Restoring “Collective Efficacy” within Poor Neighborhoods

The extraordinary violence or at least the constant threat of it that plagues impoverished neighborhoods is perpetuated by a tiny minority .

It is nothing new.

It was first documented by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois in the mid-1890s while doing a survey of poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia as a post doctorate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

This was more than a decade before he would help found the NAACP and in 1899, his findings were published as a book by Penn entitled, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study.

Born at the end of the Civil War, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was perplexed by the enduring aftereffects of slavery which were deepened by the defacto racial segregation that replaced the “Black Codes” put in place as he was born.

Known as Jim Crow laws, they had even been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court during the time of his observations of black on black violence in neighborhoods that were segregated by both race and poverty.

In part, for contrast, Du Bois also went on to analyze enclaves of middle class and affluent blacks as he did in 1912 in Durham, North Carolina where I live, pointing to the influence of a more “tolerant and helpful community” even then one of the Bull City’s overarching traits.

It was the 50th anniversary of emancipation but Durham then, as it is now in so many other ways, was an outlier. Within months, the Ku Klux Klan was resurrected in Georgia and rapidly spread across the nation.

It has now been six decades since segregation was declared unconstitutional and nearly that long since he passed away at age 95 but the problems Du Bois first traced to slavery and then racial segregation still inhabit areas of deep poverty.

A new book I mentioned last week entitled, Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, is a series of sociological overviews longitudinally weaving together hundreds of studies such as Du Bois’s.

It is edited, as well as mostly written by Dr. Orlando Patterson, another black sociologist with roots at Harvard.

Patterson notes that the black homicide rate documented by Du Bois in the mid-1890s was “more than five times that of the white population.”

In the late 1980s, social historian, researcher and Haverford College professor Dr. Roger Lane took these metrics back to 1860 and then forward to the 1980s making the connection to what he referenced as a “cultural of violence long nurtured by exclusion and denial.”

By the 1960s, according to Patterson, the black homicide rate had grown to be “11.46 times that of the white rate.”  This discrepancy “peaked at 39.4 times in 1991 and has stabilized today at still about “seven times that of whites.”

Today the discrepancy among teens is more “eight times.”

The homicide offending rate today is also higher among black teenagers, “eight times the white teen rate of murders,” giving rise to awareness of black on black crimes.

While significant, Patterson does not see poverty alone as the cause although it is poor neighborhoods where both victimization and offending is highest, perpetrated by a razor thin proportion of people there.

While racism and stereotyping among police may play a role, the findings in Cultural Matrix suggest to me that a far greater possibility is that both the officers involved and the victims in these neighborhoods may have been experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.)

Patterson explains that “By a socially and culturally toxic environment we mean three things: the pervasive culture of violence and threat of physical danger already existing in a community of upbringing; weak neighborhood efficacy; and institutional neglect and incarceration.”

He explains neighborhood efficacy by citing studies defining “collective efficacy” such as “social cohesion among neighbors combined with their willingness to intervene on behalf of the common good.”

It can be more effective at instilling social controls than formal mechanisms such as police and courts, something the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, another social historian often pointed out.

According to Patterson, “Growing up in the presence of pervasive violence tends to make one violent…Black children in the inner cities perceive their world as a violent, threatening place….”

Studies show that “environmental trauma” leads to “fear conditioning” which leads to “anxiety disorders,” and “chronic anxiety” that can disrupt “the developing architecture of the brain.”

Our brains are wired to profile but if profiling is useful at all as a tool to solve this conundrum, it would not involve race or socio-economics at all.  It would go something like this:

Look for animal abuse to find abusers of children and domestic partners.  That will also be a predictor of violent offenders in the neighborhood.

For anyone truly concerned about social justice, this would also be a far more effective way to get involved.

Other “eyes and ears” should include solid waste collectors, water meter readers, cable and utility installers as well as animal control officers and of course, neighbors.

Earlier this month, Brookings published “10 facts about child well-being and health in America.”

One is that “In 2013, nearly 680,000 children were reported to states to be the victims of abuse or neglect” and “1,520 died from maltreatment…80% at the hands of their own parents.

