NurtureShock (19 page)

Darling and Caldwell wondered if they could get high schoolers to cooperate in a study where they’d admit to the very things
they were hiding from their parents. Darling recognized that if she sat down with a high school sophomore, she would be too
imposing an authority figure to get the truth. Even her graduate students were too mature to relate to teens and gain their
confidence. So she recruited from her undergraduate classes a special research team, all under age 21—a scholar’s Mod Squad.

For the first semester, these eight undergrads met with Darling and were trained in research methods and interview techniques.
Then Darling sent them out to the places in State College where teens hang out in public. They handed out flyers at the mall,
but they were more successful at night in a little alley off Calder Way, at the back door of the video arcade. They approached
teenagers and offered them a gift certificate for a free CD at the local music store in exchange for being in the study. If
the teens agreed, the undergrads took down a phone number.

Darling wanted the first recruits to be the cool kids. “The idea was, if we just went to the school and asked for volunteers,
we’d get the goody-two-shoes kids. Then the cool kids wouldn’t join the study. We’d be oversampling the well-behaved. But
if we got the cool kids, the others would follow.” The core of recruits attended State College Area High School, which has
2,600 students. “It became quite the trendy thing at the high school, to be in the study,” Darling recalled.

The others did follow, and soon Darling had a representative sample that matched up to national averages on a bevy of statistics,
from their grades to how often they drank.

Subsequently, two of the Mod Squad researchers met with each high schooler at a place they’d feel comfortable. Often this
was the Four Brothers Pizzeria on Beaver Avenue. Having only a four-dollar budget for each restaurant field trip, all they
could do was buy the teen fries and a Coke, before presenting him with a deck of 36 cards. Each card in this deck described
a topic teens sometimes lie to their parents about. Over the next couple hours, the teen and researchers worked through the
deck, discussing which issues the kid and his parents disagreed on, and which rules the kid had broken, and how he’d pulled
off the deception, and why. Because of their age similarity to their targets, the researchers never had trouble getting the
high-schoolers to confide in them. Despite all the students and all the cards in the deck, only once—to a single card—did
a student hold back, saying, “I don’t want to talk about that.”

The deck handed to the teens triggered recognition of just how pervasive their deception went. “They began the interviews
saying that parents give you everything and yes, you should tell them everything,” Darling observed. By the end of the interview,
the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of the family’s rules they had broken. Darling said,
“It was something they realized—and that they didn’t like about themselves.”

Out of 36 potential topics, the average teen lies to her parents about 12 of them. Teens lie about what they spend their allowance
on, and whether they’ve started dating, and what clothes they put on away from the house. They lie about what movie they went
to and who they went with. They lie about alcohol and drug use, and they lie about whether they’re hanging out with friends
their parents disapprove of. They lie about how they spend their afternoons, if the parent is still at work. They lie whether
a chaperone was in attendance at a party, or whether they rode in a car driven by a drunken teen. Even some things around
the house they lie about—whether their homework is done, or what music they’re listening to.

“Drinking, drug use and their sex lives are the things kids hide the most from their parents,” Darling noted. “But it wasn’t
just the sexual acts they were hiding,” she added. “They really objected to the emotional intrusiveness—being asked, ‘How
serious is this relationship?’ and ‘Do you love this person?’ The kids just don’t want to answer those questions.”

Only one-quarter of the time do teens concoct an outright lie to pull off their deception. According to Darling’s data, these
direct lies are used to cover up the worst stuff. Half the time, teens execute their deception by withholding the relevant
details that would upset their parent; the parent hears only half the story. And another quarter of the time, the teen manages
the deception by never bringing the topic up at all, hoping the parent won’t know to ask.

Rare was the kid who was completely honest with parents: 96% of the teens in Darling’s study reported lying to their parents.

Being an honors student doesn’t change these numbers by much, according to other research. Nor does being a really busy, overscheduled
kid. No kid, apparently, is too busy to break a few rules.

“When I began this research, I would have thought the main reason teens would say they lie was, ‘I want to stay out of trouble,’
” Darling explained. “But actually the most common reason for deception was, ‘I’m trying to protect the relationship with
my parents; I don’t want them to be disappointed in me.’ ”

Darling also mailed survey questionnaires to the parents, and it was interesting how the two sets of data reflected on each
other. First, she was struck by parents’ vivid fear of pushing their teens into outright rebellion. “Many parents today believe
the best way to get teens to disclose is to be more permissive and not set outright rules,” Darling said. Parents imagine
a tradeoff between being informed and being strict. Better to hear the truth and be able to help than be kept in the dark.

Darling found that permissive parents don’t actually learn more about their child’s lives. “Kids who go wild and get in trouble
mostly have parents who don’t set rules or standards. Their parents are loving and accepting no matter what the kids do. But
the kids take the lack of rules as a sign their parents don’t actually care—that their parent doesn’t really want this job
of being the parent.”

In cooperation with other scholars, Darling has done versions of her study around the world—in the Philippines, Italy, and
Chile. “In Chile, the permissive parent is the norm. And kids lie to their parents there more than anyplace else.”

Pushing a teen into rebellion by having too many rules was a sort of statistical myth. “That actually doesn’t happen,” remarked
Darling. She found that most rules-heavy parents don’t actually enforce them. “It’s too much work,” said Darling. “It’s a
lot harder to enforce three rules than to set twenty rules.” These teens avoided rebellious direct conflict and just snuck
around behind their parents’ backs.

