Young Americans

Free-range kids part 2: Put that mommy in jail!

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:29:07 +0000

In my last post, I discussed the latest avatar of fashionable parent anxiety, the free-range kid. I got all worked up about the issue (well, I still am worked up, thus Part 2) after reading the report by Jan Hoffman in the New York Times Sunday Styles section ("Why Can't She Walk to School?" New York Times, 9/13/09) about the great anxiety parents feel when trying to decide whether to let their children go about in public without parental supervision. In this post, I address what I call the busybody option: how to resolve this great anxiety by punishing other parents.

I know these decisions are not easy, and as I said last time, I respect a wide range of parental choices about accompanying or not accompanying their kids while they go from place to place. But unfortunately, many parents seek to resolve their own anxiety, and reassure themselves about the rightness of their own choices, by trashing the choices made by other parents. In the Hoffman article in the Times, we were reminded of the nation-wide tide of opprobrium heaped upon Lenore Skenazy when she went public with her audacious choice of letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone. And Hoffman also quotes other, less famous, but equally obnoxious examples:

(speaking of Lori Pierce, a mother in Columbus, Georgia): "Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer had acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk."

Oh, really? Yes, of course, if "something untoward" had happened to her child, like stranger abduction, which is a little more likely but not much more likely than alien abduction, Mrs. Pierce would have felt worse than terrible. One hopes that if her son really had been abducted, the authorities would not have wasted precious time and resources prosecuting Mrs. Pierce for child endangerment. But if the authorities were so inclined, one hopes they would also, in the interest of fairness, have prosecuted every parent whose child was injured on ski slopes, who got a concussion on the soccer field, or who got a life-changing injury at cheerleading practice. For example, the Consumer Product Safety Commission data for 2007, which estimates injuries nationwide based upon extrapolations from a sample of hospital data, estimated 111,018 ski injuries during that year, including 5,138 listed as "hospitalized or dead on arrival." (http://www.cpsc.gov/neiss/2007highlights.pdf) Of these estimated ski injuries, 27,660 were to children age 5 to 14. And don't even get me started on cheerleading.

Have we seen articles in the national press implying that citizens should intervene- call the authorities, including the police or child welfare authorities- when they see a child on the ski slopes? Nope. How come? Well, I guess people are pretty sure that skiing is a good thing, and if something untoward happens while a child is skiing, then it is bad luck or bad karma. It is a tragedy, to be sure, but a tragedy that invokes explanations on the order of "you never know how fragile life is until one is lost" rather than explanations like "that mommy should be thrown in jail." Jail is reserved for mommies who let their children walk to school.

One might observe here that ordinary citizens' assessment of what constitutes child endangerment is slightly out of whack. Mandatory child abuse reporting laws encourage ordinary citizens to drop a dime when they think kids are being abused, but have you ever talked to child welfare authorities about what they actually count as abuse? Believe me, letting a child walk to school is not on the list. Real child abuse is all too common, and investigators having to deal with such complaints are way too busy to drop everything and open a file on parents who allow their kids to take a bus. (I won't terrify you, gentle reader, with an account of the complaints I have had to make, or have heard about in the course of an ordinary clinical practice.)

What is going on here? Anxiety reduction, that's what. If you are not sure about a parenting decision, it always helps to have the uniform support of your community. Indeed, one of the ways parents know what to do in difficult situations is to ask their peers, an excellent idea in almost all circumstances. But the dark side of this parenting community is the busybody option: making sure your community is uniform in its opinion by punishing dissenters. After all, dissent makes your job harder, right? If you are preaching abstinence for your 16-year-old daughter while one of her friend's moms is giving her birth-control pills, you are going to have to answer some tough questions. You might even have to ask yourself some tough questions. Similarly, if your kid wants to walk to school but you have told him it is too dangerous, your job will be a lot harder when his friends start to walk to school unsupervised. Time to exercise the busybody option: threaten to call the cops on your neighbor to make your job easier.

Here's the deal, folks: we live in a multi-cultural, pluralistic society. If you think pluralism is a good thing, good for you- you are a real American after all. But pluralism means tolerating not just other people's skin colors, but also other people's values. You don't have to live by their values; you can still walk your kids to the bus stop or drive them to school as long as you want. But you do have to tolerate diversity in child-rearing values, within the limits of the law. The law doesn't let 8-year-olds drive a motor vehicle, no matter what. And the law doesn't allow parents to beat their kids. But the law does allow parents to let a 10-year-old boy walk a mile to soccer practice. If you think that is against the law, think again.

Next time: Free-range kids part 3: "She's so beautiful, who wouldn't want to steal her?"

Free-range and proud?

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:58:53 +0000

Ahhh, Sunday Styles. The gift that keeps on giving.

