically.

And at first, in Schoppe-Sullivan's study, the Progressive Dads far outshone the other two groups. In the lab, they were more engaged with both spouses and kids. At home, they shared responsibility for the children. While the Traditional Dads were involved parents, their involvement was usually at their wives' direction. The Progressive Dads, on the other hand, were adept parents on their own. These dads figured out what the kid should be wearing for school and the rest of the morning routine and then put the child to bed. They played more with the kids, and they were more supportive when they did so. They were just as likely as the moms to stay home from work if the kid was sick.

However, Schoppe-Sullivan was surprised to discover that the Progressive Dads had poorer marital quality and rated their family functioning lower than the fathers in couples who took on traditional roles. Their greater involvement may have lead to increased conflict over parenting practices-which in turn would affect their kids.

At the same time, the Progressive Dad was inconsistent in what forms of discipline he ultimately used: he wasn't as strong at establis.h.i.+ng rules or enforcing them. Extrapolating from earlier research showing that fathers often doubt their ability to effectively discipline a child, Sullivan has hypothesized that the Progressive Dad may know how not not to discipline a child (i.e., hit the kid, scream), but he doesn't know what to do instead. Indeed, the whole idea that he would actually need to discipline a child-that the kid hasn't simply modeled the father's warm, compa.s.sionate ways-may throw him for a loop. Moreover, he finds punis.h.i.+ng his kid acutely embarra.s.sing. Therefore, one day it'd be no dessert; the next day the silent treatment; the third it would be a threat of no allowance if the infraction happened again; the fourth it'd be psychological criticism meant to induce guilt. He's always trying something new, and caving at the wrong time. to discipline a child (i.e., hit the kid, scream), but he doesn't know what to do instead. Indeed, the whole idea that he would actually need to discipline a child-that the kid hasn't simply modeled the father's warm, compa.s.sionate ways-may throw him for a loop. Moreover, he finds punis.h.i.+ng his kid acutely embarra.s.sing. Therefore, one day it'd be no dessert; the next day the silent treatment; the third it would be a threat of no allowance if the infraction happened again; the fourth it'd be psychological criticism meant to induce guilt. He's always trying something new, and caving at the wrong time.

This inconsistency and permissiveness led to a surprising result in Sullivan's study: the children of Progressive Dads were aggressive and acted out in school nearly as much as the kids with fathers who were distant and disengaged.

There's an old word in the Oxford English Dictionary that means "one skilled in the rearing of children." The word is pedotrophist. We sometimes a.s.sume that today's progressive coparents who can set up a portable crib in sixty seconds and can change a diaper one-handed are the contemporary pedotrophists.

But at least in one dimension, the progressive parent appears to come with a natural weakness.

TEN.

Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn'tDespite scientists' admonitions, parents still spend billions every year on gimmicks and videos, hoping to jump-start infants' language skills. What's the right way to accomplish this goal?

In November 2007, a media firestorm erupted.

The preeminent journal Pediatrics Pediatrics published a report out of the University of Was.h.i.+ngton: infants who watched so-called "baby videos" had a quantifiably smaller vocabulary than those who had not watched the videos. With sales of baby videos estimated to be as high as $4.8 billion annually, the industry went on red alert. published a report out of the University of Was.h.i.+ngton: infants who watched so-called "baby videos" had a quantifiably smaller vocabulary than those who had not watched the videos. With sales of baby videos estimated to be as high as $4.8 billion annually, the industry went on red alert.

Robert A. Iger, Chief Executive Officer of Disney-which owns the Baby Einstein brand-took the unusual step of publicly disparaging the scholars' work, describing their findings as "doubtful" and the study methodology as "poorly done." He complained the university statement in support of the study was "reckless" and "totally irresponsible."

Parents, many of whom had these DVDs on their shelves, were similarly disbelieving. One of the big reasons for their skepticism was an inexplicably wacky result within the study. According to the data, almost all other kinds of television and movies infants were exposed to-from Disney's own The Little Mermaid The Little Mermaid to to American Idol American Idol-were fine for kids. It was baby DVDs-and only baby DVDs-to watch out for. Iger described the findings as nothing less than "absurd."

How could these DVDs, beloved by infants around the world, possibly be bad for them?

The report was actually a follow-up to an earlier study the researchers had done to examine if parents used the television as an electronic babysitter. Most academics had a.s.sumed that was true-parents were parking the kids in front of a video while they went to make a phone call or cook dinner-but no one had tried to find out if there was a basis to the hypothesis.

In that study, parents did confirm that some babysitting was going on, but the main reason infants were watching television-especially videos such as those in the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series-was because parents believed the programs would give their children a cognitive advantage.

"We had parents with kids in front of the TV for as many as twenty hours a week 'for their brain development,' " recalled Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, one of the authors of both studies. "Parents told us that they couldn't provide much for their children, and that troubled them, so they had saved up and bought the videos hoping that would make up for everything else. Then they had faithfully strapped their kids into place to watch for four to six hours a week. They said they thought that was the best thing they could do for their babies."

Moved by parents' dramatic efforts to sh.o.r.e up their children's intellectual development, the scholars conducted the second study-in order to quantify the actual impact of such television exposure.

The research team called hundreds of families in Was.h.i.+ngton and Minnesota, asking parents to report the amount of television their children were watching, by each type of program. Then, they had the parents complete what's known as the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. Quite simply, the CDI is a list of 89 common words infants may know, and, if they are old enough, say themselves. The words represent a range of vocabulary sophistication, from "cup" and "push" to "fast" and "radio." The CDI is an internationally accepted measure of early language-translated versions of it are used around the world.

a.n.a.lyzing the data, the scholars found a dose-response relations.h.i.+p, meaning the more the children watched, the worse their vocabulary. If infants watched the shows one hour per day, they knew 6 to 8 fewer of the 89 CDI words than infants who did not watch any baby DVDs. That might not sound like a big deficit, but consider that the average eleven-month-old boy recognizes only 16 of the CDI words in the first place. Understanding 6 fewer of the CDI words would drop him from the 50th percentile to the 35th.

The results couldn't have been further from the statements made in the very first press release from Baby Einstein, in March 1997: Studies show that if these neurons are not used, they may die. Through exposure to phonemes in seven languages, Baby Einstein contributes to increased brain capacity. Studies show that if these neurons are not used, they may die. Through exposure to phonemes in seven languages, Baby Einstein contributes to increased brain capacity.

Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark specifically credited one professor, Dr. Patricia Kuhl, as the inspiration for much of the video's content. In an interview, Aigner-Clark explained, "After reading some of the research by Patricia Kuhl of the University of Was.h.i.+ngton, I decided to make the auditory portion of the video multilingual, with mothers from seven different countries reciting nursery rhymes and counting in their native languages."

Kuhl and other scholars had determined that, at birth, babies are sensitive to any language's phonemes-unique sound combinations that make up a word. (Each language has about 40 phonemes, such as "kuh" or "ch.") Once babies are around six to nine months old, they gradually lose that generalist sensitivity. Their brains become specialized, trained to recognize the phonemes of the language (or languages) they hear most. Kuhl describes this process as becoming "neurally committed" to a language. Commonly-used neural pathways in the brain strengthen, while unused pathways weaken.

Aigner-Clark's hope was that her audio track would train children's brains to recognize phonemes in a wide a.s.sortment of languages-essentially, preventing neural specialization. Hearing these languages early in life would allow them to learn multiple foreign languages later.