NurtureShock (32 page)

At first glance, Froh’s study appears to be another classic case where good intentions were mistaken for a good idea. But
his story didn’t end there.

For Froh to really figure out what happened, he needed to drop two of his main assumptions.

First, he had to drop his expectation that middle schoolers should react the same way as college students to the gratitude
intervention. As long as he held that expectation, he was thinking that something had gone wrong in his study—and that if
he could find his error, he could get the intended result.

But maybe nothing had gone wrong. Maybe he’d made no mistakes, and his results were completely accurate. And because he wasn’t
thinking broadly enough, he was unable to glean what his results actually proved.

There are eight years of development from middle school to college. Was there something about those intervening years that
could explain why the middle-schoolers didn’t benefit from the exercise? As we learned from Nancy Darling’s research on teenagers,
the need for autonomy peaks at age 14, and is stronger in a 12-year-old than in a college student (largely because a college
student has already established the autonomy she desires). Were the middle-schoolers reacting differently, because of their
need for independence?

Or could it be a difference in cognitive capabilities? Digging deeper into gratitude’s effects, Froh learned that children
will not experience gratitude unless they recognize three things about the various bounties in their lives: that they are
intentional, costly,
and
beneficial.
Children need to comprehend that this nice life of theirs isn’t by accident, it’s the gift of hardworking parents and teachers
who make sacrifices for the good of children—who in turn truly benefit from it.

Were younger kids capable of understanding all that?

Froh began to design a new study, working with a K–12 parochial school, where he could test a gratitude intervention on kids
from grades 3, 8, and 12, to look for the effects of age.

That Froh had chosen a parochial school was an interesting choice. The school’s religious teachings on sacrifice could have
already given its students an increased awareness of gratitude. Froh knew that these kids were already regularly taught to
count their blessings in the context of prayer.

To give them something new, Froh didn’t ask these children to list five things every day. Instead, they were to pick one person
in their lives—someone they’d never fully expressed their appreciation for—and write them a letter of thanks. They worked
on this letter in class, three times a week, for two weeks, elaborating on their feelings and polishing their prose. On the
final Friday, they were to set up a time with that person and read the letter to them, out loud, face-to-face.

Their letters were heartbreaking and sincere, demonstrating a depth of thoughtfulness not seen in the previous study. “It
was a hyperemotional exercise for them,” Froh said. “Really, it was such an intense experience. Every time I reread those
letters, I choke up.”

But when Froh analyzed the data, again he ran into the same problem—overall, the kids hadn’t benefited from the intervention.
What was going on?

To solve it, Froh had to extract himself from another assumption.

He’d assumed that positive emotions, like gratitude, are inherently protective—they ward off problem behavior and prevent
troubled moods. He wasn’t alone in this assumption; in fact, it is the core premise of every scholar working in the field
of positive psychology.

Because of this, Froh had expected to find an inverse relationship between gratitude and negative emotions, such as distress,
shame, nervousness, hostility, and fear. Meaning, even if he couldn’t change the amount of kids’ gratitude the way Emmons
had, Froh still expected that some kids would feel a lot of gratitude, and others less or none at all. And he figured that
kids who felt very grateful and appreciative would be spared from the brunt of troubled moods. It should protect them. But
the data from his multiple studies didn’t support this. Kids high in gratitude suffered storms of emotion just as commonly
as the kids low in gratitude.

At that point, Froh’s thinking was sparked by a few scholars who were rethinking the hedonic treadmill.

“They argued that happiness is not a unitary construct,” Froh explained. “You can feel good and have well-being, but still
be nervous, still be stressed. You can feel better overall, but the daily stressors haven’t necessarily gone away. For a scholar,
this means that when you measure for positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction, they won’t all move in the same
direction.”

Froh looked very carefully at each band of data measuring the kids’ emotions during the second study. Overall, writing the
thank-you letters had little benefit, just like his prior study. But this aggregation masked what was really going on. It
turned out that some kids
were
benefiting from the exercise, while others weren’t. Together, their scores canceled each other out.

Those who benefited from the exercise were kids low in positive affect—kids who rarely experienced emotions like excitement,
hope, strength, interest, and inspiration. Writing the thank-you letter, and presenting it to a parent, coach, or friend,
did indeed fill them with gratitude and make them feel better about their lives. “Those are the kids who would really benefit
from gratitude exercises,” said Froh. “The children who usually appear unengaged, or not very alert. They’re rarely cheerful
or content.”

However—and this is the important twist—for those kids who normally experienced a lot of hope and excitement, Froh’s exercise
had the opposite outcome. It made them feel less happy, hopeful, and grateful.

Why was the gratitude exercise making them feel
worse?
What could possibly be
bad
about gratitude?

