NurtureShock (26 page)

Most scholars have agreed that bullying can have serious effects, and that it absolutely needs to be stopped. However, they’ve
balked on the “zero tolerance” approach.

A task force of the American Psychological Association warned that many incidents involve poor judgment, and lapses in judgment
are developmentally normative—the result of neurological immaturity. All of which was a fancy way of saying that kids make
mistakes because they’re still young. They noted that inflicting automatic, severe punishments was causing an erosion of trust
in authority figures. As the chair of the task force later explained, “The kids become fearful—not of other kids, but of the
rules—because they think they’ll break them by accident.” During the new era of zero tolerance, levels of anxiety in students
at school had gone up, not down. In Indiana, 95% of the suspensions weren’t for bullying, per se—they were for “school disruption”
and “other.” The APA task force warned especially against over-applying zero tolerance to any sort of harassment.

Yet zero tolerance is becoming ever more common. According to one poll by Public Agenda, 68% of American parents support zero
tolerance. From Florida to New York, schools are expanding their lists of what gets zero tolerance treatment to include teasing,
cruelty, name-calling, social exclusion, and anything that causes psychological distress. One small Canadian town even passed
a new law making these behaviors expressly illegal, punishable by fine.

According to the science of peer relations, there’s one big problem with lumping all childhood aggression under the rubric
of bullying. It’s that most of the meanness, cruelty, and torment that goes on at schools isn’t inflicted by those we commonly
think of as bullies, or “bad” kids. Instead, most of it is meted out by children who are popular, well-liked, and admired.

The connection between popularity, social dominance, meanness and cruelty is hardly a surprise to any teacher—the dynamic
is plainly visible at most schools. It’s long been an archetype in literature and movies, from
Emma
to
Heathers
and
Mean Girls.
In some languages, there’s a separate word to distinguish the kind of popular teen who diminishes others—in Dutch, for instance,
the idiomatic expression
popie-jopie
refers to teens who are bitchy, slutty, cocky, loud, and arrogant.

However, social scientists didn’t really get around to studying the connection between popularity and aggression until this
decade. That’s largely due to the fact that the focus on the archetypal negative results of aggression helped papers get published
and research dollars flow: grants were readily available to study the plight of aggressive kids, in the hope the findings
might help society prevent aggressive kids from becoming our future prison population. The 1999 Columbine High School massacre
opened more floodgates for grant dollars, as the government made it a priority to ensure students would never again open fire
on their peers.

There was also a tendency, according to Dr. Allen, for social scientists to assume bad behaviors are uniformly associated
with bad outcomes; aggression was considered bad behavior, so scientists were really only looking for the negative consequences
of it.

Few research grants were available to study the popular kids systematically—chiefly because it was assumed popular kids are
doing fine. Then, a few scholars who had been conducting long-term studies of adolescents reported on a connection between
popularity and alcohol use. Lo and behold (not really any surprise), popular kids drink more and do more drugs.

For the first time, scientists were concerned about the kids who were doing well socially—they were at risk of becoming addicts,
too! Suddenly, federal grant dollars began to flow into the science of popularity. Soon, the social forces of popularity were
linked to aggression as well (especially relational aggression), and, finally, the social scientists caught up to the schoolteachers
and screenwriters.

Today, the field of peer relations is in the process of doing an extraordinary backflip-with-twist, as scholars adapt to the
new paradigm.

Ostrov’s mentor, Dr. Nikki Crick of the University of Minnesota, has contradicted decades of earlier research that claimed
girls weren’t aggressive. She proved that girls can be just as aggressive as boys—only they’re more likely to use relational
aggression.

Similarly, Dr. Debra Pepler has shown that at the elementary school age, the “nonaggressive” kids are far from saintly—they
still threaten to withdraw their friendship and threaten and push, just not as frequently as the more aggressive kids. So
rather than the nonaggressive being the “good” kids, it might just be that they lack the savvy and confidence to assert themselves
as often.

As University of Connecticut professor Dr. Antonius Cillessen explains, it’s now recognized that aggressiveness is most often
used as a means of asserting dominance to gain control or protect status. Aggression is not simply a breakdown or lapse of
social skills. Rather, many acts of aggression require highly attuned social skills to pull off, and even physical aggression
is often the mark of a child who is “socially savvy,” not socially deviant. Aggressive kids aren’t just being insensitive.
On the contrary, says Cillessen, the relationally aggressive kid needs to be extremely sensitive. He needs to attack in a
subtle and strategic way. He has to be socially intelligent, mastering his social network, so that he knows just the right
buttons to push to drive his opponent crazy. Aggression comes as “early adolescents are discovering themselves. They’re learning
about coolness—how to be attractive to other people.”