Another is that “An estimated 13 percent of all U.S. children and 21 percent of black children will experience confirmed maltreatment at some time between birth and adulthood.”

Police need to be accountable but it is clear, according to Patterson’s book of studies, that so do parents and neighborhoods.

Poor neighborhoods must seem capable of being a war zone at time but it is crucial to remember that the vast majority living there are “friendlies.”

This even includes the vast majority of the between one and two-in-10 who are totally disconnected from society.

Repeat after me:

Look for animal abuse to find abusers of children and domestic partners.  That will also be a predictor of violent offenders in the neighborhood.

The Value of Fostering Early Memories

In the image in this essay, I am holding my middle sister who was born two years and ten months after me.

For three and a half years, it would be just the two of us.  I was three years and 10 months old when that family photo was taken.

It had become separated from thousand of other family photos and resurfaced in a box my mother left for me to organize in January when she died.

Nine months before my first sister was born, when I was two, my parents had very briefly separated.

All but four memories from before I was five or six, which is when my second sister came home, faded away because, as researchers have learned, before that age we really haven’t developed the capacity to retain them.

That’s why we are rarely able to recall memories of events before the age of three or four.

The three I can recall are flashes that were later filled in by my parents.

One is from around when that photo was taken at 3 years, 10 months when I recall being thrown over my dad’s shoulder while being carried into the house late one night after returning home from visiting our grandparents.

Another is when I was three and a half being pulled on a makeshift sled behind my parents who were on snowshoeing up to play cards one night with friends.

The third flash I recall from that period is when I was four and riding between my parents early one morning to get my tonsils removed in the new hospital in Ashton, the closest town to our ranch.

A fourth is being pushed to the floor boards of an old jeep I would later inherit as my first vehicle.  I was five and the Jeep was slowly overturning on the corner leading down to the ranch after my dad failed to negotiate a huge snow berm.

No one was hurt but I remember walking down to the ranch house where my mom was furious with my dad from fear.

I’m not unusual.  Researchers call our inability to remember much before we are three or four, “childhood amnesia.”  Theorists today believe we can recall information for weeks or months as babies.

But retaining memories involves linking them to verbal cues.

A study published a year ago by researchers at Emory University compared rates of forgetting among young children, college students and middle-aged adults.

It also replicated earlier research into childhood amnesia.

Results showed that in children the earliest memory tended to be 3.67 years.  There was no difference for different age groups or for college students or middle aged adults or even for older adults (ahem!)

In her coverage of that study and others, WSJ Work & Family columnist, Sue Shellenbarger explained that there are three kinds of memories we recall.

One relates is to events that help us feel continuity with who we are or how we’ve changed.  Another type serves to guide behavior such as things we want to avoid repeating.

A third type is “social-bonding memories” that involve relationships.

Shellenbarger continues in her review of these studies, “The ability to draw on all three types of memories predicts higher psychological well-being, a greater sense of purpose and more positive relationships.”

They also help shape better “choices in adolescence and adulthood.”

Parents, especially mothers but often fathers can aid these memories when they use a style that includes asking opened-ended questions versus just repetitive reminiscing.

My daughter manifests this elaborative style with my two grandsons.  These studies show that this is more worthwhile than just taking millions of photos.

One Last Gift

We just got back from a quick weekend trip to the Pacific Northwest.  Actually, it takes seven hours each way by commercial flight, about eight hours including the drive north to where one of my two sisters and brothers-in-law live in Snohomish County, Washington.

It is also where my Mom lived the last few months of her life.  The trip had been planned before her passing to celebrate what would have been her 86th birthday.  Instead it was now in part to honor her life but also so I could process a gift she had left with my name on it.

It left an impression on my grandsons to see how much the gift meant to me as I sorted through and re-boxed sixty pounds of family history papers and undiscovered family photos for shipment to Durham, North Carolina where we live.

Many of these items I had never seen before.

Included were the names of each of the schools she attended and her last report card, given just before she dropped out of high school to elope with my Dad who was leaving to join a tank battalion in WWII.