Well, for kids with a strong need for autonomy and independence, it might be demoralizing to recognize how much they are dependent
upon grownups. They might already feel like adults are pulling all the strings in their lives—controlling what they eat, what
they study, what they’re allowed to wear, and who they hang out with. And they’d rather feel self-reliant than beholden. Their
sense of independence might be an illusion, but it’s a necessary illusion for their psychological balance and future growth
into genuine independence. Their lack of gratitude might be the way they maintain the illusion that they are in control of
their own lives.

Froh is considering that his intervention led those children to realize just how much of their lives depended on someone else’s
whim or sacrifice. They didn’t feel happy that people were always there doing things for them. Instead, it made them feel
powerless.

The lesson of Jeffrey Froh’s work is
not
that society should simply give up on teaching children about gratitude. Certainly, some children do benefit from the exercises.
(In fact, Froh remains so committed to the idea that one of his grad students recently began pilot-testing a five-week gratitude
school curriculum.) However, for most kids, gratitude is not easily manufactured, and we can’t take it for granted that gratitude
should supersede other psychological needs just because we want it to.

The real value in Froh’s story, however, isn’t limited to his insight on gratitude. We’re including it here because we think
that his entire process is also illustrative of a much larger point.

When we looked back at all the enormity of research that this book was built on, an interesting pattern was apparent. Most
of the noteworthy insights into child development were revealed when scholars dropped the same two assumptions as Froh had.

Or, to restate that with more emphasis: a treasure trove of wisdom about children is there for the grasping after one lets
go of those two common assumptions.

The first assumption is that things work in children in the same way that they work in adults. To put a name to this reference
bias, let’s call it the Fallacy of Similar Effect.

In chapter after chapter of this book, great insights were gained when scholars set that assumption aside. Consider the research
into sleep. It was, for a long time, all too convenient to assume kids are affected by sleep loss the same way as adults—it’s
tiring but manageable. But when scholars decided to test that, they found that the magnitude of effect on kids was exponentially
damaging.

In the same way, we presumed that because measured intelligence is stable in adults, it’s also stable in young children. It’s
not—it plateaus and spurts. And because adults can pick up the implicit message of multiculturally diverse environments, we
assumed kids can, too. They can’t—they need to hear explicit statements about how wrong it is to judge people for their skin
color.

Here’s yet another example of this fallacy in operation. In our chapter about Tools of the Mind, we described how pretend
play is the way young kids master symbolic representation, which soon becomes necessary for all academic coursework. But this
crucial point never comes up when society debates the purpose of kids’ free time, or the necessity of school recess. Instead,
the arguments are always about exercise and social skills. That’s because for adults, playtime is a chance to blow off steam
and relax with friends. While those are certainly relevant to children too, our adult frame of reference has caused us to
overlook a crucial purpose of play.

The Fallacy of Similar Effect also helps explain why society got it wrong on praising children. In a variety of studies, praise
has been shown to be effective on adults in workplaces. Grownups like being praised. While praise can undermine a child’s
intrinsic motivation, it doesn’t have this affect on adults. It has the opposite effect: being praised by managers
increases
an adult’s intrinsic motivation, especially in white-collar professional settings. (Only in a few circumstances, such as
some blue-collar union workplaces, is praise interpreted as untrustworthy and manipulative.) It’s because we like praise so
much that we intuited lavishing it upon kids would be beneficial.

The second assumption to drop, as illustrated in Froh’s story, is that positive traits necessarily oppose and ward off negative
behavior in children. To name this bias, let’s call it the Fallacy of the Good/Bad Dichotomy.

The tendency to categorize things as either good for children or bad for children pervades our society. We tend to think that
good behavior, positive emotions, and good outcomes are a package deal: together, the good things will protect a child from
all the bad behaviors and negative emotions, such as stealing, feeling bored or distressed, excluding others, early sexual
activity, and succumbing to peer pressure.

When Ashley and I first began this book, we wrote out a wish list of Supertraits we wanted for kids—gratitude, honesty, empathy,
fairness. If we could sufficiently arm children with Supertraits such as these, we hoped that problems would bounce off them
just as easily as bullets bounced off Superman.

Then Victoria Talwar taught that us that a child’s dishonesty was a sign of intelligence and social savvy. Nancy Darling explained
how teens’ deception was almost a necessary part of developing one’s adolescent identity. Laurie Kramer’s research showed
us how blind devotion to fairness can derail sibling relationships. Patricia Hawley and Antonius Cillessen revealed how empathy
may be evil’s best tool: the popular kids are the ones who are the best at reading their friends—and using that perception
for their gain. And of course, there was that study about imprisoned felons having higher emotional intelligence than the
population as a whole.

It isn’t as if we’ve now abandoned our desire for children to acquire honesty and other virtues. (And we’re still telling
kids to “play nice” and say thank you.) But we no longer think of them as Supertraits—moral Kevlar.

The researchers are concluding that the good stuff and the bad stuff are not opposite ends of a single spectrum. Instead,
they are each their own spectrum. They are what’s termed orthogonal—mutually independent.