How to Be Human

by Ruby Wax

  I know I haven’t mentioned teenagers up until this point. How to deal with them requires writing another book dedicated completely to the topic. I may do that in the future but, in the meantime, let me tell you that most of their abuse to you is nothing personal, it’s because, inside their bodies, the equivalent of Hurricane Katrina, the San Francisco Earthquake, Pompeii, the Yangtze River flood and the Evado del Ruiz volcano eruption is happening. This is the time in their lives where their biology is shifting like tectonic plates, moving them from childhood to adolescence. Even though they now have bigger protrusions, they still partly have the brain of a baby, but they don’t want to be treated like a baby and this is why everything you do is an irritant, from the way you breathe to your very existence. Boys usually cut off from their parents by distancing themselves i.e. locking themselves in their room; girls usually go into combat mode and let you know how irritating and passé you are. If you wait a few years and you survive, I promise they will love you again.

  If you tell them, ‘No,’ don’t add on long explanations, because they are geniuses at manipulating you with every ploy on earth. Here are some of the more common comebacks for when you say, ‘No,’ to something as simple as, ‘No, I don’t want you to stay out until four in the morning’ to your fourteen-year-old:

  You hate me and want to ruin my life.

  You can’t tell me what to do.

  You never let me do anything, you’re such a bitch.

  You’re just jealous cause you’re a loser.

  Asking you, ‘Why?’ over two thousand times an hour.

  Everyone else’s parents let them do/have/smoke it.

  Some rules:

  Don’t just say, ‘No.’ Always present a simple case for why you said it, to show you’ve thought it out and, whatever you do, don’t elaborate.

  If you get into the cycle of reasons for your ‘No’, your child’s retaliation will be endless, leaving you drained. You’ll be like an old, dead, dried corn husk and will eventually change the ‘No’ to ‘Okay, whatever you want.’

  If they find out they can wear you down, that there’s a teeny chink in the armour, they will gnaw away at you until you’re swallowed.

  If their argument is reasonable, you can change your mind to show them that you do listen and are at least partially human.

  Choose your battles. Too many ‘No’s may drive them away, shut them down or they’ll do things behind your back. Decide which are the absolute ‘No’s and when you can throw them a ‘Yes’ bone.

  If the argument gets too heated, stop and wait to respond when you’re feeling calmer. Even if they’ve gone too far and insulted you, wait until you’ve cooled down to discuss why it will never be acceptable to abuse you.

  If you do lose it, you lose it; it’s not going to harm them if they see your anger when you’re really angry. If you’ve gone too far in expressing it, wait until you’ve simmered down and then, without expecting a reply, say, ‘Sorry.’

  The Monk, the Neuroscientist and Me

  Ruby: Does a neuroscientist bring up a kid differently from the rest of the world?

  Neuroscientist: We have a tendency to do experiments on our own children – it’s a captive audience. For example, there’s a technique that developmental neuroscientists use with an electronic pacifier. By recording how often the baby is sucking, you can tell whether they are paying attention to what you’re showing them. When they’re alert and interested, they suck more, and it shows us about their early cognition.

  Ruby: You’re like Dr Frankenstein. And if they don’t pay attention, do they get an electric shock? Is that how you train them to be smarter, rather than just be a baby? You might electrocute them but at least they’ll go to a good university.

  Neuroscientist: I wanted to do those kinds of experiments with my son, Kirin. It was the first time I had unlimited access to a baby. My wife didn’t really go for it. But we did try the things that lots of scientists try with their kids. We bought the big black-and-white mobiles for the crib, for example, because the early visual cortex can be patterned by high-contrast shapes.

  Ruby: Did it help?

  Neuroscientist: I don’t know. I shoved a lot of black-and-white shapes in his face when he was little.

  Ruby: Yeah, I got my kids mobiles, too. I don’t think they became geniuses, as far as I know.

  Neuroscientist: Were your mobiles black and white?

  Ruby: No.

  Neuroscientist: Exactly.

  Ruby: But why would that make him smart?

