NurtureShock (16 page)

Similarly, Dr. Kun Ho Lee of Seoul National University gave IQ puzzles to two groups of Korean high schoolers inside a scanner.
The brains of the smart teens had shifted processing to a network recruiting the parietal lobe; they tested in the top one
percent. The brains of the normal teens had not made this shift.

Other scholars are finding this as well. Teams at Cornell, Stanford, and King’s College, London, have all found that children’s
cognitive networks aren’t the same as adults’.

“This is so contradictory to the old principles of neuroscience,” remarked a gleeful Haier. “The research is going in a new
direction, that intelligence moves throughout the brain as different brain areas come online.”

From the unfinished cortex to the shift in neural networks, none of the critical mechanisms of intelligence are yet operational
at the age most children are taking a test for entry into a gifted program or a private K through 8 school. We are making
long-term structural decisions over kids’ lives at a point when their brains haven’t even begun the radical transformations
that will determine their true intelligence.

Real intellectual development doesn’t fit into nicely rounded bell curves. It’s filled with sharp spikes in growth and rough
setbacks that have to be overcome.

We need to question why this idea of picking the smart children early even appeals to us. We set this system up to make sure
natural talent is discovered and nurtured. Instead, the system is failing a majority of the kids, and a lot of natural talent
is being screened out.

It may sound trite to ask, “What about the late bloomers?” But in terms of truly superior cognitive development, the neuroscience
suggests that “later” may be the optimal rate of development. And it’s not as if society needs to wait forever for these later
developers to bloom; the system of screening children would be significantly more effective if we simply waited until the
end of second grade to test them.

It’s common for gifted children to make uneven progress. (It’s not unheard of for a gifted child’s scores across verbal and
nonverbal skills to be so disparate that one half of a test result could qualify for an advanced program while the other half
could send the kid to special ed.)

The way most programs are currently designed, admissions officers never consider that uneven development may actually be an
asset. The young child who masters cognitive skills but struggles in phonics might later approach the abstract language of
poetry in a profoundly new way. A four-year-old’s single-minded fascination with dinosaurs to the exclusion of anything else
might not mark a deficit; instead, it might allow him to develop focus and an approach to learning that will serve him well
in any other context.

Think of the little girl kept out of a gifted program—despite the fact that she’d been reading since she was two—because she
wasn’t manually coordinated enough to put four blocks in a perfect row.

In the meantime, the late-blooming child lives with the mistaken fact that she is not gifted—but she’s bright enough to understand
that the Powers That Be have decreed that it would be a waste of time and resources to develop her potential. The gifted rolls
have already been filled.

Freud was wrong. Shakespeare was right. Why siblings really fight.

I
n Brazil recently, a team of scholars studied the medical data from an emergency room, looking at all the cases where children
had been rushed in after swallowing coins. The scholars were curious—was swallowing coins more common for children who didn’t
have any brothers or sisters? In the end, they decided their sample size was too small to draw any conclusion.

This was far from the first time scholars had tried to find strange side effects of being an only child. In Italy, a couple
years ago, researchers tried to determine if female onlies were more likely to have an eating disorder in high school. (They
weren’t.) In Israel, one scholar noted that onlies had higher incidence of asthma—at least compared to children who had 15
to 20 siblings. But compared to children with a normal number of siblings, there was barely any difference in the rate of
asthma. Parents of onlies could stop worrying.

Meanwhile, over in the United Kingdom, researchers were studying whether onlies get fewer warts. Not that you need to know
the answer, but what the heck—onlies do have somewhat fewer warts at age 11. However, Scottish researchers have informed us
that onlies get more eczema.

It seems that research on onlies has gone batty. It’s no surprise why. In the last two decades, the proportion of women having
only one child has about doubled in the United States, and single-child families are now more common than two-child families.

Nobody knows what this means for the children, but it seems reasonable that it must mean
something.
We have this idea because we’ve always stigmatized the exception, and onlies are a good example of that: way back in 1898,
one of the pioneers of child psychology, G. Stanley Hall, wrote that “being an only child is a disease in itself.” Many scholars
today cringe at this ridiculous statement, but the studies on warts and coin swallowing suggest some are still under the influence
of Hall’s point of view.

Scientists have uncovered some things about onlies—where onlies measure out slightly differently than those with brothers
and sisters. But these are not surprising discoveries. We know that onlies do a little bit better in school, on average—probably
for the same reasons that oldest siblings do a tiny bit better than younger siblings. From a study in Australia we know that
girl onlies average fifteen fewer minutes of physical activity per day, which probably explains the study in Germany that
said preschool-aged onlies have slightly worse physical dexterity.