She was 16 years old and he had just turned 21.  Seeing the name of one of the witnesses who accompanied them up over the continental divide to Bozeman, where she listed her age as 18, gave me insight into the urgency they felt.

Frances Bowman had been married to my dad’s cousin and best friend, when six month before the B-26 in which he was flying as tail gunner was blown up by anti-aircraft fire during a bombing run just north of Venice, Italy to cut German Army supply routes.

To my parents at the time, life had obviously taken on a very short horizon.

Included in the material she left for me was a WWII ration card from where she had gone to live with her maternal grandmother Lizzie Messersmith in Denver where her youngest uncle, John, was playing and teaching guitar.

I found some humorous things as I sorted through the materials before re-boxing them for shipment including a note in my Mom’s handwriting reminding us upon her death to cancel auto shipments of shampoo etc. from QVC.

There were also several letters I had written home to my parents dated 1968 and postmarked in the months just before and after my 20th birthday that my daughter, and only child, got a kick out of reading.

It is priceless to have such a personal glimpse of your parents lives prior to your birth.

There was also a small card given to my parents immediately after my birth, labeled “Baby Boy Bowman” and giving the hospital room number, time of birth, weight at birth and the name of the doctor, Joe Hatch.

My parents had rushed fifty miles south of our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, down the Henry’s Fork River to the nearest hospital in Idaho Falls, just south of where it joins the South Fork to form the Snake River.

There is as much regarding my Dad’s history as hers in the papers she left for me to preserve for posterity, including a photo of him (shown in this post) when he was twenty one that she had carried in her wallet until they dissolved their 36 year union when all of us were grown and out of the nest.

Many of the photos dating to her youth include priceless negatives.

I have begun to do something my parents inspired with my grandsons now that it is clear they have a passion and respect for heirlooms, passing down a huge elk antler I found during my first cattle round up, a pocket knife my grandfather gave to me, currency and coins their great grandfather brought back from WWII.

Likewise, my Mom had already distributed some family artifacts to my sisters.

The huge box of papers and photos on their way cross country to me comes with a responsibility.  She wanted me to digitize them for broader access by my siblings and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren as well as posterity yet to come.

She also expected that I would use them to weave narratives around the ancestors they depict, including her final call to me reminding me to write the history of her youngest brother who was less than seven years older than me.

For good measure, she had also had my sister follow up to reinforce the promise I had made to my grandfather when my uncle was killed flying for the DEA in 1973 the year after I graduated from college and just before my daughter was born..

He was more like an older brother to me, teaching me to ride his hand-me-down, rusty, balloon-tired bike down the steep graveled hill that ran from the family cemetery my great-grandparents had deeded to the county to the gate into our ranch.

Working part time on the ranch one summer just after the Korean War, he had taught me how to build model airplanes and later interested me in marketing, a degree he earned at Utah State University in 1963 while working his way through school by delivering milk to homes each morning.

But flying a fighter plane was his passion, and he did just that as a highly decorated F-4 squadron leader while flying more than 300 missions over heavily defended North Vietnam during three tours during that war.

It was his phone calls and letters as well as heart to heart talks between tours that finally blunted my relentless drive to also fight in that war, warning me that American atrocities there were not limited to My Lai, turning me against that conflict while in college.

Within six years of that war’s end, an effort was made to recast that war as a noble lost cause, just as the South did immediately after the Civil War.

But today, we know from documentation in the book entitled Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam that my uncle was right.  Atrocities there were a failure of command and touched every unit deployed.

Our revulsion at the atrocities of ISIS and a commitment to face down this criminality should be fueled not only by righteousness but by a sense of our own past rationalizations.

I promise this is not the history I promised to write about my uncle who a few years after he left the Air Force became only the 18th DEA special agent killed in the line of duty as a pilot while fighting the Dominguez cartel.

Hidden away in the papers my mom left for me was his wallet from the day he crashed including papers he was using undercover and a photo of the way he looked taken for a special permit to fly back and forth across the border with Mexico.

He was not yet 31 years old but the history I will undertake will go far deeper than his heroism to the unrequited love of a black sheep including the flaws that make him so complex.

