1. Judith Harris, The Nuture Assumption (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
2. Michael Rutter and David J. Smith, eds., Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends and Their Causes (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1995).
3. This was the conclusion of Professor David Shaffer, a leading researcher and textbook writer in developmental psychology, after reviewing the literature on peer influence. Commenting on the current research, he states “…it is fair to say that peers are the primary reference group for questions of the form ‘Who am I?’ ” (David R. Shaffer, Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence, 2nd ed. [Pacific Grove, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publishers, 1989], p. 65.)
4. The suicide statistics are from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in the United States and from the McCreary Centre Society in Canada. The statistics on suicide attempts are even more alarming. Urie Bronfenbrenner cites statistics that indicate that adolescent suicide attempts almost tripled in the twenty-year period between 1955 and 1975. (Urie Bronfenbrenner, “The Challenges of Social Change to Public Policy and Development Research.” Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research and Child Development, Denver, Colorado, April 1975).
5. Harper’s, December 2003.
6. Professor James Coleman published his findings in a book entitled The Adolescent Society (New York: Free Press, 1961).
1. John Bowlby, Attachment, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 46.
2. Robert Bly, The Sibling Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 132.
3. These were the findings when two scholars examined the results of ninety-two studies involving thirteen thousand children. In addition to more school and behavior problems, they also suffered more negative self-concepts and had more trouble getting along with parents. Their findings were published in Psychological Bulletin 110 (1991): 26–46. The article is entitled “Parental Divorce and the Well-being of Children: A Meta-analysis.” Indirectly related is a 1996 survey by Statistics Canada that found children of single parents much more likely to have repeated a grade, be diagnosed with conduct disorder, or to have problems with anxiety, depression, and aggression.
4. Research by the British psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter brings home this point. He found that behavioral problems were even more likely in children living in intact but discordant marriages than in children of divorce who were living in homes relatively free of conflict. (Michael Rutter, “Parent-Child Separation: Psychological Effects on the Children,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 12 [1971]: 233-256.)
5. Bly, The Sibling Society, p. 36.
6. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
1. John Bowlby, Attachment, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 377.
1. M. R. Lepper, D. Greene, and R. E. Nisbett, “Undermining Children’s Intrinsic Interest with Extrinsic Rewards: A Test of the Over-justification Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28 (1973):129-137.
2. Edward Deci, Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), pp. 18 and 25.
1. Howard Gardner, Developmental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1982).
2. The Globe and Mail, April 12, 2004.
3. Vancouver Sun, August 30, 2003.
1. A sample of such studies would include:
J. D. Coie and A. N. Gillessen, “Peer Rejection: Origins and Effects on Children’s Development,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 2 (1993):89-92.
P. L. East, L. E. Hess, and R. M. Lerner, “Peer Social Support and Adjustment of Early Adolescent Peer Groups,” Journal of Early Adolescence 7 (1987):153–163.
K. A. Dodge, G. S. Pettit, C. L. McClaskey, and M. M. Brown, “Social Competence in Children,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 51 (1986).
2. The most extensive study was the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in the United States, which involved some ninety thousand American teens. The study by psychologist Michael Resnick and a dozen of his colleagues was entitled “Protecting Adolescents from Harm: Findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health” and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September 1997. This is also the conclusion of the late Julius Segal, one of the pioneers of resilience research, as well as the authors of Raising Resilient Children, Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein. (R. Brooks and S. Goldstein, Raising Resilient Children [New York: Contemporary Books, 2001].)
3. Segal is quoted by Robert Brooks, Ph.D., of Harvard Medical School in his article “Self-worth, Resilience and Hope: The Search for Islands of Competence.” This article can be found in the electronic reading room of the Center for Development & Learning. The url address is www.cdl.org/resources/reading_room/self_worth.html.
4. John Bowlby, Loss (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 20.
1. Robert Bly, The Sibling Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. vii.
2. For a full discussion on the physiological aspects of human brain development and their relationship to psychological growth, see Geraldine Dawson and Kurt W. Fischer, Human Behavior and the Developing Brain (New York: Guildford Press, 1994), especially chapter 10.
3. Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 283.
1. This statistic was cited by Linda Clark of the New York City Board of Education, in an address to the 104th annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
2. These statistics were cited by Michelle Borba, author of Building Moral Intelligence, in an address to a national conference on safe schools, held in Burnaby, British Columbia, February 19, 2001.
3. The report by Barbara Cottrell is called Parent Abuse: The Abuse of Parents by Their Teenage Children. It was published by Health Canada in 2001.
4. This survey was conducted by David Lyon and Kevin Douglas of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and released in October of 1999.
5. The suicide statistics are from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control in the United States and from the McCreary Centre Society in Canada.
6. W. Craig and D. Pepler, Naturalistic Observations of Bullying and Victimization on the Playground (1997), LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution, York University, quoted in Barbara Coloroso, The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 66.
