Were younger kids capable of understanding all that?
Froh began to design a new study, working with a K–12 parochial school, where he could test a gratitude intervention on kids from grades 3, 8, and 12, to look for the effects of age.
That Froh had chosen a parochial school was an interesting choice. The school’s religious teachings on sacrifice could have already given its students an increased awareness of gratitude. Froh knew that these kids were already regularly taught to count their blessings in the context of prayer.
To give them something new, Froh didn’t ask these children to list five things every day. Instead, they were to pick one person in their lives—someone they’d never fully expressed their appreciation for—and write them a letter of thanks. They worked on this letter in class, three times a week, for two weeks, elaborating on their feelings and polishing their prose. On the final Friday, they were to set up a time with that person and read the letter to them, out loud, face-to-face.
Their letters were heartbreaking and sincere, demonstrating a depth of thoughtfulness not seen in the previous study. “It was a hyperemotional exercise for them,” Froh said. “Really, it was such an intense experience. Every time I reread those letters, I choke up.”
But when Froh analyzed the data, again he ran into the same problem—overall, the kids hadn’t benefited from the intervention. What was going on?
To solve it, Froh had to extract himself from another assumption.
He’d assumed that positive emotions, like gratitude, are inherently protective—they ward off problem behavior and prevent troubled moods. He wasn’t alone in this assumption; in fact, it is the core premise of every scholar working in the field of positive psychology.
Because of this, Froh had expected to find an inverse relationship between gratitude and negative emotions, such as distress, shame, nervousness, hostility, and fear. Meaning, even if he couldn’t change the amount of kids’ gratitude the way Emmons had, Froh still expected that some kids would feel a lot of gratitude, and others less or none at all. And he figured that kids who felt very grateful and appreciative would be spared from the brunt of troubled moods. It should protect them. But the data from his multiple studies didn’t support this. Kids high in gratitude suffered storms of emotion just as commonly as the kids low in gratitude.
At that point, Froh’s thinking was sparked by a few scholars who were rethinking the hedonic treadmill.
“They argued that happiness is not a unitary construct,” Froh explained. “You can feel good and have well-being, but still be nervous, still be stressed. You can feel better overall, but the daily stressors haven’t necessarily gone away. For a scholar, this means that when you measure for positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction, they won’t all move in the same direction.”
Froh looked very carefully at each band of data measuring the kids’ emotions during the second study. Overall, writing the thank-you letters had little benefit, just like his prior study. But this aggregation masked what was really going on. It turned out that some kids were benefiting from the exercise, while others weren’t. Together, their scores canceled each other out.
Those who benefited from the exercise were kids low in positive affect—kids who rarely experienced emotions like excitement, hope, strength, interest, and inspiration. Writing the thank-you letter, and presenting it to a parent, coach, or friend, did indeed fill them with gratitude and make them feel better about their lives. “Those are the kids who would really benefit from gratitude exercises,” said Froh. “The children who usually appear unengaged, or not very alert. They’re rarely cheerful or content.”
However—and this is the important twist—for those kids who normally experienced a lot of hope and excitement, Froh’s exercise had the opposite outcome. It made them feel less happy, hopeful, and grateful.
Why was the gratitude exercise making them feel worse? What could possibly be bad about gratitude?
Well, for kids with a strong need for autonomy and independence, it might be demoralizing to recognize how much they are dependent upon grownups. They might already feel like adults are pulling all the strings in their lives—controlling what they eat, what they study, what they’re allowed to wear, and who they hang out with. And they’d rather feel self-reliant than beholden. Their sense of independence might be an illusion, but it’s a necessary illusion for their psychological balance and future growth into genuine independence. Their lack of gratitude might be the way they maintain the illusion that they are in control of their own lives.
Froh is considering that his intervention led those children to realize just how much of their lives depended on someone else’s whim or sacrifice. They didn’t feel happy that people were always there doing things for them. Instead, it made them feel powerless.