It may take me years to properly digitalize as well as mine the treasure my mom left for me and put it in context for future generations.  My uncle’s story will be one of many.

May I be as prescient and generous on behalf of future generations as she was.

Clearing My Head

My Mom died suddenly this week.  I’m heading out west to the funeral with Mugs, my English Bulldog, on a cross-country road trip to clear my head and process.

For today’s post, below is the obituary I wrote for her.  I’ll write more about this remarkable woman and her incredible influence on me in the future.  Right now I’m still too numb.

Dawn W. Vincent

(previously known as Dawn White Bowman)

(January 27, 1929 – January 19, 2015)

Dawn Vincent passed away in the wee hours of 19 January, 2015 with her daughter Myrle at her side in Everett, Washington near where she had been living in Mill Creek.

She was born Dawn LaBeth White to Mark and Deane White in American Fork, Utah near their home in Highland, the oldest of four children, two of whom survive her, Monte White and his wife Joyce and Eleanor Van Liew and her husband Bob.

During her high school years they moved near Ashton, Idaho where she met and married Reynol M. Bowman, a nearby rancher before he headed off to WWII. On his return, they had three children beginning in 1948, when she was just 19, all of whom survive them: Reyn Bowman, Raemarie Steele and Myrle Guthrie.

The family also lived in Connell, Spokane and Redmond, Washington as well as Idaho Falls, Idaho and Sandy, Utah. Dawn had a 37-year career working her way up from secretary to accountant and medical center manager.

Thirty-three years ago, she was remarried to W. Leon Vincent and became step-mother to Vicky, Dan, Jeff and Richard Vincent.

Dawn was a devout member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) and held the positions of chorister, Relief Society president and pianist. She and Leon served a mission to Cambodian immigrants south of Los Angeles and later served as temple workers in Utah and Washington State where they lived in retirement.

Her varied interests included gardening, reading, playing violin and piano, singing and genealogy.  She was also an incredible cook.

Dawn is also survived by two son-in-laws, Rick Guthrie and Dan Steele, seven grandchildren, Emily Haley, Mark and Megan Guthrie and Ben, Zach, Sam and Adam Steele as well as eight great-grandchildren, Oliver and Charlie Haley, Mattie, Ella and Liam Guthrie and Amelia, Ellie and Harper Steele.

She was a loving and devoted daughter, mother, wife, grandmother and great-grandmother. For countless reasons she will be greatly missed including her resilience, sense of humor, twinkling eyes, love of the lake, drive, determination, independence, grit and boundless optimism.

Graveside services will be held at the cemetery in Spanish Fork, Utah on Friday, January 30, 2015 at 1:00 p.m.

The Pivotal First 36 Months

Studies I’ve been reading on “rearing” have made me reflect on my own as well as how much they should inform solutions to problems in today’s headlines.

I was destined to be a fifth generation Idaho rancher and based on the fact that my mother dropped out of school when she was 16, it wasn’t likely I would go to college.

A mother’s education level is usually a strong predictor of a child’s educational aspiration, attainment and occupational success.  Still in her mid-twenties my mother taught herself to type and worked her way up to managing the practices of two doctors and two dentists.

She is a bit of an anomaly as that predictor goes, because she dropped out of high school to elope with my dad as he headed into WWII, staying near Camp Roberts, while he was training for a tank battalion and then spending the time he was overseas working in Denver.

I got off to a rocky start when I came along three years after the war due to an allergic reaction to formula that wasn’t resolved until I was six months old when during a blizzard my parents gave me whole milk.

It was an inauspicious start for my then fifth-generation rancher destiny as the only son of an only son.

So maybe that is why my fourth generation rancher father tried so hard from then through my preschool years to “breathe fire into me,” something I would also futilely try to do during my now concluded career for some co-workers.

Throughout my career, no one ever accused me of not having enough fire, but trying to “breathe fire” into someone never works, regardless of the education level.

People who aren’t ambitious or passionate or growth-oriented by then, also lack what the Japanese call Kaizen, a drive for continuous and never-ending improvement that may trace to their first 36 months of life.

