“Oooot!!” piped Jenna, picking the piece up from the table.
Glenn started laughing, turned to Ashley and said, “I didn’t think it was going to work quite that fast.”
Ashley hadn’t expected so either. Jenna kept repeating her new word until the baggie was empty. Needless to say, Jenna’s parents were doing twice as much object-labeling and motionese by the time dinner was over. The next day, they used motionese to teach her “sock” and “shoe.” Since then, they’ve increased their responsiveness to Jenna’s babbles, and they’ve seen the difference.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Dr. Noam Chomsky altered the direction of social science with his theory of an innate Universal Grammar. He argued that what children hear and see and are taught, in combination, is just too fractured and pattern-defying to possibly explain how fast kids acquire language. The stream of input couldn’t account for the output coming from kids’ mouths. Chomsky highlighted the fact that young children can do far more than merely repeat sentences they’ve heard; without ever having been taught grammar, they can generate unique novel sentences with near-perfect grammar. Therefore, he deduced that infants must be born with “deep structure,” some underlying sense of syntax and grammar.
By the 1980s, Chomsky was the most quoted living scholar in all of academia, and remained at the top through the millennium.
However, in the intervening decades, each step of language acquisition has been partially decoded and, in turn, dramatically demystified. Rather than language arising from some innate template, each step of language learning seems to be a function of auditory and visual inputs, contingent responses, and intuitive scaffolding, all of which steer the child’s attention to the relevant pattern. Even Chomsky himself has been considering the import of the newly discovered mechanisms of language learning. In 2005, Chomsky and his colleagues wrote, somewhat cryptically: “Once [the faculty of language] is fractionated into component mechanisms (a crucial but difficult process) we enter a realm where specific mechanisms can be empirically interrogated at all levels…. We expect diverse answers as progress is made in this research program.”
This doesn’t rule out the possibility that some portion is still innate, but the portion left inexplicable—and therefore credited to innate grammar—is shrinking fast.
A similar argument can be applied to the notion held by our society that having better or lesser verbal skills and reading skills is a function of innate verbal ability. To a parent, these skills seem innate, because from the moment their daughter could talk, she was precocious—speaking full sentences by two, reading words by three and books by four. But the parent’s unaware of his own influence in those first two years.
“When parents see development in their kids, they are only seeing the output—not the mechanisms underneath,” said Goldstein. “We just see significant changes, so parents tend to say, ‘It must be built in.’ I don’t think people are aware of what they are bringing to babies.”
According to an extensive study comparing identical twins to fraternal twins, headed by University of New Mexico’s Dr. Philip Dale, only 25% of language acquisition is due to genetic factors.
So do kids who get a head start keep their advantage, over time? Does being an early talker really mean the child will be a better reader, in elementary school? Or do other kids quickly catch up, once they hit the language spurt, too?
Scientists tend to say that both are true. The advantage is real, yet many kids do catch up, and show no long-term consequences. Dr. Bruce Tomblin, Director of the Child Language Research Center at the University of Iowa, noted that language measures are highly stable once children are in elementary school, but prior to that age, they’re not stable. “The trajectories of their future results look like spaghetti,” he said. “The only thing typical about typical language development was variability.”
According to Tamis-LeMonda, this is especially true for toddlers who spoke late, but still understood a lot of words early. “Sometimes a kid who seems to catch up wasn’t actually behind in the first place; their receptive vocabulary was proceeding apace, but they weren’t talking much because they were shy or didn’t quite have the motor control yet.”
Harvard University’s Dr. Jesse Snedeker has studied how international adoptees fare in the United States. These children often spend their first year, or years, in orphanages and with foster families, then come to American families that are quite well-off. Some adoptees do have learning difficulties, but “the adoptees who were typically developing… they caught up to their American-born peers within three years,” concluded Snedeker. This was true whether they were adopted at age one or age five—even up to age ten.
Nevertheless, the general trend is apparent: an early advantage in language can be quite meaningful, at least through the first several years of elementary school. Going back to the famous Hart and Risley study from the University of Kansas, Dr. Dale Walker analyzed how those children were doing academically six years later—in third grade, at age nine. The measures taken at age three, of how long kids’ average spoken sentences were, and how big their spoken vocabulary was, strongly predicted third-grade language skills. The correlation was strongest for their spoken language ability, and it was still quite strong for their reading, spelling, and other measures of verbal ability. It didn’t help with math, which wasn’t a surprise; presumably, this head start in language wouldn’t drive all cognitive functions.
It’s important to characterize early language precocity for what it is: a head start, but far from a guarantee. “It’s not like the infancy period is the only critical period,” said Tamis-LeMonda. “New skills are emerging in every period, and vocabulary development has to continually expand.”
Conclusion
The Myth of the Supertrait.