  Neuroscientist: There’s stuff that you do as a neuroscientist because you know something about the brain and you think you can intentionally improve brain function. I feel that about my own brain, but even more so about my son’s because it’s literally growing in front of my eyes. We have all these theories about what should work and what shouldn’t work. I mean, none of it really pans out.

  Ruby: Do you sometimes feel like you’re growing his brain in a lab?

  Neuroscientist: Definitely.

  Ruby: So, how are you growing your son’s brain?

  Neuroscientist: Well, my wife stopped me doing a lot of the stranger things. She says we should love him, care for him and talk to him.

  Ruby: What a crazy thing to do.

  Neuroscientist: It’s crazy, I know.

  Ruby: If she had let you loose, what else would you have done to your son?

  Neuroscientist: Oh, there would have been a lot more experiments.

  Ruby: Like what?

  Neuroscientist: Well, I’m very interested in the relationship between finger counting and numbers. I wonder what would have happened if I had bandaged up one of Kirin’s hands so he could only count on the one hand? Would it change his mental number line? Would it help or hurt his acquisition of numbers? That sort of thing.

  Ruby: And what would that have done?

  Neuroscientist: I don’t know. I think it would have been interesting.

  Ruby: What else?

  Neuroscientist: There’s a great experiment where you have Bert and Ernie puppets.

  Ruby: Who are Bert and Ernie?

  Neuroscientist: They’re the gay couple from Sesame Street.

  Ruby: They’re puppets, I hope?

  Neuroscientist: Yeah, they’re not openly gay. So, you’ve got multiple Berts and multiple Ernies. And then you’ve got a little stage. The curtain closes, you put a Bert and an Ernie behind the curtains on the stage. Curtain opens, there’s Bert and Ernie and they’re talking to each other. Curtain closes, then opens again. Now, instead of Bert and Ernie, there are two Berts or two Ernies, so a Bert has become an Ernie, or vice versa. Then you measure how many times the child sucks on the electronic pacifier.

  Ruby: What does this show? This is so frightening.

  Neuroscientist: It shows whether babies are most sensitive to changes in colour, identity or number. So, instead of having a Bert change to an Ernie, you could have a Bert and two Ernies.

  Ruby: And they would suck on the electric thing?

  Neuroscientist: As they become habituated to Bert and Ernie, they suck less. So, if the sucking rate goes up after the change, it means the baby noticed the change.

  Ruby: And does this teach them to be smarter?

  Neuroscientist: Well, no, but it’s interesting.

  Ruby: For you?

  Neuroscientist: Yeah, I guess it’s just interesting for me.

  Ruby: Great. Give me some other tips on childrearing.

  Neuroscientist: I tried to teach him Latin.

  Ruby: You did?

  Neuroscientist: Yes, early. Around age three.

  Monk: I’m phoning Child-line.

  Neuroscientist: No! I just tried to teach him some Latin.

  Monk: How did you do that? With flash cards?

  Neuroscientist: I just started naming things in Latin. I would make him use Latin names for things. It didn’t last long.

  Monk: What else did you do?

  Neuroscientist: You know that age when
kids start to name body parts, like ‘Knee!’ ‘Elbow!’ I taught him the medical names for body parts. He knows where his scapula is and that he’s got a uvula and that when he swallows a bite of food it’s a bolus. Oh, and I taught him some quantum physics when he was five. Hours of quantum physics.

  Monk: That’s just insane, but tell us more.

  Neuroscientist: It started out innocently enough. Someone gave us a book of chemical elements or something and it had the periodic table in the front cover. I love the periodic table, I think it’s a beautiful and amazing thing. So, I started taking him through it, and I said, ‘Look, this is copper, this is what it looks and feels like. This is sodium. It’s also a metal but it looks and feels really different.’ And at first he was excited about elements, he would go around the house and he’d say, ‘Oh, this is glass. It’s made of glass.’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, now let’s talk about the atomic structure of glass. Why do silica compounds behave in such interesting ways?’ That led us into electron shells and why subatomic energy is quantum.

  Ruby: How old was he?

  Neuroscientist: Four or five. I don’t know if he remembers all that.

  Monk: Right.

