Red Flags or Red Herrings?: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become - Hardcover

Engel, Susan

3.32

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9781439150115: Red Flags or Red Herrings?: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439150117 ISBN 13: 9781439150115

Publisher: Atria Books, 2011

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Take the worry out of parenting...

These days, parenthood and anxiety seem to go hand in hand, especially given that it’s harder than ever to raise happy, well-adjusted kids in our complicated world. And all parents long to figure out just who their child will become when he or she grows up. But with websites, media, and other parents providing an endless stream of advice about how to raise a perfect and perfectly happy child, how can you really know whom to trust?

Susan Engel draws on her years of experience as a developmental psychologist, educator, and mother to help parents stop worrying about their young children’s future and stop trying to control their formative years. Offering an intriguing new way of thinking about child development, she uses both personal and professional research to identify problematic behaviors that require intervention and gives reassurance about those that don’t. Unlike many parenting experts, Engel encourages perspective and acceptance: rambunctious children will calm down as they find activities to absorb their intellectual energy; similarly, as shy kids grow, they will learn how to reach out to others on a one-to-one level.

Engel provides straightforward guidance about issues of major concern for parents—happiness, intelligence, love, and morality—while blending stories about real children with relevant and up-to-the-minute social and clinical research. This absorbing narrative is an indispensable tool that will restore your sanity, help you sleep better, and put the joy back in child-raising.

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About the Author:

Susan Engel is a developmental psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Williams College and the founder and director of the Williams Program in Teaching. She wrote a column on teaching for The New York Times called “Lessons” and is a cofounder of The Hayground School in Eastern Long Island.

Introduction

A Road Map to Your Child’s Future

I got my first pair of evening slippers when I was three, a birthday gift from my six-year-old sister. They were sparkly gold plastic high-heeled mules, with little pink poofs on the toes. I’d sashay around the living room in them, listening to the click of the plastic, feeling glamorous. I liked to wear them to nursery school, along with a large black leather purse I dragged around with me. It had first belonged to an elderly relative and contained lots of things I might need during the day: lipstick, candy, pencils, stuffed animals, Scotch tape, and sometimes a book or two.

According to my family, from the time I was two years old, I’d spend hours by myself dressing up in other people’s discarded fancy dresses, telling stories, and outlining, to anyone who would listen, my secret lives. On any given day, I might be a mother of fourteen who also managed a busy medical practice. I loved the part where I would get out of my station wagon, loaded down with grocery bags, my stethoscope swinging around my neck. I’d pretend to soothe one of my babies on my hip, while holding a phone cradled between ear and shoulder, giving a diagnosis over the phone. I was harried and competent, and so many needy people depended on me. But other days, I was an immortal princess who had been married to a handsome strong king for a thousand years. I could visit with him only now and then, when he appeared magically in the night, to court me all over again. Sometimes I was the maverick head of a major company, who managed a large staff and strode into meetings wearing black high heels, holding a clipboard. At other times, however, I was a starving orphan who lived in the woods and had only animals for friends. I could get very caught up in the pathos of that character. My fantasies weren’t confined to marvelous identities acted out in the privacy and solitude of my bedroom, either. Sometimes I tried to bring others into my imaginary world.

My grandmother Helen lived in a small white farmhouse at the edge of a potato farm, her home since she married in 1927. I visited her almost every day, walking down a little dirt path that led from my house at one end of the farm to hers at the other end. She’d toast me Wonder bread, spread it with oleo, and I’d chatter to her. She was a wonderful audience, smiling and nodding, ready to sit there with me for hours.

One day, when I was about six, I arrived and plunked myself down on one of her blue plastic kitchen chairs. It was probably about seven in the morning. I explained that I had some bad news. In a mournful voice, I told her that I was suffering from a rare disease. I lifted my hands from my lap and laid them out on the red plastic checkered cloth that covered her kitchen table, so that she could see the odd semi-shiny veneer, cracked in places, that covered my skin. I explained that the disease required me to peel that top shiny layer of skin off my hands every few hours, even though it was extremely painful. I demonstrated by pulling at one of the edges, grimacing in stoic agony as the translucent material lifted from the top of my hand. Tolerant and adoring, she’d watch sympathetically, clucking her tongue at how awful it must be for me. It was Elmer’s glue, which I had carefully painted across my hand and allowed to dry before walking down the path to share my condition with my grandmother. I can remember the disbelieving glee that I felt when she seemed to fall for my fabulous account. I loved temporarily inhabiting that suffering victim, and I loved the thought that others would fall for my story.

