The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Avoidantly attached children tend to have parents who are emotionally withdrawn and psychologically unavailable. They don’t communicate well with their children or establish emotional rapport. Sometimes they will say the right things, but their words are not accompanied by any physical gestures that communicate affection. In response, their children develop an internal working model in which they figure they have to take care of themselves. They learn not to rely on others and preemptively withdraw. In the Strange Situation Tests, they don’t protest (at least on the outside) when their mothers leave the room, even though their heart rate goes up and internally they are all worked up. When left alone, they tend not to cry, but continue with their solitary play and exploration.

  As they get older, these children seem, at first blush, astonishingly independent and mature. During the first weeks of school, their teachers rate them highly. But gradually it becomes clear that they are not developing close relationships with friends and adults. They suffer from higher levels of chronic anxiety and are unsure in social situations. In the book The Development of the Person by L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson and W. Andrew Collins, there is a description of an avoidantly attached child as he walks into a classroom: “He walked in a series of angles, like a sailboat tacking into the wind. By approximation, he eventually wound up near the teacher; then, turning his back toward her, he would wait for her to contact him.”

  Adults who are avoidantly attached tend not to remember much about their childhoods. They may describe their childhoods in generalities, but there was little that was emotionally powerful enough to lodge into recall. Often they have trouble developing intimate commitments. They may excel at logical discussion but react with deep unease when conversation turns to the emotions, or when asked to reveal themselves. They go through their days within a narrow emotional range, and are most at ease when alone. According to work done by Pascal Vrticka of the University of Geneva, adults who were avoidantly attached show less activation in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. They are three times more likely to be solitary at age seventy.

  Children with ambivalent or disorganized attachment patterns tend to have parents who are inconstant. They are there one minute, gone the next. They may be overly intrusive one hour, and then coldly aloof. The children have trouble developing consistent working models. They feel a simultaneous urge to run toward Mom and Dad and run away. When they are placed on the edge of a scary incline, even as early as twelve months, they don’t look toward their mothers for help, the way secure babies do. They look away from their mothers.

  Later in life, these children are more fearful than other children. They are more likely to perceive threats, and to have trouble controlling their impulses. These kinds of stresses can have long-term influences. Girls who grow up in homes without a father tend to have their periods at earlier ages, even after controlling for other factors. They tend, in general, to be more promiscuous in adolescence. Children with disorganized attachment patterns tend to have higher rates of psychopathology at age seventeen. Children from disorganized homes have smaller, less densely connected brains because the traumatic shocks of their childhood have retarded synaptic development.

  Again, all this is not to say that early attachment determines a life course. Adult outcomes do not rigidly follow attachment patterns. That’s in part because some people seem to have tremendously resilient temperaments that allow them to overcome early disadvantages. (Even among people who are sexually abused as children, roughly a third show few serious aftereffects in adulthood.) And it’s in part because life is complicated. A child with a poor attachment pattern with his mother might meet a mentor or an aunt who will teach him how to relate. Some children have the ability to “use” other people, to attract attachment figures even if their parents are not doing the job. But these early parental attachments do open up a pathway; they foster an unconscious working model of how the world works.

  Many studies have traced how early attachment patterns influence people over the course of their lives. They’ve found, for example, that Germany has more avoidant babies than the United States, and Japan has more anxious ones. One of the most impressive studies is based in Minnesota and summarized in The Development of the Person by Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson and Collins.

  Sroufe and his team have followed 180 children and their families for over three decades. They began testing about three months before the children were born (to evaluate the personalities of the parents), and they have observed, measured, and tested them in myriad ways since, in all aspects of their lives, and always with multiple rigorous independent observers.

  The results of this study do not overturn common sense, but they do reinforce it in impressive ways. The first striking finding is most of the causal arrows flow from parent to child. It’s obviously true that irritable or colicky children are harder to attach to and calm and sunny children are easier to attach to. Nonetheless, the key factor is parental sensitivity. Parents with communicative, interacting personalities tended to produce securely attached children. Parents with memories of good relationships with their own parents also tend to produce securely attached children. Sensitive parents can securely attach to difficult children and overcome genetic disadvantages.

  Another striking finding is that people develop coherently. Children who were rated securely attached at one age, tended to get the same rating at another age, unless some horrible event intervened, like the death of a parent or abuse at home. “In general, our study strongly supported the predictive power of childhood experience,” the authors write. Sensitive early care predicted competence at every subsequent age.

  Third, attachment patterns correlated well with school performance. Some researchers think that, if they measure a kid’s IQ, they can easily predict how well the kid will fare academically. The Sroufe study suggests that social and emotional factors are also incredibly powerful. Attachment-security and caregiver-sensitivity ratings were related to reading and math scores throughout the school years. Children with insecure or avoidant attachments were much more likely to develop behavior problems at school. Kids who had dominating, intrusive, and unpredictable caregivers at six months were much more likely to be inattentive and hyperactive by school age.