When Ashley and I began this book, we adamantly chose not to focus just on children’s intellectual prowess. Brainy prodigies were not our goal; rather, we were interested in a more complete perspective of children, including the development of their moral compasses, their behavior around peers, their self-control, and their honesty.
We chose this subject at what seemed a fortuitous time. Over the last ten years, a new branch of psychology has emerged. Rather than studying clinical patients with pathologies, these scientists have applied their skills to studying healthy, happy people who thrive, in order to discern what were the habits, values, and neuroscience of those with greater well-being. This new starting-point has led to insights about the strengthening of positive emotions such as resilience, happiness, and gratitude.
In one celebrated example, Dr. Robert Emmons, of the University of California at Davis, asked college students to keep a gratitude journal—over ten weeks, the undergrads listed five things that had happened in the last week which they were thankful for. The results were surprisingly powerful—the students who kept the gratitude journal were 25% happier, were more optimistic about the future, and got sick less often during the controlled trial. They even got more exercise.
Emmons repeated his study, this time with undergrads writing in a gratitude journal every day for two weeks—and he also sent questionnaires about the participants to their close friends, asking them to rate their friend on a variety of measures. He wanted to see if the subjects’ improved sense of well-being was more than just an internal state of mind; did it actually affect how they interacted with others? The answer was a confident yes. Their friends had noticed them being more helpful and emotionally supportive.
Philosophers have long written about the importance of gratitude. Cicero called it the parent of all other virtues. Shakespeare described ingratitude as a marble-hearted fiend, and he decried ingratitude in children as being more hideous than a sea monster. But until Emmons’ research, we couldn’t really say whether gratitude triggered well-being, or whether gratitude was merely the by-product of well-being. Certainly the two rise and fall together, but Emmons showed that gratitude could be enh
anced, independently, and greater well-being would result.
By itself, this wasn’t exactly extraordinary, but in the context of happiness theories, it was significant. Back in 1971, two scholars, Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell, described the human condition as a “hedonic treadmill.” Essentially, we have to keep working hard just to stay in the same relative place in society. Even when our situation improves, the sense of achievement is only temporary, because our hedonistic desires and expectations rise at the same rate as our circumstances. Brickman and Campbell noted that lottery winners are not any happier, long-term, than non-winners, and paraplegics are not less happy than those of us with all our limbs. They argued that this plight was inescapable, due to our neural wiring. Our brains are designed to notice novel stimuli, and tune out everyday, predictable stimuli. What we really notice, and are affected by, are relative and recent changes. As soon as those become static, we return to a baseline level of well-being.
That we are so adaptive can be a good thing. When life falls apart, we’ll soon get used to it—such changes in circumstance don’t have to become incapacitating. But when our lives are blessed, and things are going well, there seems something morally decrepit in how we so easily overlook how good we have it.
In the last forty years, a lot of cracks have been discovered in Brickman and Campbell’s theory of the hedonic treadmill. First, while most people might have a happiness set point, it’s not a flat neutral—it’s actually a fairly positive state. Around the world, 80 percent of people report being quite happy or very happy. Also, while paraplegics and lottery winners might return to their baseline, other classes of people (on average) never quite recover—such as widows, divorcees, and the long-term unemployed.
Emmons’ work was yet another crack in the hedonic treadmill theory. Effectively, he demonstrated that our default wiring can be consciously tricked; by forcing college students to pay attention to the bounty in their everyday lives, he got them to escape the perception-trap of the treadmill.
One of the many scholars inspired by Emmons’ research was Dr. Jeffrey Froh, a psychology professor at Hofstra University on Long Island. Froh also served as the psychologist for the Half Hollow Hills school district, spending a fair amount of time in the local grammar schools and high schools. Froh had been struck by the rampant materialism and sense of entitlement within the affluent Long Island youth culture.
“At the high school, there were BMWs in the parking lot, and E-Class Mercedes,” Froh said. “And they really wanted to look a certain way. They dressed immaculate. They wore two-hundred-dollar jeans, and hundred-dollar T-shirts. They wanted peers to know they didn’t get these on sale, and they weren’t knockoffs. There was also a lot of focus on where they’d been admitted to college—not for the educational value, but for the status and prestige, for the name brand of certain universities.”
He saw in Emmons’ work a possible antidote to all that.
Froh certainly wasn’t alone in that view. Educational institutes, newspaper columnists, and parenting coaches began advocating that children keep gratitude journals. Many schools started incorporating gratitude exercises into their curricula.
Froh, however, thought these efforts warranted scientific testing and real analysis. So with Emmons’ consultation, Froh began the first randomly assigned, controlled trial of gratitude in schoolchildren.
Hoping to help these kids before they turned into materialistic high schoolers, he went into the Candlewood Middle School in Dix Hills, New York, and enlisted the cooperation of the three teachers who taught “Family and Consumer Science” to sixth and seventh graders. All told, eleven classrooms were involved, amounting to 221 students; this included a cross-section of the whole school, with some gifted children and special education children. Four of the classes were given gratitude journals; daily, for two weeks, the students were asked to “think back over the last day and write down on the lines below up to five things in your life that you are grateful for or thankful for.”