The joke in my family is that someone passing by my bedroom door would hear lots of people talking. Looking in to find out who my visitors were, an observer would see just one little girl, pale and thin, sitting alone, sometimes in a darkened room, creating an imaginary world peopled by admirers, comrades, enemies, and support staff.

However, this funny little story has a twist. Sometime during my teens, I found out that when I was little, my father was concerned that all of those imaginary friends foreshadowed schizophrenia. When I talked to myself, he worried that I had a fragile hold on reality. He was alarmed that I didn’t know the difference between the real world and make-believe and that I spent too much time pretending. He anxiously watched for signs that my fantasy life was getting the better of me. His aunt had suffered from schizophrenia, although her diagnosis had been kept secret for most of his childhood. Perhaps my behavior triggered his fear that someone else in the family would also be afflicted with mental illness. Was my father right? Did those early escapes from reality presage something more debilitating?

As things turned out, I am riddled with anxieties and, perhaps as a result, almost unbearably controlling. I tell my husband what to say to the kids, I tell my grown children what to say in job interviews, and I wake my sixteen-year-old son, even though his alarm clock has gone off, just to guarantee he will get to school on time. When guests visit our home, I rush down to the kitchen before anyone else wakes up, just to make sure that breakfast goes the way I think it should. I have all kinds of fears. I cannot board a plane without Xanax. I don’t like to be the passenger in other people’s cars. I’ve never met a superstition I didn’t embrace. Every single evening, I stop whatever I am doing so that I can wish on the first star and ensure that my children will stay healthy. Just as I did when I was young, I still mentally rewrite the sad endings of novels I like. I’ve had my share of troubles, too—estrangements, disappointments, and regrets. But other than my quirks and the neuroses from which they spring, my connection to reality is pretty solid. I’ve worked my whole adult life, been married to the same man for thirty years, and raised three sons. The usual barometers of mental health point in the right direction.

Those wild gatherings of imaginary friends and narrative performances when I was little predicted something, but they did not predict mental illness. My love of fictive lives stayed with me. I studied literature in college and am still an avid reader; I love novels most of all. Much of my research has concerned the stories children tell and the worlds they create in their play. I have spent plenty of time thinking about alternative worlds, but scientists tend to call this counterfactual thinking. Most researchers do it.

My vivid fantasy life in early childhood might have foreshadowed my interest in psychology, but it wasn’t a red flag for mental illness. Although my father’s prediction turned out to be wrong, it’s understandable that he was uneasy. Most parents feel anxious at one point or another about how their children will turn out. In those uncertain moments, what are they to do? Often, parents feel lost, as if all they can do is read tea leaves. Some lean on folk wisdom they have inherited from others, and it might not, in fact, be very wise. Yet developmental psychology can provide parents with a helpful road map for identifying and interpreting clues about who their children will become.

Finding Each Child’s Pattern

I fell in love with developmental psychology when I was a sophomore in college. I was dazzled by the clever experiments that revealed how children thought. I loved the idea that there was a pattern and an order to development that could be deciphered through observation. I loved the contrasting theories that illuminated such different aspects of what children did and said. Seemingly small patches of behavior offered clues about how a child was thinking and feeling. Taken together, those clues provided a blueprint for growth and change. I had already spent years watching children play and talk (my much younger sister and the children I had taught in the summer program I ran during my teens). Now research was offering me a way to think about the patterns that governed what I had noticed.

Yet once I became a mother, the world of children looked very different to me. I no longer saw moments of behavior simply as a demonstration of a psychological principle. But I did begin to notice, with a sharpened focus, all kinds of details about my kids, and my friends’ kids. One little girl I knew was high-strung from the moment she was born. She fell asleep crying and woke up crying. When she did sleep, she stuck one finger straight up in the air. She learned to talk with vehemence and rattled off long, breathless sentences about everything. Which of these things was an indication about her future, and how did the clues fit together? One little two-year-old friend of my son used to come home with us from the park and spend the afternoons at our house. From the moment he set foot in our loft, he would race around and around our kitchen table, letting out shrill screams for what seemed like hours on end, as if this were the most fun game ever. When he would eventually get tired, he would stop running, and a blank, inscrutable look would cover his face as he just stood quietly, watching whatever my son was doing. What kind of a guy will he turn out to be? I wondered.

As my immediate world became peopled with babies and children, my younger sister and I would play a guessing game. We would imagine the little boys and girls in our extended family thirty years later. What kind of grown-up would each of them turn out to be? One niece spent several years of her childhood dressed like her boy cousins, even wearing boys’ boxers under her pants. She also insisted on peeing standing up. She was strong-willed and dynamic, a real bossy boots, and easily excited. My sister predicted that this niece would become the head of a big record company and would wear a pinstriped three-piece suit to work every day. Another niece had a quiet, beguiling manner. She was ultra-feminine, almost languorous, even as a little girl. She loved pretty things, and we guessed that she would grow up to be a fashion designer. We playfully thought we could see the seeds of their future selves.