Still in his 20s, my dad - whether he realized it or not – was trying in his own intense way to give me the “scaffolding” necessary to instill the handful of life-skills that must be largely inculcated during those first 36 to 60 months including rising to challenges and learning from mistakes.

My mom, who was in her early 20s, had a different type of intensity but in her own way also helped erect this “scaffolding,” especially through music.

It is clear that my parents incorporated many things into their parenting style.  The examples they set offset my mother’s lack of educational attainment, including a relentless focus on effort over talent and perseverance in the face of obstacles.

They weren’t what today we call “helicopter parents,” preferring a balance of unstructured play, especially in nature, to organized activities.  Nor did they ever tolerate a second of entitlement.

I can see now how much attention they also gave to learning from criticism, persistence, and embracing challenges.  All of these factors have now been confirmed by researchers in psychology to lead to high performance.

I am not aware of a statistical breakdown of adults in society with executive function and self-regulatory deficits (beyond attention-deficit) but I’ll bet kindergarten and elementary school teachers could give an educated guess.

Regardless of class status, today’s parents spend far too much time either making excuses for their children’s educational or work performance or greatly overestimating and placing too much emphasis on their intelligence vs. their effort and performance.

K-12 teachers are slightly more “engaged” and slightly less “actively disengaged” than Americans as a whole, but parenting may be partially responsible for why those who are not engaged miss 2.3 million more workdays annually than teachers who are.

As an aside, officials concerned with creating jobs such as Governor Pat McCrory in North Carolina, where I live, would do well to study Gallup’s reports on worker engagement.

Engaged workers report twice as much job creation as well as good customer ratings, profitability and productivity as well as lower turnover, fewer safety incidents, less theft, absenteeism and defects.

North Carolinians are not as engaged as we think we are.  Unfortunately, the Governor must deal with the fact that engagement among members of the General Assembly is no better than workers overall, fewer than 1-in-3 there with nearly 1-in-5 at cross-purposes even within his own party.

In my mother’s lifetime (my dad passed away shortly after 9/11,) she has seen her children and seven grandchildren leap from the working class backgrounds of my grandparents to middle and upper middle class.

Three have undergraduate college degrees, one a law school degree and another just accepted into top tier law schools, one with a Master’s and another with a PhD, and one who leapt directly from community college to a career in IT administration for the world’s largest video game concern.

More importantly, they are all hard workers and thrive in the workplace, engagement that is never guaranteed by educational attainment.

Americans believe in the individual-centered American Dream.  It is rooted in the belief that “all men [and women] are created equal” but science shows that there are many other more powerful influences that shape individual aspiration, none more important than those detailed in the book Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life.

According to the study, “two-thirds of society ultimately reproduce their parents’ level of educational attainment while about one-third take another path.”

But it is purely arrogant for those of us who transcended to delude ourselves into believing that it is due to our own willfulness.

A few months after I retired, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign identified something of a paradox regarding willfulness and willpower.

As an aside, nearly all of the campus is located in Urbana but Champaign was added to placate Champaign boosters-sound familiar?  A toxic sense of entitlement can invade communities as well (smile.)

It turns out that people willing to ask questions and those who question whether they will succeed, perform better than those who are convinced they will or who spend too much time on self-affirmation.

By the time we reach the ages of 3 to 5 years old, we learn the handful of building blocks needed for success in life known as “executive function and self-regulation skills.”

Dimensions of these skills include:

• “The ability to hold information in mind and use it.
• The ability to master thoughts and impulses so as to resist temptations, distractions, and habits, and to pause the think before acting.
• The capacity to switch gears and adjust to changing demand, priorities and perspectives.”

Self-regulation is the ability to override one response or behavior and replace it with a less common but more desired response.

The researchers who discovered the paradox of will power have already turned to the study of how what we say to ourselves “shapes the course of our behaviors,” the essence of self-regulation.

Parents such as mine gave me the “scaffolding” for developing these skills by challenging me and then stepping back and letting me try to manage things on my own and learn from my mistakes as well as helping me talk and think through what worked and what didn’t work.

I owe them everything.  We may all be “created equal” but those of us who think we are living the American Dream were fortunate enough to have these influences in those first few years.