This took just a few minutes at the start of each class. Some responses were quite specific (“I am grateful my mom didn’t go crazy when I accidentally broke a patio table”); some hinted at a specific event but didn’t explain it in detail (“My coach helped me out at baseball practice”); far more were all-encompassing (“My grandma is in good health, my family is still together, my family still loves each other, and we have fun every day”). Froh was particularly excited by how few of the kids’ items had anything to do with their possessions. Very little materialism emerged, and even then, it was eccentric, such as the child who was grateful for all the Star Wars books. The gratitude inventories, it seemed, were recalibrating the kids’ focus.
Before, during, and after the two-week period, teachers also passed out and collected questionnaires that measured students’ life satisfaction, gratitude, and emotions. This was repeated three weeks later, to see if the benefits lasted. The teachers were never told the purpose of the study, so they couldn’t bias the results; for the most part, they stuck to scripts Froh had written.
At the same time, three classrooms were assigned as control groups; all these students did were the questionnaires, with no other writing. The last four classes were instructed to complete the questionnaires, and also to complete their own daily writing assignment: the students in these classes listed five hassles that had occurred each day. Froh considered these four classes as a kind of alternative control group, to check for effects of dwelling on the negative.
So what was the impact of counting blessings?
There was none.
The four classes of students who counted their blessings didn’t experience more gratitude than the control group—not during the two-week exercise, immediately after, or three weeks later. The journal writing simply didn’t have the intended effect. At all stages, the three classes in the control group—which did nothing but take the mood questionnaires—experienced the most gratitude of the three groups. As a result, the kids who did the exercise weren’t friendlier or more helpful to their friends. They didn’t have greater all-around life satisfaction.
Strangely, though, these lackluster results didn’t slow down the excitement around Froh’s study. The gratitude journal sounded like exactly the sort of exercise kids should do. Everyone involved wanted it to work and fully expected it to work. With that kind of momentum built up, everyone was predisposed to consider the intervention a success, no matter what the data determined.
The study results were published in a notable journal. Candlewood Middle School itself was so happy with the exercise that the administrators had all the thousand-plus students repeat it.
Newspapers then wrote feature stories about Froh’s study, clearly creating the impression that his study had effectively reproduced the results of Emmons’ studies on college students. In none of the articles was there a single mention about the flimsiness of the results. A year later, when Thanksgiving rolled around again—triggering a new round of coverage—these same claims were repeated.
One explanation for the press accounts could be the distraction created by the data on the alternative control group—the four classes who dwelled on the negative every day. Not surprisingly, those kids looked a little worse, statistically, than the other groups. But there was scant evidence that writing in the gratitude journal improved one’s well-being more than doing nothing. The only thing the study proved was that dwelling on the negative can bum you out.
Why were the results so different from Emmons’ work on college students?
Froh wasn’t sure, and he was troubled. He set the quantitative analysis aside, to go reread the kids’ actual diary entries. Quickly, he realized that a fair number of the middle schoolers suffered gratitude fatigue.
“They wrote the same thing, day after day—‘my dog, my house, my family,’ ” Froh recalled. “In hindsight, it might have been ideal for the teachers to encourage the kids to vary their answers, think harder, and really process it—rather than let
them complete it in a hurry so they could get back to their classwork.”
He realized his next experiment would have to address this.
At first glance, Froh’s study appears to be another classic case where good intentions were mistaken for a good idea. But his story didn’t end there.
For Froh to really figure out what happened, he needed to drop two of his main assumptions.
First, he had to drop his expectation that middle schoolers should react the same way as college students to the gratitude intervention. As long as he held that expectation, he was thinking that something had gone wrong in his study—and that if he could find his error, he could get the intended result.
But maybe nothing had gone wrong. Maybe he’d made no mistakes, and his results were completely accurate. And because he wasn’t thinking broadly enough, he was unable to glean what his results actually proved.
There are eight years of development from middle school to college. Was there something about those intervening years that could explain why the middle-schoolers didn’t benefit from the exercise? As we learned from Nancy Darling’s research on teenagers, the need for autonomy peaks at age 14, and is stronger in a 12-year-old than in a college student (largely because a college student has already established the autonomy she desires). Were the middle-schoolers reacting differently, because of their need for independence?
Or could it be a difference in cognitive capabilities? Digging deeper into gratitude’s effects, Froh learned that children will not experience gratitude unless they recognize three things about the various bounties in their lives: that they are intentional, costly, and beneficial. Children need to comprehend that this nice life of theirs isn’t by accident, it’s the gift of hardworking parents and teachers who make sacrifices for the good of children—who in turn truly benefit from it.
NurtureShock Page 21