  Ruby: But just explain to me what would be your hope when you cram his brain? He knows Latin. He knows quantum physics. He knows the reason for the universe. And now, imagine you’re dying, what was it that you wanted him to have in life?

  Neuroscientist: It’s not that I think he needs to have any of this information to succeed in life, I just want to take advantage of the fact that he’s very young and his brain is like a sponge at that age. Babies start out with trillions of connections between their neurons, more than they will ever have in their lives. This is the best time for them to learn a language, a musical instrument, or anything. I want to give him everything I can in that window.

  Ruby: So, what’s your deadline? You want to stuff it in by what age?

  Neuroscientist: Five or six. After that, of course, kids can still learn lots but it just takes more effort.

  Ruby: Right. And then, were you hands off?

  Neuroscientist: I’ve been a little bit more hands off since then, but that’s probably because of my wife’s intervention. She just wants him to be happy and to be able to do nothing sometimes so she stopped leaving me alone with him so much.

  Monk: That was a good move. She probably has a child psychologist on speed dial.

  Ruby: How old is he now?

  Neuroscientist: He’s eight.

  Ruby: What does your wife want for him?

  Neuroscientist: She wants him to be well adjusted. It’s not in the Indian tradition to go for well adjusted.

  Monk: We’ve just all got to be doctors.

  Neuroscientist: Well, not everybody has to be a doctor, but everybody should go to medical school.

  Ruby: Wow. Would him being well adjusted be upsetting for you?

  Neuroscientist: I mean, I can see the value in well adjusted, it’s just not what I’m bringing to the parenting.

  Ruby: There must be a point where they go, ‘I hate my parents.’

  Neuroscientist: I hope that won’t happen!

  Ruby: What if he didn’t have the kind of brain that could learn that stuff? They’re going to hate you if you try to enforce that information. My daughter would have sued me at age two.

  Monk: They want to play on the Xbox and you’re teaching them classical Greek.

  Neuroscientist: It’s a risk. But I also think you’ve got to be the parent you can be. The parent that I can be is someone who likes Latin and physics. That’s just the parent that I am. I can’t really be the parent that goes to the bouncy castle and wants to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar all the time.

  Monk: But you’d do that for a friend. What if I said, ‘Ash, I really want to go and play on a bouncy castle.’ Would you come with me?

  Neuroscientist: I would once. We would hang out less after that.

  Ruby: Really? So, you’d take Thubten to a bouncy castle, but only once?

  Neuroscientist: I would once.

  Monk: But not again.

  Neuroscientist: Not again. But Thubten on a bouncy castle would be a marvellous thing to behold. The saffron robes flowing up in the air, the smiling face, the gleaming bald head …

  Ruby: I’d pay to see that. I wonder how much stress is too much when you’re raising a kid?

  Monk: I think the main thing is to make sure we’re not passing our stress on to our kids. But the trick is also knowing when to push, in the right way.

  Neuroscientist: That’s the hardest thing to work out. It works well when you push and then let up. Like when I’m working on a difficult problem with lab data, I immerse myself in that problem and work hard. But, at some point I have a shower or go for a walk and, many times, the answer just pops into my head. I call it a shower epiphany. It happens when the stress levels drop, then the solution pops into your head fully formed. But it won’t pop into your head if you don’t do the hard work first.

  Ruby: I agree with you. If you don’t push in the beginning, you won’t ever become proficient at anything. In the beginning, when you learn something, it’s always agony and, later, it’s smooth sailing. I wept when my piano teacher put the lid down on my fingers when I screwed up Für Elise. Eventually, I loved playing piano, even though my fingers were broken. But I don’t always know when to back off and take a shower. Sometimes, I never do. How can I teach my kids if I don’t know when to back off myself?

  Monk: I think the more you get to know your own mind and learn how to regulate your stress, the more you can do the same for your kids. If you’re pushing them because you’re afraid they’ll fail, they won’t learn anything. It can’t be about you. You have to tune into the individual child’s innate talents and nurture those. There’s no sense pushing what they have absolutely no interest in. My father used to whack me to learn maths, and now I go blank when faced with numbers.