We have an obligation to help those who didn’t, but the real solution is to focus society on remediation for kids between the years of 3 and 5 before it is too late.

I ran into more than a few people in responsible positions during my career with deficits or even dysfunction in one or more of the three skills noted above, some with high IQs.

Other than being irritating to those who had to work with them, they imposed a lot of lost productivity and long-term contributed to some very poor outcomes, but they were functional nonetheless.

None of us demonstrate mastery of executive function skills 100% of the time.  But our jails and prisons are populated by individuals who never learned them or were never given the chance to learn them because their parents never learned them.

A meta-analysis of studies published a few months ago by neuropsychology and criminology researchers in Amsterdam and led by Jesse Meijers found “a robust relationship between antisocial behavior and executive function deficits.”

In studies published in 2004 and 2008, researchers have determined that “impoverished rearing conditions” actually alter brain functions responsible for executive functions.  To many, we should be looking at rearing and parenting for solutions rather than law enforcement or the justice system.

For children in that 36 month window, reading this simple little 16-page guide is a way today’s new parents can learn how to teach them.  However, the guide won’t teach someone how to show by example or instill them in parents who missed out when they were young.

The more I live and learn, the more I realize how lucky I am and how unfortunate many are.

Maybe the American Dream is really about humility.

Through A Different Lens

Secretly, journalists had to be asking themselves why more people weren’t up in arms in Ferguson, Missouri last week as “lookie-there” reports circulated about the tiny number that were torching the private property of neighbors in response to a grand jury report.

I don’t mean to be cynical.

Virtually no one on the front lines in that highly competitive and breaking news-obsessed line of work has the luxury of mindfulness or even personal accountability when it comes to fueling the “rush to judgment” these story feeding frenzies create.

Nor do they seem to ever go near the issue of personal responsibility unless it is white collar crime and related to a fall from grace.

Take away the relatively small number among us on either side of that tragedy that made up their minds with far too little information and then further subtract those of us who seemed to have formed an opinion just to reinforce a larger point and we’re left with the vast majority of us who simply have compassion fatigue.

From the beginning, even after I passed through there at the height of turmoil last summer, none of the narratives in the Ferguson case fully made sense to me.

Not even the incredible job ProPublica did on crunching data seemed to go anywhere near deep enough to draw conclusions beyond better policing.  The topic of race seems to inhibit any effort to look for deeper social influences.

I’ve always got the impression I am slightly progressive leaning as an Independent because of my concern for social justice but it is increasingly clear at times like this that I may be among the 10% of voters who truly are straight up Independents.

Part of the reason is compassion fatigue brought on, in part, by well-meaning folks who want to do right but pile on seemingly without a clue.

Are there rogue cops?  Yes, but not nearly as many as there are on TV shows or in movies where the predictable narratives skew either that way or to superhuman.

Is everyone who acts out in response to authority, guilty of something?  Not unless you throw in those with mental disabilities and those who are just being jerks.

I’ve sat in enough rooms over the years with very well-meaning people, including those who are or have been underprivileged, to know that the latter have compassion fatigue too, but more so, they hate to be patronized.

I remember having a discussion about adopting a metric to measure closing gaps in school achievement when a county manager began to lecture me that studying and publicizing gaps would be racist.

A friend among one of the groups we were discussing quipped, “Are you kidding?  Do you really think we aren’t fully aware of the problem and want to do everything possible to close it?”

No one deserves to die but everyone involved plays a role when these things occur.  Focusing only on police restraint or latent racism by either party seems to fall short.

More than a decade ago, a friend of mine in education would often explain to groups that closing the achievement gap in schools had to take place between kindergarten and third grade because some children started out already more than a thousand books behind.

Unspoken though, because no one wanted to go there, was why were they so behind and how do we change that?

The seminal influence begins before birth (no pun intended.)

During the events in Ferguson, I reread a updated edition of a book I had read back then entitled, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life by Dr. Annette Lareau.

It is based on in-depth observations over time of 88 African-American and white families across the spectrum from middle class, working class and poor families with children ages 9 and 10, of which twelve are discussed in the book.