For many years, my interest in children seemed to follow two parallel paths: the children I knew and watched, who seemed to be brimming with intriguing quirks, and the world of research, which was bent on lifting patterns from the confusing debris of specific children and particular situations. As a mother, I noticed the incidents and idiosyncrasies that made each child so interesting. As a psychologist, I thought about trends and benchmarks.

As strange as it might seem, I never thought my life as a mother and the friend of other mothers had anything much to do with my work as a psychologist. I lived among real kids, but I studied behaviors that proved and disproved general theories. I never dwelled on the possibility that I knew anything as a psychologist that could help me predict what my children or their friends would be like when they got older.

That changed suddenly in 2008, during a conversation with my sister. We were gossiping about the son of one of our childhood neighbors, a young man who had just celebrated his twentieth birthday. His early family life, we thought, had all of the ingredients that would surely lead to trouble. His father was a substance abuser with a spotty and troubled work life. His mother’s hold on reality was tenuous. His parents had broken ties with many of their family members. They had few friends and were always feuding with neighbors. They mistrusted everyone around them. They seemed plagued by physical ailments that had no clear cause or cure. And when he was young, the son seemed muted, anxious, and often sad. We would have bet our bottom dollar that this boy would bear the marks of such problematic family life. Yet, against all odds, as a twenty-year-old, he was thriving. My sister reported to me how warm, smart, and engaged he now was. He was doing well in a good college, he loved his courses, he enjoyed the new friends he was making, and he was dating a really nice young woman. Who knew? On the face of it, his childhood had seemed filled with arrows pointing toward disaster.

As we discussed this, I laughed wryly and said, “Development is a mystery, isn’t it?” This book starts with that comment, because it took me off guard and forced an idea that had been bubbling around in my head finally to take shape. I thought to myself, Now, wait just a minute here. I’ve been a developmental psychologist for almost thirty years. Development is not a mystery. It’s a crystal ball. But you need to know how to read it.

When I thought about that neighbor, I realized that along with all of those worrisome signs were other, more significant qualities. The young man had had a very strong bond with his mother even as an infant. His parents had adored him and been very consistent in their attention to him. They were smart, and he was smart. He was good at things. The family had fun together, spent time doing things together, and showed love for one another. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he seemed to have grown into a happy, able young man. I had let myself get distracted by red herrings and ignored equally clear signs that he would probably be fine.

The idea for this book came from that conversation, which led me to rethink the ways in which developmental research could help us see and understand the paths of real children. I wanted to show parents that the findings of well-done research could help them see their children with more subtlety and understanding.

The heart of the book comes from my experience as a mother and a friend to other parents. I have seen that each of us looks into the face of our little baby with joy but also with apprehension and uncertainty. What will her life be like? What will she be like?

A very close friend of mine had a little boy whom she worried about during nursery school. He spilled his milk every night at dinner, played too roughly with toys, and frequently broke lamps and dishes. His elbows were everywhere. He didn’t sit, he bounced. Although he was kind and loving, he often clobbered other children or knocked them over. He played too hard, leaving tears and wagging fingers in his wake. In nursery school, he had only one buddy. He would often come home with his Charlie Brown mouth turned down, telling his mom that his friend had rejected him or that some little boy had been mean to him.

When it came time for kindergarten, his mother fretted that he would be the kid teachers wouldn’t like, the rambunctious boy who found lessons difficult to concentrate on, and, on top of all that, a loner. As they were heading out the door that first morning of school in September, the little boy suddenly said, “Wait a minute. I need something.” His mother stood watching as he raced to his shelf of toys, grabbed a small action figure that punched its fist when you pushed a button, strode over to her, and said, “I’m ready now.” When they got to school, he walked in calmly, the small figure visible in his hand. Within thirty seconds, four little boys had gathered around him to admire the toy. He was off and running. His mom thought to herself, Phew. He’s gonna be fine. Then she called me on the phone and said anxiously, “Can I count on this? Does it mean he’ll always know how to navigate a group?”

In the best moments of your child’s life, you want reassurance that he will always be this ebullient/clever/determined/appealing. At the worst moments, however, you want reassurance that your child can change and is likely to. I recall going to visit a younger friend a few years ago, the mother of a smart and dynamic four-year-old named Rosie. Rosie was a handfu...

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