  By observing quality of care measures at forty-two months, the Sroufe researchers could predict with 77 percent accuracy who would drop out of high school. Throwing in IQ and test-achievement data did not allow researchers to improve on that prediction’s accuracy. The children who remained in school generally knew how to build relationships with their teachers and peers. At age nineteen, they reported having at least one “special” teacher who was “in their corner.” Those who dropped out didn’t know how to build relationships with adults. Most reported having no special teachers and “many of them looked at the interviewer as if an unfathomable question had been asked.”

  Attachment patterns in early childhood also helped predict the quality (though not the quantity) of other relationships later in life, especially romantic relationships. They strongly predict whether a child will go on to become a leader at school. They predict teenage self-confidence levels, social involvement, and social competence.

  Children also tend to replicate their parent’s behavior when they themselves have kids. Forty percent of the parents who had suffered from abuse while young went on to abuse their own children, while all but one of the mothers with a history of supportive care went on to provide adequate care for their own kids.

  Sroufe and his team observed children with their parents as they played games and tried to solve certain puzzles. Then, twenty years later, they observed their subjects, now parents, play the same games with their own kids. Sometimes the results were eerily alike, as they describe in one case:

  When Ellis seeks help from his mother as he struggles with a problem, she rolls her eyes at the ceiling and laughs. When he finally manages to solve the problem, his mother says, “Now see how stubbor
n you were.” Two decades later, as Ellis watches his son Carl struggle with the same problem, he leans away from the child, laughing and shaking his head. Later he taunts the child by pretending to raise the candy out of the box, then dropping it as the child rushes to try to get it. In the end he has to solve the problem for Carl and says, “You didn’t do that, I did. You’re not as smart as me.”

  The Complexity of Life

  If you had asked Harold as an adult which sort of attachment style his parents had established, he would have told you he was securely attached. He remembered the happy holidays and the bonds with Mom and Dad. And it’s true; most of the time his parents were attuned to his needs and Harold developed secure models. Harold grew into an open and trusting boy. Knowing that he’d been loved in the past, he assumed he’d be loved in the future. He had a tremendous hunger for social interaction. When things went wrong, when he fell into one of his self-hating moods, he didn’t withdraw (much) or lash out (much). He threw himself at other people and expected that they would welcome him into their lives and help him solve his problems. He talked to others and asked for their help. He entered new environments, confident that he could make friends there.

  But real life can never be completely reduced to a typology. Harold also suffered from certain terrors and felt certain needs that his parents could never comprehend. They simply had no experience with some of the things he was going through. It was as if he had a hidden spiritual layer that they lacked, terrors they could not understand, and aspirations they could not share.

  When Harold was seven, he came to dread Saturdays. He would wake up in the morning, aware that his parents were going to go out that evening, as they almost always did. As the hours stretched by, he would tell himself that he must not cry when they left. He would pray to God during the afternoon, “Please, God, don’t let me cry. Please don’t let me cry.”

  He would be out in the backyard, looking at ants, or up in his room, playing with his toys, but thoughts of doom were never far away. He knew that parents were supposed to go out at night and boys were supposed to accept this bravely and without crying. But he knew this was a rule he could not follow, no matter how desperately he tried. Week after week, he dissolved into tears and scrambled toward them as they closed the door and left. For years, babysitters had clawed and wrestled and strained to hold him back.

  His parents told him to be brave and to be a big boy. He knew and accepted the code he was supposed to follow, and he had a thorough knowledge of his own disgrace. The world was divided between boys who did not cry when their parents went out and him, alone—who could not do what he was supposed to do.

  Rob and Julia tried various strategies to avoid these collapses. They reminded him that he went away to school every weekday without any fear or anxiety. But this didn’t allay Harold’s absolute certainty that he would cry and do wrong even though he desperately wanted to do right.

  One afternoon, Rob caught Harold furtively sneaking around the house, turning on every light and closing every closet door. “Are you scared when we leave?” he asked. Of course Harold said no, meaning yes. Rob decided to take him on a little tour of the house to show him that there was nothing to be afraid of. They walked into every room, and Rob showed him how empty each was. Rob looked at the small empty rooms as incontrovertible proof that everything was safe. Harold looked into the vast empty chambers as incontrovertible proof that some formless evil was lurking there. “See? There’s nothing to worry about,” Rob said. Harold understood that this was the sort of thing adults said when they looked at something truly terrifying. He nodded glumly.