There were families of each race in each class but the definition of class was a combination of both household income and education level.

Lareau and her researchers also did a follow up ten years later.

She found that all of the parents wanted their children to be happy and to thrive but they fell along a spectrum of parenting about how to do that.

At one end, there is extreme “natural” parenting and at the other extreme “concerted cultivation” parenting.  In the extreme, both styles have pros and cons.

For example, during my pre-school years, my parents had a natural style but as I grew up, it evolved more toward concerted cultivation. But either way they were probably always more to the center of the spectrum.

I also had a number of friends raised at each end of the spectrum. Looking back now, my parents, one of whom did not complete high school and both of whom worked more than one job at times to pull themselves barely into the middle class, did a very good job.

Lareau wasn’t looking for an either/or answer but a correlation to what would predict an upwardly mobile trajectory for those in poor or working class households and what links there might be for keeping middle class children from downward mobility.

For a quick video overview of the times per week the researchers spent observing the children both in school and within the home as well as the follow up ten years later click here.

I have found that many people talk about this study without ever having read either edition of the book so I definitely recommend reading it cover to cover more than say an overview such as the one linked here.

The positive links she found to upward mobility or sustaining middle class status once achieved vs. cycling downward didn’t relate to race as much as they did social class and parenting style.

A third of Americans raised as middle class (income) fall out of the middle as adults including 38% of black men and a somewhat lower proportion of Hispanic men.  Achievement gaps on test scores play a role.

A lot of things can affect how things turn out for us as adults but Lareau’s studies are particularly fascinating because they provide insight into the interplay of parenting, neighborhood and institutional influences.

For parents who are poor or working class, a natural style of parenting becomes the default because the logistics of housing safety, clothing, doctors appointments, getting to bed and ready for school, not to mention putting food on the table often take precedence.

The natural parenting style tends toward directives and completely unstructured and undirected play time.  But it isn’t just less intensity about organized leisure or learning activities that differentiates the natural style.

There more likely isn’t the time to interact by answering questions with questions and exploring options such as certain behaviors or coaching on how to deal with authority and institutions or how to question adults….or reading books.

Clearly the boys in Ferguson not only knew how to blow off authority and social norms but apparently may have also over reacted.  It doesn’t excuse shooting them either, but there has to be some accountability on both sides.

Police restraint is not the panacea.

Of course, many of us see when the concerted cultivation style goes awry, e.g. domineering helicopter parents, a sense of entitlement that it is the job of parents to make sure a child is never bored and far too little unstructured time.

But the true value of the concerted cultivation style is having conversations with children where they explore feelings, thoughts and options as well as learn to learn by reading books well in advance of formal schooling.

Any effort to ensure social justice, including addressing poverty, needs to be informed by Dr. Lareau’s research and others.  She talks about race and distrust of the police regardless of class.  But she sees more potential solutions looking at class.

My friends on the left often point to the robotic, lockstep manifest by many on the right and they are right to be concerned.  But even among those deeply concerned with social justice it is important to guard against becoming brittle, rigid and kneejerk in its pursuit.

And those who react forcefully to the notion that poverty can become a culture need to come to the realization that not everything is about race.

More Than Giving Thanks – The Key to Willpower

During my adult lifetime, the “holiday” I most looked forward to during this time of year was January 2nd when things finally got back to normal.

Yes, you wouldn’t know it by my behavior as a grandparent, but I was a holiday curmudgeon during my now-concluded, nearly forty-year career.  But if I had a favorite holiday, it was Thanksgiving.  Short, sweet, to the point and with modest expectations.

It is overly simplistic to tie attitudes about the holidays to an individual’s upbringing.  But it seems to me that many adults who take holiday preparations to extremes are trying to compensate for childhood memories, either disappointing or the lack thereof, while many who are turned off when it comes to holidays have wonderful memories to look back on.

According to the recent in-depth American Values Survey, by 73 to 1, our society believes that family has the greatest impact on our values, ten times greater than schools.

More than 80% feel that they have it much tougher today as parents than their parents did, 22% of American parents are focused on making kids happier today, while 76% are focused on helping their kids be successful in the future.