By withholding information about their lives, adolescents carve out a social domain and identity that are theirs alone, independent
from their parents or other adult authority figures. According to a recent Harris Poll, 78% of parents were sure their teens
could talk to them about anything. However, the teens disagreed.

To seek out a parent for help is, from a teen’s perspective, a tacit admission that he’s not mature enough to handle it alone.
Having to tell parents about it can be psychologically emasculating, whether the confession is forced out of him or he volunteers
it on his own. It’s essential for some things to be “none of your business.”

The big surprise in the research is
when
this need for autonomy is strongest. It’s not mild at 12, moderate at 15, and most powerful at 18. Darling’s scholarship
shows that the objection to parental authority peaks around age 14 to 15. In fact, this resistance is slightly stronger at
age 11 than at 18. In popular culture, we think of high school as the risk years, but the psychological forces driving deception
surge earlier than that.

A few parents managed to live up to the stereotype of the oppressive parent, with lots of psychological intrusion, but those
teens weren’t rebelling. They were obedient. And depressed.

“Ironically, the type of parents who are actually most consistent in enforcing rules are the same parents who are most warm
and have the most conversations with their kids,” Darling observed. They’ve set a few rules over certain key spheres of influence,
and they’ve explained why the rules are there. They expect the child to obey them. Over life’s other spheres, they supported
the child’s autonomy, allowing her freedom to make her own decisions.

The kids of these parents lied the least. Rather than hiding twelve areas from their parents, they might be hiding as few
as five.

The Mod Squad study did confirm Linda Caldwell’s hypothesis that teens turn to drinking and drugs because they’re bored in
their free time. After the study’s completion, Caldwell wondered if there was a way to help kids fend off boredom. Rather
than just badgering kids with the message “Don’t Do Drugs,” wouldn’t it be more effective to teach them how else to really
enjoy their free time?

So Caldwell went about designing a program, driven by an ambitious question: “Can you teach a kid how not to be bored?”

Her research has shown that boredom starts to set in around seventh grade, and it increases all through twelfth grade. Intrinsic
motivation also drops, gradually but consistently, through those same years. So Caldwell aimed her program at seventh graders
in their fall semester.

She got nine middle school districts throughout rural Pennsylvania to sign up; over 600 children participated in the study.
Teachers from these schools came to Penn State and received training in how to teach anti-boredom.

The program Caldwell created, TimeWise, did every detail right. Rather than some one-day intervention, this was an actual
school class that lasted six weeks. Rather than being lectured to, the students enjoyed a workshop vibe, where they discussed
their issues, problem-solved, and coached one another. Rather than merely testing these students after the course, Caldwell
continued to test the long-term benefits of TimeWise, measuring the students’ boredom levels and use of time for the next
three years. Every year, the students went through a booster class, to remind them of the principles and encourage them to
reapply the lessons to their changing lives.

The course began with a self-examination module. The students learned the difference between being generally bored, all day
long, and being situationally bored, be it when in history class or when sitting on the couch at home, watching reruns. They
learned to recognize the difference in their own motivation: “Am I doing this because I actually want to, or because my mom
signed me up and I have to, or because I feel pressured by friends to follow along?” They spent the first week filling out
time diaries, charting how they spent their time and how engaged they felt doing it all.

The researchers saw that it wasn’t just kids with lots of free time who were bored. Even the really busy kids could be bored,
for two reasons. First, they were doing a lot of activities only because their parent signed them up—there was no intrinsic
motivation. Second, they were so accustomed to their parents filling their free time that they didn’t know how to fill it
on their own. “The more controlling the parent,” Caldwell explained, “the more likely a child is to experience boredom.”

The students spent a lot of time learning how to counter peer pressure. They went on to do a module on flow, based on the
ideas of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and did a module on understanding how the element of risk made something exciting
or scary. They learned to see themselves as architects of their own experience.

When I first read of Caldwell’s TimeWise, I felt jealous—I wished there had been such a program for me in seventh grade. The
program was so exciting that it was simultaneously reproduced in South Africa, where children have very little to do, and
it’s now being reproduced in school districts in Oregon, Utah, and urban Pennsylvania. The California Parks & Recreation Society
put TimeWise on the top of its list of role models for leisure education programs.

There’s been only one problem. The kids came out of the class charged up, but by the end of spring, they weren’t dramatically
different from kids who hadn’t taken the TimeWise class. “The results dissipated after the initial intervention,” Caldwell
noted. “You always wish for stronger results. We got some nice results, but they haven’t lasted across the four years.” It’s
really been a mystery why this great class didn’t have a huge impact.

Note that her results have statistical significance; Caldwell published them in a prestigious journal and has continued to
receive grants for TimeWise. But from an ordinary person’s perspective, the results lack any “wow” factor. Compared to students
not in the class, measurable boredom went down only about 3%. TimeWise students were only meagerly better at avoiding peer
pressure, and they didn’t join more clubs. Though they played sports a little more and spent more time outdoors, their intrinsic
motivation was no better than regular students. These kids weren’t drinking alcohol a lot—during ninth grade, they’d drank
only a couple times that year, on average—but there was almost no difference on that score between the kids in the TimeWise
program and the kids who weren’t. The smoking of pot and cigarettes was also almost indistinguishable between the two groups.