7. According to U.S. government statistics, alcohol is involved in 68 percent of manslaughters, 62 percent of assaults, 54 percent of murders or attempted murders, 48 percent of robberies, 44 percent of burglaries, and 42 percent of rapes. An online reference for these government statistics is www.health.org/govpubs/m1002.
1. Natalie Angier, “When Push Comes to Shove,” New York Times, May 20, 2001.
2. S. H. Verhovek, “Can Bullying Be Outlawed,” New York Times, March 11, 2001.
3. W. Craig and D. Pepler, Naturalistic Observations of Bullying and Victimization on the Playground (1997), LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution, York University, quoted in Barbara Coloroso, The Bully, the Bullied, and the Bystander (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 66.
4. Stephen Suomi is a primatologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Maryland. It is here that he studied the effects of rearing environments on the behavior of young rhesus macaques. His findings have been published in S. J. Suomie, “Early Determinants of Behaviour. Evidence from Primate Studies,” British Medical Bulletin 53 (1997):170–184. His work is also reviewed by Karen Wright in “Babies, Bonds and Brains” in Discover Magazine, October 1997.
5. Natalie Armstrong, “Study Finds Boys Get Rewards for Poor Behaviour,” Vancouver Sun, January 17, 2000.
6. Angier, “When Push Comes to Shove.”
1. Study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, reported inMacleans Magazine, April 9, 2001.
2. The Globe and Mail, April 24, 2004, p. A6.
3. Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert, “The Truth About Tweens,” Newsweek, October 18, 1999.
4. Our source for this is Dr. Helen Fisher’s book Anatomy of Love (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992). Dr. Fisher is an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History and is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards in recognition of her work.
5. These were the conclusions reached by Dr. Alba DiCenso of McMaster University and her colleagues (G. Guyatt, A. Willan, and L. Griffith) when assimilating and reviewing the findings of twenty-six previous studies from 1970 to 2000. This substantial study was published in the British Medical Journal in June of 2002 (vol. 324) under the title “Intervention to Reduce Unintended Pregnancies Among Adolescents: Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.”
1. One example is the authors’ home province of British Columbia, for example, where educators and school trustees were perplexed by a 2003 study that showed such a decline.
2. Fueling this peer-learning model in education circles is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the ideas of Jean Piaget, the great Swiss developmentalist, on cooperative learning. Piaget did indeed state that children learn best when interacting with one another. Not taken into account is the developmental perspective within which he was theorizing—the idea that a strong sense of self needs to emerge before peer interaction can facilitate true learning. According to Piaget, it was only as children came to know their own minds that interacting with one another would sharpen and deepen their understandings. He perceived authoritarian teachers as having a dampening effect on this process of cognitive individuation, at least in comparison with the more egalitarian relationship of peers. Piaget’s theories were formulated forty years ago in continental Europe where students were highly adult-oriented and the educational system hier-achical. In North America, Piaget’s idea was taken out of developmental context and applied in a completely different social milieu. Completely severed from its original moorings in adult attachment, the peer learning model has become the rage among educational theoreticians.
There is nothing wrong with Piaget’s idea in the proper setting: cooperative learning does stimulate thinking, but only with those children who have formed their own ideas about a subject in the first place and are capable of operating from two points of view simultaneously. Otherwise, the interaction serves to suppress budding individuality, discourage originality, and facilitate peer dependence.
1. Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), pp. 199–200.
2. Stanley Greenspan, The Growth of the Mind (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
1. This has been a consistent finding across numerous studies. An example of such a study is R. E. Marcon, “Moving Up the Grades: Relationship Between Preschool Model and Later School Success,” Early Childhood Research & Practice vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 2002).
2. This according to a special Time article (August 27, 2001) on home education. There is good reason for this apparently, as students educated at home achieve the highest grades on standarized tests and outperform other students on college entrance exams, including the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
3. Jon Reider was quoted in G. A. Clowes, “Home-Educated Students Rack Up Honours,” School Reform News, July 2000.
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, D.C., 2000.
5. Sarah E. Watamura, Bonny Donzella, Jan Alwin, Megan R. Gunnar, “Morning-to-Afternoon Increases in Cortisol Concentrations for Infants and Toddlers at Child Care: Age Differences and Behavioural Correlates,” Child Development 74 (2003): 1006–1021.
6. Carol Lynn Martin and Richard A. Fabes, “The Stability and Consequences of Young Children’s Same-Sex Peer Interactions,” Developmental Psychology 37 (2001): 431–446.
7. Early Child Care Research Network, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, “Does Amount of Time Spent in Child Care Predict Socioemotional Adjustment During the Transition of Kindergarten?” Child Development 74 (2003):976–1005.
8. Stanley I. Greenspan, “Child Care Research: A Clinical Perspective,” Child Development 74 (2003):1064–1068.
9. Eleanor Maccoby, emerita professor of developmental psychology at Stanford University, was interviewed by Susan Gilbert of the New York Times for her article “Turning a Mass of Data on Child Care into Advice for Parents,” published July 22, 2003.