The lesson of Jeffrey Froh’s work is not that society should simply give up on teaching children about gratitude. Certainly, some children do benefit from the exercises. (In fact, Froh remains so committed to the idea that one of his grad students recently began pilot-testing a five-week gratitude school curriculum.) However, for most kids, gratitude is not easily manufactured, and we can’t take it for granted that gratitude should supersede other psychological needs just because we want it to.
The real value in Froh’s story, however, isn’t limited to his insight on gratitude. We’re including it here because we think that his entire process is also illustrative of a much larger point.
When we looked back at all the enormity of research that this book was built on, an interesting pattern was apparent. Most of the noteworthy insights into child development were revealed when scholars dropped the same two assumptions as Froh had.
Or, to restate that with more emphasis: a treasure trove of wisdom about children is there for the grasping after one lets go of those two common assumptions.
The first assumption is that things work in children in the same way that they work in adults. To put a name to this reference bias, let’s call it the Fallacy of Similar Effect.
In chapter after chapter of this book, great insights were gained when scholars set that assumption aside. Consider the research into sleep. It was, for a long time, all too convenient to assume kids are affected by sleep loss the same way as adults—it’s tiring but manageable. But when scholars decided to test that, they found that the magnitude of effect on kids was exponentially damaging.
In the same way, we presumed that because measured intelligence is stable in adults, it’s also stable in young children. It’s not—it plateaus and spurts. And because adults can pick up the implicit message of multiculturally diverse environments, we assumed kids can, too. They can’t—they need to hear explicit statements about how wrong it is to judge people for their skin color.
Here’s yet another example of this fallacy in operation. In our chapter about Tools of the Mind, we described how pretend play is the way young kids master symbolic representation, which soon becomes necessary for all academic coursework. But this crucial point never comes up when society debates the purpose of kids’ free time, or the necessity of school recess. Instead, the arguments are always about exercise and social skills. That’s because for adults, playtime is a chance to blow off steam and relax with friends. While those are certainly relevant to children too, our adult frame of reference has caused us to overlook a crucial purpose of play.
The Fallacy of Similar Effect also helps explain why society got it wrong on praising children. In a variety of studies, praise has been shown to be effective on adults in workplaces. Grownups like being praised. While praise can undermine a child’s intrinsic motivation, it doesn’t have this affect on adults. It has the opposite effect: being praised by managers increases an adult’s intrinsic motivation, especially in white-collar professional settings. (Only in a few circumstances, such as some blue-collar union workplaces, is praise interpreted as untrustworthy and manipulative.) It’s because we like praise so much that we intuited lavishing it upon kids wo
uld be beneficial.
The second assumption to drop, as illustrated in Froh’s story, is that positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative behavior in children. To name this bias, let’s call it the Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy.
The tendency to categorize things as either good for children or bad for children pervades our society. We tend to think that good behavior, positive emotions, and good outcomes are a package deal: together, the good things will protect a child from all the bad behaviors and negative emotions, such as stealing, feeling bored or distressed, excluding others, early sexual activity, and succumbing to peer pressure.
When Ashley and I first began this book, we wrote out a wish list of Supertraits we wanted for kids—gratitude, honesty, empathy, fairness. If we could sufficiently arm children with Supertraits such as these, we hoped that problems would bounce off them just as easily as bullets bounced off Superman.
Then Victoria Talwar taught that us that a child’s dishonesty was a sign of intelligence and social savvy. Nancy Darling explained how teens’ deception was almost a necessary part of developing one’s adolescent identity. Laurie Kramer’s research showed us how blind devotion to fairness can derail sibling relationships. Patricia Hawley and Antonius Cillessen revealed how empathy may be evil’s best tool: the popular kids are the ones who are the best at reading their friends—and using that perception for their gain. And of course, there was that study about imprisoned felons having higher emotional intelligence than the population as a whole.
It isn’t as if we’ve now abandoned our desire for children to acquire honesty and other virtues. (And we’re still telling kids to “play nice” and say thank you.) But we no longer think of them as Supertraits—moral Kevlar.
