The Social Animal (12 page)

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 stubborn 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.”

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.

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 turned 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.

The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.

In 1954 Muzafer Sherif conducted a famous social-science experiment. He gathered a homogeneous group of twenty-two schoolboys from Oklahoma and took them to a campground in Robbers Cave State Park. He divided the eleven-year-old boys into two groups, who gave themselves the names the Rattlers and the Eagles. After a week of separation, the research team arranged for a series of competitive games between the two groups. Trouble started immediately. The Rattlers put their flag on the backstop of “their” baseball field. The Eagles tore it down and burned it.

After a tug-of-war match, the Rattlers raided the Eagles’ cabins, trashed their property, and stole some clothing. The Eagles armed themselves with sticks and raided the Rattlers unit. When they returned, they prepared for the inevitable retaliation. They put stones in socks, so they could smash their enemies in the face.

The two groups developed opposite cultures. The Rattlers cursed, so the Eagles banned cursing. The Rattlers posed as toughs, so the Eagles organized prayer sessions. The experiment suggested what dozens of later experiments confirmed: People have a tendency to form groups, even on the basis of the most arbitrary characteristics imaginable, and when groups are adjacent, friction will arise.

In Harold’s high school, nobody put rocks in socks. There, life was dominated by a universal struggle for admiration. The students divided into the inevitable cliques, and each clique had its own invisible pattern of behavior. Gossip was used to spread information on how each person in a clique was supposed to behave and to cast social opprobrium on those who violated the rules. Gossip is the way groups establish social norms. The person spreading the gossip gains status and power by demonstrating his superior knowledge of the norms. The person listening receives valuable information on how not to behave in the future.