10. This study is discussed in Cornell University professor Urie Bronfenbrenner’s book Two Worlds of Childhood (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1970).
11. The former textbook writer is Judith Harris and she makes this claim repeatedly in her book The Nuture Assumption (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
12. The first literature on self-esteem was unequivocal regarding the role of the parent. Carl Rogers and Dorothy Briggs—among many others—held that a parent’s view of the child was the most important influence on how a child came to think of him- or herself. Unfortunately, parents have been replaced as the mirrors in which children now seek a reflection of themselves.
Contemporary literature and research reflect only what is, not what should be or what could be. In our attempts to find out about children, researchers ask questions about where they get their sense of significance and about who matters most to them. The more peer-oriented children become, the more they indicate their peers as the ones that count. When this research is published, the results obtained from peer-oriented young subjects are presented as normal, without any attempt to place them into some kind of historical or developmental context. To further complicate the issue, self-esteem tests are constructed using questions that focus on peer relationships, closing the circle of illogic. Thus, psychologists are led astray by the skewed instincts of the children they are studying. The conclusions and recommendations derived from such research are tainted by the peer orientation dynamic that created the very problems the hapless researchers were trying to address!
1. The Historical Chronology of Intergeneration Programming in Ontario is published on the Internet by United Generations.
1. The facts and figures in this chapter and the next come primarily from the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Other sources include the social media entry of Wikipedia and Nielsen surveys and media use statistics.
2. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe, M.D., and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, M.D., Council on Communications and Media, “The Impact of Social Media on Children, Adolescents, and Families,” Pediatrics 124, no. 4 (2011):800–804.
3. Fuchun Lin, Yan Zhou, Yasong Du, Lindi Qin, Zhimin Zhao, et al., “Abnormal White Matter Integrity in Adolescents with Internet Addiction Disorder: A Tract-Based Spatial Statistics Study,” PLoS ONE 7, no. 1 (2012), plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0030253; Haifeng Hou, Shaowe Jia, Shu Hu, et al., “Reduced Striatal Dopamine Transporters in People with Internet Addiction Disorder,” Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology, 2012, hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2012/854524.
4. Leslie J. Seltzer, Ashley R. Prososki, Toni E. Ziegler, and Seth D. Pollak, “Instant Messages vs. Speech: Hormones and Why We Still Need to Hear Each Other,” Evolution & Human Behavior 33, no. 1 (January 2012):42–45.
5. Diana I. Tamir and Jason P. Mitchell, “Disclosing Information About the Self Is Intrinsically Rewarding,” PNAS 109, no. 21 (May 2012):8038–8043.
6. Recent surveys have confirmed the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future’s earlier report of a sharp drop-off in face-to-face family time in Internet-connected households, starting in 2007. From an average of twenty-six hours per week during the first half of the decade, family face time had fallen to just under eighteen hours per week by 2010. Dr. Jeffrey Cole, the director of Annenberg Center, stated that family time had been stable for decades previously.
7. Linda A. Jackson, Alexander von Eye, Hiram E. Fitzgerald, Edward A. Witt, and Yong Zhao, “Internet Use, Videogame Playing and Cell Phone Use as Predictors of Children’s Body Mass Index (BMI), Body Weight, Academic Performance, and Social and Overall Self-esteem,” Computers in Human Behavior 27, no. 1 (2011):599–604.
8. The sample consisted of 1,324 self-selected Australian Internet users (1,158 Facebook users and 166 Facebook nonusers), between the ages of eighteen and forty-four. According to the authors, Facebook users had significantly higher levels of family loneliness than Facebook nonusers. Tracii Ryan and Sophia Xenos, “Who Uses Facebook? An Investigation into the Relationship Between the Big Five, Shyness, Narcissism, Loneliness, and Facebook Usage,” Computers in Human Behavior 27, no. 5 (2011): 1658–1664.
9. These figures come from an article by Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” which appeared in the May 2012 issue of The Atlantic.
10. Wilhelm Hofmann, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Roy F. Baumeister, “What People Desire, Feel Conflicted About, and Try to Resist in Everyday Life,” Psychological Science 23, no. 6 (2012):582–588.
1. The ninth annual survey (2009) conducted by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future.
2. These figures are from a Donald Shifrin study conducted in 2010 for the American Academy of Pediatrics. Dr. Shifrin is a pediatrician in Washington State.
3. Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe discusses the report in an article by Doug Brunk, “Social Media Confuses, Concerns Parents,” Pediatric News 45, no. 2 (February 2011).
4. Michael A. Stefanone, Derek Lackaff, and Devan Rosen, “Contingencies of Self-Worth and Social-Networking-Site Behavior,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 14, no. 1–2 (January–February 2011):41–49.
5. Victoria J. Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr, and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds: A Kaiser Family Foundation Study (January 2010).
6. Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).