The researchers are concluding that the good stuff and the bad stuff are not opposite ends of a single spectrum. Instead, they are each their own spectrum. They are what’s termed orthogonal—mutually independent.
Because of this, kids can seem to be walking contradictions. A child can run high in positive emotions and high in negative emotions—so the fact that a teen can be happy about a new boyfriend won’t negate her stress over school. There can be wild disconnects between children’s stated opinions and their actions. Kids can know that fruit tastes good and that it’s good for them—but that doesn’t mean kids will eat any more apples.
And many factors in their lives—such as sibling interactions, peer pressure, marital conflict, or even gratitude—can be both a good influence and a bad influence.
Despite these contradictions, the goal of having a deeper understanding of children is not futile. In fact, it’s by studying these apparent contradictions very closely that deeper understanding emerges.
It’s when children are at their most mysterious that we, their caretakers, can learn something new.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank Adam Moss and Hugo Lindgren at New York Magazine for encouraging us to “geek out” in our stories, trusting that readers would be turned on, not turned off, by the depth of science we covered. Many others at New York also deserve credit—especially Lauren Starke, Serena Torrey, and our former editor, Adam Fisher.
At our publisher, Twelve, special thanks go to Jon Karp, Jamie Raab, and Cary Goldstein. Peter Ginsberg, at Curtis Brown Ltd., played a huge role in guiding us. We are also indebted to Nathan Bransford, Shirley Stewart, and Dave Barbor.
Of course, we’re enormously grateful to many scholars and others who were instrumental in helping us with our research. Our praise chapter—the catalyst for our first piece for New York on the science of kids—would not have been possible without the cooperation of Stanford University’s Carol S. Dweck. Our chapter on “Why Kids Lie” just wouldn’t have been the same without the cooperation of McGill University’s Victoria Talwar and her entire lab—especially Cindy M. Arruda, Simone Muir, and Sarah-Jane Renaud. Similarly, our language chapter is particularly indebted to Michael H. Goldstein and Jennifer A. Schwade of Cornell University and the rest of the B.A.B.Y. Lab. Deborah J. Leong, Elena Bodrova, and Amy Hornbeck showed us Tools of the Mind in action. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Laurie Kramer and Mary Lynn Fletcher spent snowy days driving us around, while explaining their work on sibling relationships. We are also indebted to the many families who spoke with us and allowed us to observe their children’s participation in lab experiments.
Dozens of researchers kindly agreed to be interviewed. Countless others sent advanced drafts of papers and presentations. We hounded scholars at conferences. We made pests of ourselves with endless rounds of e-mails and so sorry to call again but if you could clarify that number just one more time…. Despite all that, they were uniformly gracious.
Thanks to Brown University’s Mary A. Carskadon, Judith Owens, and Monique K. LeBourgeois; Douglas K. Detterman at Case Western Reserve University; and, also at Cornell University, B.J. Casey, Marianella Casasola, Gary W. Evans, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Heidi R. Waterfall; Columbia University’s Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Geraldine Downey; at Duke University, Kenneth A. Dodge, Jennifer E. Lansford, and James Moody; Florida State University’s Roy F. Baumeister and Stephen I. Pfeiffer; David S. Crystal, Georgetown University; Harvard University’s Mahzarin R. Banaji, Kurt W. Fischer, and Jesse Snedeker; Linda B. Smith, Indiana University; Douglas A. Gentile of Iowa State University; Cynthia L. Scheibe of Ithaca College; Kent State University’s A. Margaret Pevec and Rhonda A. Richardson; Robert D. Laird, Louisiana State University; Kay Bussey, Macquarie University; Dan Ariely at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Judith S. Brook and Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda of New York University; Northwestern University’s Frederick W. Turek; Oberlin College’s Nancy Darling; Christopher Daddis and Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan of Ohio State University; Jeane Coperhaven-Johnson of Ohio State University at Mansfield; Marjorie Taylor, University of Oregon; Duane F. Alwin, Clancy Blair, Linda L. Caldwell, Pamela M. Cole, and Douglas M. Teti of Pennsylvania State University; Shawn Whiteman at Purdue University; Rutgers University’s W. Steven Barnett; Jean M. Twenge, San Diego State University; Jamie M. Ostrov, State University of New York, University at Buffalo; Tabitha R. Holmes at State University of New York, New Paltz; Avi Sadeh at Tel Aviv University; Texas A&M University’s Cecil R. Reynolds; Birgitte Vittrup, Texas Women’s University; Laurence Steinberg at Tufts University; Noel A. Card and Stephen T. Russell of the University of Arizona; University of British Columbia’s Adele Diamond; Silvia A. Bunge, Elliot Turiel, and Matthew P. Walker of University of California, Berkeley; Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Haier, University of California, Irvine; Abigail A. Baird, Adriana Galvan, Michael Prelip, and Gary Orfield at the University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bella M. DePaulo; Claire Hughes, University of Cambridge; Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago; Antonius H. N. Cillessen, University of Connecticut; David F. Lohman and Larissa K. Samuelson at the University of Iowa; University of Kansas’ Patricia H. Hawley and Dale Walker; Frederick W. Danner of the University of Kentucky; Rochelle S. Newman and Nan Bernstein Ratner at the University of Maryland; Linda R. Tropp, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Ronald D. Chervin, Jennifer Crocker, Denise Kennedy, and Louise M. O’Brien of the University of Michigan; Kyla L. Wahlstrom at University of Minnesota; Alan L. Sillars, University of Montana; E. Mark Cummings at the University of Notre Dame; April Harris-Britt and Jane D. Brown of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; David F. Dinges of University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh’s Ronald E. Dahl; Judith G. Smetana, University of Rochester; at the University of Texas, Austin, Rebecca S. Bigler, Elizabeth A. Vandewater, and Mark Warr; Joseph P. Allen at the University of Virginia; Steven Strand, University of Warwick; Andrew N. Meltzoff at the University of Washington; C. Robert Cloninger of Washington University in St. Louis; and Peter Salovey of Yale University.
We’d also like to express our appreciation to: Deborah Linchesky at the American Academy of Pediatrics; Stephen C. Farrell of Choate-Rosemary Hall; Bria
n O’Reilly of the College Board; Donald A. Rock at Educational Testing Service; Anna Hogrebe at Elsevier B.V.; Lawrence G. Weiss of Harcourt Weiss / Pearson; Lauri Kirsch of Hillsborough County Public Schools; Lisa Smith and Stacy Oryshchyn of Jefferson County Public School District, Denver, Colorado; Gigi Ryner and Jackie Gleason of Stony Creek Preschool in Littleton, Colorado; Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center’s Mark W. Mahowald; Thomas D. Snyder, National Center for Education Statistics; Jay N. Giedd and Marc Bornstein at the National Institutes of Health; Lisa Sorich Blackwell, New Visions for Public Schools; Richard L. Atkinson, Obetech LLC; Sally Millaway and Kathleen Thomsen of Neptune, New Jersey schools; Erin Ax at Effective Educational Practices; Judy Erickson, Sage Publications; the entire staff of the Society for Research in Child Development; Jessica Jensen and Debbie Burke of Van Arsdale Elementary School, Arvada, Colorado; and Bethany H. Carland of Wiley-Blackwell. Additionally, thanks to Joan Lawton, the staff and members of the Magic Castle in Hollywood, California, and Rose M. Kreider at the United States Census Bureau.
NOTES
Preface
Cary Grant as doorman: A number of Magic Castle members recall Cary Grant acting as the doorman, either having been there during Grant’s tenure or having heard it from other members at the time. Outside the club membership, the story has become more elaborate over the years; some versions even claim that Grant occasionally donned a doorman costume when at its entrance. Our account is based on Joan Lawton’s recollection of the events, which she kindly relayed to us in interviews. (And no, Lawton doesn’t recall him ever wearing a costume. He was usually in a suit, sometimes a tuxedo.)
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