  Ruby: Are you kidding?

  Monk: No. I got whacked quite a bit. It was a heavy time.

  Ruby: Was he happy when you became a monk?

  Monk: Actually, he was also a monk for a short while before he met my mother. When he first saw me as a monk he was so proud of me that he lay prostrate in front of me on the floor. It happened at Heathrow Airport. It was quite a moment.

  Ruby: Did you ever forgive your father?

  Monk: What changed it for me was when I found out about his childhood. He was brought up by a very austere mother. One day when he was young, he came home from school really excited because he had spent all day carving a wooden spoon for her. He handed it to his mother and she stared at him and said, ‘You encumber the earth.’ It helped me understand him better and understand his pain. We’re friends now. He’s a really interesting guy.

  Ruby: Thubten, how would you raise a kid?

  Monk: Well, I think I’d get them to talk about how they feel and I would try to be non-judgemental. And, like I said, I’d try not to dump my emotions on them.

  Ruby: So, let’s say I was angry and I said, ‘I want to bite my doll’s head off and stuff it down Lumpi’s throat’ (he’s my dog). You’d go, ‘Okay, let’s talk about that?’

  Monk: Not right away, but in a calmer moment later I’d say, with kindness, ‘Why would you want to do that? What were you feeling?’ You can have intelligent conversations with children about how they feel, trying to stay curious instead of blaming, and not patronizing them.

  Ruby: Thubten, you should have a child. The world would be a better place.

  Monk: I really can’t do that, but thanks for the thought.

  You’ll find the relevant mindfulness exercises for bringing up kids in Chapter 11.

  9

  Addiction

  Many of us feel we’re on the brink of a new Ice Age, an economic plummet or just biding our time before the North Koreans twitch their trigger finger. All this may happen (hopefully, not until after my book is published), but the main threat to our longevity is our
addictions. We know how to deal with limited resources; we don’t with unlimited resources. In the old days, if we were hungry for a snack, we could just grab a banana even though there was a limited amount but, now, in this click-of-a-finger society, we can get immediate gratification. One click and you can order in porn, food, clothes, cars, jewellery, a husband … and I haven’t even got to the Dark Net yet. We did not inherit handbrakes for when too much is too much. Up until now, in the West, you could never earn too much but, now, with the newly minted billionaires, it’s unfathomable to imagine how they deal with their lives when they can have anything in unlimited amounts. Show me a healthy billionaire who’s having a whale of a time and I’ll eat my socks.

  Novelty

  What kept us progressing throughout our evolution was a quest for novelty. This is what motivated us to invent the next ‘big thing’, from spears to missiles. Studies of DNA show that Neanderthals carried a gene called DRD4-7R forty thousand years ago. That gene is associated with risk-taking and sensation-seeking – always seeking, but rarely satisfied. A similar gene exists in 10 per cent of the current population, and this 10 per cent are more likely to be addicts, if not the greatest daredevils (see extreme sports addicts). I’m not saying we can throw caution to the wind, stay addicted to our substance of choice and blame it on our Neanderthal genes but, if we’re aware of our propensity towards addiction, we stand more of a chance of being able to do something about it.

  In ancient Greece, the word ‘addiction’ meant ‘those not entitled to rights’, in other words, slaves. In a way, that’s a pretty good description, because when you’re addicted you have no freedom, you’re always enslaved to your drug of choice. I’m somehow sure that no one gets addicted to brushing their teeth, but I’m probably wrong.

  Digital Hits

  In the past, chemists created dangerously addictive substances; today, entrepreneurs get us addicted to devices. They get rich by finding some new way to tickle our sweet spot to keep us hooked. They know they need to keep the hits coming to ensure no one ever gets bored; the consumer always needs higher doses. These digital-media honchos don’t accidentally trip on to the ‘next big thing’, they run thousands of tests to learn exactly what gives the user the biggest buzz and how long to hold back before giving them the next one to get the level of craving just right. The toys are engineered to be irresistible to all who touch them. Their creators research what stokes you up to the max, using specific background colours, audio sounds, animations and music.