But that’s not what society worries about, when it comes to onlies. What we wonder is: “Do they know how to get along?” Nowhere
is this question getting more scrutiny than in China, which has limited families in urban areas to one child since 1979. (Despite
this policy, 42.7% of families in China today have two or more children.) When the policy was first implemented, critics argued
that a country of onlies would destroy the character of the entire nation. Despite three decades of intense study on this
question, the research in China is still very mixed. One report said onlies in middle school were
less
anxious and had
better
social skills. But another report stated that in high school it was just the opposite. The research on social skills is just
as conclusive in China as the coin-swallowing research in Brazil.

Why are we seeing no clear effect? It’s surprising, because the
theory
that being an only child deprives a child of social skills makes so much logical sense. By growing up with siblings, a child
has thousands upon thousands of interactions to learn how to get along. According to this theory, children with siblings should
be massively more skilled at getting along than children with no siblings.

Yet they aren’t.

Maybe the mistake here was assuming that those thousands upon thousands of interactions with siblings amount to a single positive.
Perhaps the opposite is true—that children learn poor social skills from those interactions, just as often as they learn good
ones.

Dr. Laurie Kramer, Associate Dean at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is attempting to do the impossible: get
brothers and sisters to be nicer to each other.

It was clear what she’s up against, after just a few minutes with parents who have enrolled their children in Kramer’s six-week
program, “More Fun with Sisters and Brothers.” We were sitting on a circle of couches in a small room, watching their children
on a closed-circuit television. On the other side of the wall, in a living room wired with seven hidden cameras, the children
were working with Kramer’s undergraduate students.

“When they get going, it’s a like a freight train. It’s paralyzing,” remarked one mother about the fighting between her five-year-old
daughter and six-year-old son. In her professional life, she’s a clinical psychiatrist working with wounded veterans. But
it’s seeing her kids battling that she described as “painful to watch.”

Another mother sighed in frustration as we watched her seven-year-old son constantly taunt his four-year-old sister. “He knows
what to say, but he just can’t be nice about it.” She stared into space for a moment, fighting a tear.

A mother of five-year-old twin girls felt that her kids are usually great together—but for some inexplicable reason, they
can’t get through cooking dinner without a nightly argument.

The families in Kramer’s program are well-educated and well-off. Many of the parents are Illinois faculty, and their children
attend one of the best private elementary schools in Urbana. These parents have done everything to provide their children
with a positive environment. But there’s one wild card in the environment that they can’t control, undermining everything—how
well the siblings get along.

Mary Lynn Fletcher is the program coordinator for Dr. Kramer; she’s on the receiving end of the phone calls from parents who
want to get their kids in the program. “Many are shaking when they call. My heart goes out to them,” Fletcher said. “They
are so stressed. Others, the stress isn’t so bad, but they are feeling so helpless. Every day, there’s a moment they have
to deal with. One parent was driving her kids home from school, and she said, ‘Listen to this,’ then held the cell phone up
to the back seat so I could hear the yelling.”

It might sound like these children were the problem cases, but Ashley and I had reviewed videotapes of the children made a
month earlier, in their homes. Each tape recorded a half-hour stretch of the sibling pairs playing beside each other with
their toys, without any parents in the room to mediate. On these videotapes, there was definitely some tension, but what we
saw looked better than normal.

Observational studies have determined that siblings between the ages of three and seven clash 3.5 times per hour, on average.
Some of those are brief clashes, others longer, but it adds up to ten minutes of every hour spent arguing. According to Dr.
Hildy Ross, at the University of Waterloo, only about one out of every eight conflicts ends in compromise or reconciliation—the
other seven times, the siblings merely withdraw, usually after the older child has bullied or intimidated the younger.

Dr. Ganie DeHart, at State University of New York College at Geneseo, compared how four-year-old children treat their younger
siblings versus their best friends. In her sample, the kids made seven times as many negative and controlling statements to
their siblings as they did to friends.

Scottish researcher Dr. Samantha Punch found similar results in her interviews of ninety children. She determined that kids
don’t have an incentive to act nicely to their siblings, compared to friends, because the siblings will be there tomorrow,
no matter what. She concluded, “Sibship is a relationship in which the boundaries of social interaction can be pushed to the
limit. Rage and irritation need not be suppressed, whilst politeness and toleration can be neglected.”

So do they grow out of it, by having thousands of interactions of practice? Not really, according to Kramer. Back in 1990,
she and her mentor, Dr. John Gottman, recruited thirty families who were on the verge of having a second child; their first
child was three or four years old. Twice a week, for months, Kramer went into their homes to observe these siblings at play
until the youngest were six months old. She was back again at fourteen months, then four years. Each time, Kramer scored the
sibling relationship quality, by coding how often the kids were nice or mean to each other. Nine years later, Kramer tracked
these families down again. By then, the older siblings were on the verge of college. Again, she videotaped them together.
To make sure they didn’t ignore each other, she gave the sibling pairs some tasks—solve some puzzles together, and plan an
imaginary $10,000 weekend for their family.