This completely changes the game for parents. When parents attempt to teach their seven-year-old daughter that it’s wrong
to exclude, spread rumors, or hit, they are literally attempting to take away from the child several useful tools of social
dominance. “This behavior is rewarded in peer groups,” observed Cillessen, “and you can say as a parent, ‘Don’t do this,’
but the immediate rewards are very powerful.” As long as the child is compulsively drawn to having class status, the appeal
of those tools will undermine the parent’s message. Children already know that parents think these behaviors are wrong—they’ve
heard it since they were tots. But they return to these behaviors because of how their
peers
react—rewarding the aggressor with awe, respect, and influence.

The mystery has been why. Why don’t kids shun aggressive peers? Why are so many aggressive kids socially central, and held
in high regard?

Two reasons. First, aggressive behavior, like many kinds of rule breaking, is interpreted by other kids as a willingness to
defy grownups, which makes the aggressive child seem independent and older—highly coveted traits. The child who always conforms
to adults’ expectations and follows their rules runs the risk of being seen as a wimp.

The other reason aggressive kids can remain socially powerful is that—just as the less-aggressive kids aren’t angels—aggressive
kids aren’t all devils, either.

“A vast majority of behavioral scientists think of prosocial and antisocial behavior as being at opposite ends of a single
dimension,” explains University of Kansas professor Patricia Hawley. “To me, that oversimplifies the complexity of human behavior.”

In the canon of child development, it’s long been taken as gospel that a truly socially-competent child is nonaggressive.
Hawley questions that orientation.

Hawley studies kids from preschool up through high school. She looks specifically at how one kid makes another do his bidding—whether
it’s through kind, prosocial behavior, or antisocial acts—threats, violence, teasing. Contrary to those who expected kids
high in prosocial behavior to be low in antisocial acts, and vice versa, she finds that the same kids are responsible for
both—the good and the bad. They are simply in the middle of everything, or, in the words of another researcher, “They’re just
socially busy.”

Hawley calls the children who successfully use both prosocial and antisocial tactics to get their way “bistrategic controllers.”
These kids see that, when used correctly, kindness and cruelty are equally effective tools of power: the trick is achieving
just the right balance, and the right timing. Those who master alternating between the two strategies become attractive to
other children, rather than repellant, because they bring so much to the party. Not only are they popular, they’re well-liked
by kids, and by teachers, too (who rate them as being agreeable and well-adjusted).

Hawley’s data suggests that at least one in ten children fits the bistrategic description. But inspired by her approach, several
other scholars have done similar analyses. Their subsequent findings suggest that the proportion is even higher—around one
in six.

Jamie Ostrov has been finding kids with a similarly mixed pattern of prosocial and aggressive behavior in his preschool research.
In his television-use study, the children who watched a lot of educational television were far more relationally aggressive,
but they were vastly more prosocial to classmates as well.

“The lesson from these children is that it might not make sense to look at aggression alone,” Hawley stated. “Bistrategics
can use unsettling levels of aggression without suffering the same consequences of those using only aggression.” It’s an exhibition
of their nascent ambition.

For her part, Hawley’s only problem is that her bistrategics are so successful, in school and in life, that she still can’t
get a grant to follow them long-term.

We began this chapter by asking why modern parenting has failed to result in a generation of kinder, gentler kids. It turns
out that many of our enlightened innovations have had unintended consequences.

When we changed the channel from violent television to tamer fare, kids just ended up learning the advanced skills of clique
formation, friendship withdrawal, and the art of the insult.

In taking our marital arguments upstairs to avoid exposing the children to strife, we accidentally deprived them of chances
to witness how two people who care about each other can work out their differences in a calm and reasoned way.

We thought that aggressiveness was the reaction to peer rejection, so we have painstakingly attempted to eliminate peer rejection
from the childhood experience. In its place is elaborately orchestrated peer interaction. We’ve created the play date phenomenon,
while ladening older kids’ schedules with after-school activities. We’ve segregated children by age—building separate playgrounds
for the youngest children, and stratifying classes and teams. Unwittingly, we’ve put children into an echo chamber. Today’s
average middle schooler has a phenomenal 299 peer interactions a day. The average teen spends sixty hours a week surrounded
by a peer group (and only sixteen hours a week surrounded by adults). This has created the perfect atmosphere for a different
strain of aggression-virus to breed—one fed not by peer rejection, but fed by the need for peer status and social ranking.
The more time peers spend together, the stronger this compulsion is to rank high, resulting in the hostility of one-upmanship.
All those lessons about sharing and consideration can hardly compete. We wonder why it takes twenty years to teach a child
how to conduct himself in polite society—overlooking the fact that we’ve essentially left our children to socialize themselves.