As John Gottman, the psychologist who led the research, explained, "Parents modify their children's vagal tone"—a measure of how easily triggered the vagus nerve is—"by coaching them emotionally: talking to children about their feelings and how to understand them, not being critical and judgmental, problem-solving about emotional predicaments, coaching them on what to do, like alternatives to hitting, or to withdrawing when you're sad." When parents did this well, children were better able to suppress the vagal activity that keeps the amygdala priming the body with fight-or-flight hormones—and so were better behaved.
It stands to reason that the key skills of emotional intelligence each have critical periods extending over several years in childhood. Each period represents a window for helping that child instill beneficial emotional habits or, if missed, to make it that much harder to offer corrective lessons later in life. The massive sculpting and pruning of neural circuits in childhood may be an underlying reason why early emotional hardships and trauma have such enduring and pervasive effects in adulthood. It may explain, too, why psychotherapy can often take so long to affect some of these patterns—and why, as we've seen, even after therapy those patterns tend to remain as underlying propensities, though with an overlay of new insights and relearned responses.
To be sure, the brain remains plastic throughout life, though not to the spectacular extent seen in childhood. All learning implies a change in the brain, a strengthening of synaptic connection. The brain changes in the patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder show that emotional habits are malleable throughout life, with some sustained effort, even at the neural level. What happens with the brain in PTSD (or in therapy, for that matter) is an analog of the effects all repeated or intense emotional experiences bring, for better or for worse.
Some of the most telling of such lessons come from parent to child. There are very different emotional habits instilled by parents whose attunement means an infant's emotional needs are acknowledged and met or whose discipline includes empathy, on the one hand, or self-absorbed parents who ignore a child's distress or who discipline capriciously by yelling and hitting. Much psychotherapy is, in a sense, a remedial tutorial for what was skewed or missed completely earlier in life. But why not do what we can to prevent that need, by giving children the nurturing and guidance that cultivates the essential emotional skills in the first place?
PART FIVE
EMOTIONAL LITERACY
15
The Cost of Emotional Illiteracy
It began as a small dispute, but had escalated. Ian Moore, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, and Tyrone Sinkler, a junior, had had a falling-out with a buddy, fifteen-year-old Khalil Sumpter. Then they had started picking on him and making threats. Now it exploded.
Khalil, scared that Ian and Tyrone were going to beat him up, brought a .38 caliber pistol to school one morning, and, fifteen feet from a school guard, shot both boys to death at point-blank range in the school's hallway.
The incident, chilling as it is, can be read as yet another sign of a desperate need for lessons in handling emotions, settling disagreements peaceably, and just plain getting along. Educators, long disturbed by school children's lagging scores in math and reading, are realizing there is a different and more alarming deficiency: emotional illiteracy.1 And while laudable efforts are being made to raise academic standards, this new and troubling deficiency is not being addressed in the standard school curriculum. As one Brooklyn teacher put it, the present emphasis in schools suggests that "we care more about how well school children can read and write than whether they'll be alive next week."
Signs of the deficiency can be seen in violent incidents such as the shooting of Ian and Tyrone, growing ever more common in American schools. But these are more than isolated events; the heightening of the turmoil of adolescence and troubles of childhood can be read for the United States—a bellwether of world trends—in statistics such as these:2
In 1990, compared to the previous two decades, the United States saw the highest juvenile arrest rate for violent crimes ever; teen arrests for forcible rape had doubled; teen murder rates quadrupled, mostly due to an increase in shootings.3 During those same two decades, the suicide rate for teenagers tripled, as did the number of children under fourteen who are murder victims.4
More, and younger, teenage girls are getting pregnant. As of 1993 the birthrate among girls ten to fourteen has risen steadily for five years in a row—some call it "babies having babies"—as has the proportion of unwanted teen pregnancies and peer pressure to have sex. Rates of venereal disease among teenagers have tripled over the last three decades.5
While these figures are discouraging, if the focus is on African-American youth, especially in the inner city, they are utterly bleak—all the rates are higher by far, sometimes doubled, sometimes tripled or higher. For example, heroin and cocaine use among white youth climbed about 300 percent over the two decades before the 1990s; for African-American youth it jumped to a staggering 13 times the rate of twenty years before.6
The most common cause of disability among teenagers is mental illness. Symptoms of depression, whether major or minor, affect up to one third of teenagers; for girls, the incidence of depression doubles at puberty. The frequency of eating disorders in teenage girls has skyrocketed.7
Finally, unless things change, the long-term prospects for today's children marrying and having a fruitful, stable life together are growing more dismal with each generation. As we saw in Chapter 9, while during the 1970s and 1980s the divorce rate was around 50 percent, as we entered the 1990s the rate among newlyweds predicted that two out of three marriages of young people would end in divorce.
AN EMOTIONAL MALAISE
These alarming statistics are like the canary in the coal miner's tunnel whose death warns of too little oxygen. Beyond such sobering numbers, the plight of today's children can be seen at more subtle levels, in day-to-day problems that have not yet blossomed into outright crises. Perhaps the most telling data of all—a direct barometer of dropping levels of emotional competence—are from a national sample of American children, ages seven to sixteen, comparing their emotional condition in the mid-1970s and at the end of the 1980s.8 Based on parents' and teachers' assessments, there was a steady worsening. No one problem stood out; all indicators simply crept steadily in the wrong direction. Children, on average, were doing more poorly in these specific ways:
• Withdrawal or social problems: preferring to be alone; being secretive; sulking a lot; lacking energy; feeling unhappy; being overly dependent
• Anxious and depressed: being lonely; having many fears and worries; needing to be perfect; feeling unloved; feeling nervous or sad and depressed
• Attention or thinking problems: unable to pay attention or sit still; daydreaming; acting without thinking; being too nervous to concentrate; doing poorly on schoolwork; unable to get mind off thoughts
• Delinquent or aggressive: hanging around kids who get in trouble; lying and cheating; arguing a lot; being mean to other people; demanding attention; destroying other people's things; disobeying at home and at school; being stubborn and moody; talking too much; teasing a lot; having a hot temper