One important ingredient for any future success is willpower which many believe cannot be taught, or in my experience, established in adults once they become part of the workplace.

However, a new study by researchers at the University of Rochester finds that willpower is strongly linked to a child’s ability to find trust in and/or rely on parents and other adults to keep promises and commitments, a prescient irony belatedly gleaned by many of us from the haunting lyrics of the 1974 hit Cat’s in the Cradle, performed and written by the late Harry Chapin based on a poem written by his wife Sandy.

It turns out that keeping promises and other commitments to children is also linked to the ability to defer immediate gratification.  Maybe it also has something to do with the way Americans view “struggle” compared to Asian parents.

I also wonder if even as adults, being let down by those to whom we entrust the safeguarding of our society is at the root of why the percentage of American trusting in the rewards of hard work has fallen to 70% including 64% among Democrats and 66% among Independents.

Only 44% of Americans now believe that our country’s traditional value of “upward mobility/ability to pull oneself up by bootstraps” contributes to America having stronger values than other places in the world.

Only 36% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 today believe that the free enterprise system contributes to strong American values and only 20% of Americans overall believe that people are generally altruistic vs. motivated by self interest.

Only 47% of Americans attribute the weakening of American values to “apathy/lack of strong work ethic,” compared to 63% who attribute this to “political corruption” and 61% to the “influence of money in politics” which brings us back to trust in the system when the rewards for working hard are trumped by special interests.

Giving thanks is not only a holiday, as declared by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, during our nation’s deepest division and an ancient tradition, but a secret scientists have identified as a prophylactic to depression and the blues throughout the year.

Hug your kids, your grandkids and great grandkids on this holiday, but also remember that keeping promises and commitments and being reliable are pivotal to future success.

But this doesn’t should not be construed to mean “overprotection” – a mistake which is often made today by what has become known as “helicopter parents” who choose to hover over their offspring rather than instill values which will contribute to their success in the future.

The key to success is failure and researchers who have proven this to be true find it far more directly linked to success than intelligence.

I wish that everyone could be as fortunate as I was to find my life’s work as described by Bold Academy-founder Amber Rae on this Fast Company blog, both during my now concluded career and in retirement by recognizing that:

1. It doesn't feel like work.
2. You are aligned with your core values.
3. You are willing to suffer.
4. You experience frequent flow.
5. You make room for living.
6. Commitment is an honor.
7. The people who matter notice.
8. You fall asleep exhausted, fulfilled, and ready for tomorrow.

Parenting Styles, Narcissism and the Decline in Empathy

Researchers have noted that people born in the late 1940s and 1950s, when I was, have higher empathy scores than those born in the late 1880s such as my maternal grandfather.

They also found no apparent direct correlation between parental empathy and child empathy, so how empathetic my peers and I are may have nothing to do with the experiences of our parents who were most likely humbled by the Great Depression and World War II.

However, some types of parenting did appear to predict empathy levels in their children when the researchers from the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research looked at 72 different studies conducted from 1979 to 2009 on college students showed that levels of empathy have noticeably declined.

The researchers looked in particular at the areas of “dispositional empathy” which included the following:

“Empathic Concern(EC) measures people’s other-oriented feelings of sympathy for the misfortunes of others and, as such, is a more emotional component of empathy...”

“Perspective Taking (PT) is a more cognitive or intellectual component, measuring people’s tendencies to imagine other people’s points of view…”

My take-away from the analysis is that today’s hyper-competitive, “helicopter parents” who narcissistically pressure kids to succeed by even doing such things as “red-shirting” kindergarteners so they will be physically and mentally ahead of peers may be contributing even more to the fall-off in empathy among their off-spring.

According to the researchers, the literature surrounding all of these studies, when taken together, suggests that the decline in empathy might be caused by these changes in parenting styles in particular:

• Parents who are more controlling and less warm and responsive

 

• Parents who are less focused  on teaching children to imagine others’ feelings

 

• Parents less willing to promote their children’s emotional expressiveness

 

• Parents less tolerant of dependent behavior

 

• Parents more accepting of their children’s aggression

 

• Parents unhappy with the sacrifice that parenting requires