  Julia sat him down for a conversation and she told him she wanted him to be brave. His Saturday-evening scenes were getting out of hand, she said. And this led to one of those comic misunderstandings that are woven into the fabric of childhood. Harold had never heard the expression “out of hand” before, and for some reason he imagined his punishment for crying would be that they would chop off his hands. He imagined some tall thin man in a long coat and long scraggly hair with stiltlike legs sweeping in with great scissors. A few weeks ago, he had decided—again, for confused reasons only a child can really follow—that he cried when his parents left because he ate his food too fast. And now he was going to lose his hands. He thought about blood spurting out from his wrists. He thought about trying to eat dinner with two stumps and whether he would still be able to eat too fast. All this was going through his head as Julia patiently talked to him, and he assured her he would not cry. Like a press secretary, there was an official position he knew he must repeat in public. Inside, he knew he would definitely cry.

  Toward evening, he could hear his mother’s hair dryer—a sign that the end was near. A solitary pot of water was boiling on the stove, for the macaroni and cheese he would eat alone. The babysitter arrived.

  Rob and Julia put on their coats and headed for the door. Harold stood in the hall. The crying itself began as a series of slight tremors in his chest and stomach. Then he felt his torso heaving as he tried to hold it still. The pressure of tears welled up in his eyes, and he pretended they were not visible as he began to feel his nose tickle and his jaw tremble. Then his innards broke loose. He was convulsed by sobs, tears splashing down on the floor, making no attempt to hide them or wipe them away. This time he didn’t move his feet or scramble to them. He just stood there alone in the hallway, with his parents at the door and the babysitter behind him, quaking in on himself.

  “I’m bad. I’m bad,” he thought. His shame welled up and swept over him. He was the boy who cries. And in the turmoil he got the causation wrong. It seemed that his parents were leaving because he was crying.

  A few minutes after they left, Harold brought the blanket from his bed, surrounded himself with his stuffed-toy animals, and built a fort out of them. Children project souls into their favorite stuffed animals and commune with them in the way adults commune with religious icons. Years later he would remember a happy childhood, but it was interwoven with painful separations, confusions, misapprehensions, traumas, and mysteries. This is why all biographies are inadequate; they can never capture the inner currents. This is why self-knowledge is limited. Only a few remarkable people can sense the way early experience has built models in the brain. Later in life we build fictions and theories to paper over the mystery of what is happening deep inside, but in childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.

  CHAPTER 6

  LEARNING

  POPULAR, GOOD-LOOKING, AND ATHLETIC CHILDREN ARE THE subjects of relentless abuse. While still young and impressionable, they are force-fed a diet of ugly duckling fables to which they cannot possibly relate. They are compelled to endure endless Disney movies that tell them that true beauty lies inside. In high school, the most interesting teachers favor the brainy students who are rendered ambitious by social resentments and who have time on Saturday nights to sit at home and develop adult-pleasing interests in Miles Davis or Lou Reed. After graduation the popular and good-looking have few role models save for local weathermen and game-show hosts, while the nerds can emulate any number of modern moguls, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the Earth.

  And yet Harold, forever cheerful, carried the burden of his adolescent looks and popularity lightly. He’d had his growth spurt early, and had been a playground sports star through junior high. The other kids had caught up with him in size and surpassed him in ability, but he still played with a confidence that inspired deference and respect. Together, he and his thin-waisted, square-shouldered friends were notable for their ability to produce noise. Sound radiated out of their pores. They greeted one another explosively across the high-school hallways. If there was a water bottle at hand, they’d play an exuberant game of catch with it in the cafeteria, and everybody else had to flinch as the bottle went whizzing past. They swapped blowjob jokes with the pretty girls, which tu
rned some male teachers into titillated spectators and reduced the sophomores into puddles of voyeuristic awe. They took delicious pride in the knowledge, never expressed but universally understood, that they were the kings of the school.

  Harold’s relationships with his friends involved maximum body contact and minimum eye contact. They were forever wrestling, shoving, and otherwise engaging in little prowess competitions. Sometimes it seemed entire friendships in that group were built around comic uses of the word “scrotum,” and they were just as foul-mouthed with their female buddies. Harold went out with a string of cute girls—successively, as it turned out, from Egypt, Iran, Italy, and an old WASP family from England. Sometimes it seemed he was using Will and Ariel Durant’s Civilizations series as a dating manual.

  And yet he was well liked by adults. With his friends he was all “Yo! Douche bag!” but in parental and polite adult company he used a language and set of mannerisms based on the pretense that he’d never gone through puberty. Unlike many teenagers, he could be sensitive and polysyllabic, and at times he seemed sincerely moved by the global warming-awareness pep rallies that were so beloved by teachers and guidance counselors.

  Harold’s high school was structured like a brain. There was an executive function—in this case, the principal and the rest of the administrators—who operated under the illusion that they ran the school. But down below, amidst the lockers and in the hallways, the real work of the organism took place—the exchange of notes, saliva, crushes, rejections, friendships, feuds, and gossip. There were about 1,000 students and therefore roughly 1,000 × 1,000 relationships, the real substance of high-school life.