If you're dying to know what's new in the hyper-parenting set, there's nothing like the Sunday Styles section in the New York Times. It is a style section, after all, so it tries to keep up with the buzz. It tries to feel the pulse of the (upper-middle-class, East Coast, anxiety ridden) planet. It tries to lasso the Zeitgeist and bring it down like a wildebeest. So, for those of us who aren't always in that hunt, it is a great gift.

Am I being sarcastic? A little, because I think parenting is a task that should be beyond, or above, fashion. Parenting is a task best performed with gentle delivery but firm conviction; if you don't know what you're doing, you'd better go to your therapist, your mother, or your pastor and figure out why it's so hard to be sure of anything. But people in the Sunday Styles parenting articles are never sure of anything; they just fret about the one and only "right way" to parent, which always eludes them. Did it ever occur to any of these people that there is no one right way?

The case in point this week: free-range kids. ("Why Can't She Walk to School?" by Jan Hoffman, New York Times, 9/13/09). The article reminds us that it was not too long ago that Lenore Skenazy set her 9-year-old kid free by himself in the New York City subways, and then wrote the book Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, based upon her actions as a parent and the furious public reactions to her actions. Skenazy encountered the proverbial firestorm of condemnation about what a terrible mother she was, and the parenting world is still talking about it. How do we decide when to let our kids go places alone? How old is old enough? How much protection is overprotection, and how much protection is prudence? Hard questions, to be sure. Just last month I was interviewed on the subject of "free-range kids" by a very sweet reporter from Philadelphia, who interviewed me for an hour and listened with interest to my relatively complicated views on the subject, and then quoted me in the paper in a sentence (which, by the way, made me sound like a nitwit. I understand space limitations, really I do, but I speak with all my heart to all you parenting reporters out there when I say: if you're really only going to use a sentence and make me sound like a nitwit, don't keep me on the phone for an hour, okay?)

I am so exercised about this article on free-range kids that I am going to address it in a series of posts. Today, I just want to re-state the obvious: parenting is about values, not facts or rules. One mommy-blogger in the Sunday Styles article, complaining about the difficult choices parents face, asked sadly, "What are the rules?" Dear Mommy: there are no rules. There are choices made as a result of values, but values are not the same as rules.

In this case, a parent has to make a tough choice between assuring kids' safety on one hand, and encouraging their independence and self-confidence on the other. You can drive the kid to school until he can drive himself; you can wait with her at the bus stop until she is as big as you are. Okay. If you are the kind of parent who needs to do that to be able to sleep at night, then go ahead. "Better safe than sorry" is a perfectly respectable value statement.

And, if you value self-reliance, and you would feel terrible if you fostered a child who was not self-reliant, then you choose the free-range option. You decide that you can live with a little worry, and that the risks are manageable, but having an over-dependent child is not manageable, for you. So you decide to give your child more freedom and independence earlier, based upon that value. Also perfectly respectable.

The point is you make a choice. And when you choose Option A, you give up Option B. What many of these parents are saying is "It is so hard to live in a world where one has to know oneself and one's values and make a choice. I want a world where I don't have to make a choice. I want a world in which I can have a completely independent, self-reliant child and I never have to let him take any risks!" Put more simply, this is a way of saying "I want it all!"

If I sound out of patience, I am. Some years ago, after the terrible tsunami in South Asia, I was called and interviewed by a parenting reporter (this one in Boston) who wanted to know how to help parents talk to their kids about it. It seems she was talking to a bunch of parents who wanted their kids to feel compassionate about the plight of tsunami victims, but who also did not want their kids to feel anxiety about living in a world where tsunamis happen. They did not want their kids to feel insulated, and possibly callous regarding the plight of the world's poor, nor did they want their kids to feel anxious, guilty or upset about....the plight of the world's poor. So, I was asked, "What's the right way to talk about this with our kids?" Sorry. There is no right answer. One can choose to help children feel totally safe and protected from the terrible realities of life on Earth (and risk them turning out to be a little smug), or one can choose to clue them in (and take the risk they will decide to be missionaries by the time they're 13). One can, of course, try to aim for the middle ground: that's the place to aim for. But the wish to have rules which guarantee that kids will feel both things (totally safe and totally compassionate) is just another way of saying, "I want it all! I want everything! I want the chocolate ice cream and the vanilla! I want the BMW and the Saab! I want public school and private school! I want the buzzy-buzz-buzz of Manhattan and the comfy-cozy-crickets-chirping-me-to-sleep of Outer Greendale!"

While wanting it all is an understandable wish (especially in these United States) it is not really a grown-up wish. Parenting is about being grown up and taking responsibility for another human life. That's what it is. Trying to get an expert to tell you the one right thing to do, the thing that will let you have it all, is an abdication of that responsibility. This task requires knowing who you are, knowing who your child is, and doing the best you can, and living with the consequences. No expert- not me, not anyone- can do that for you.

Next post: reducing your own anxiety by exercising the busybody option, or, how to impose your own values on everyone else.

Innocence corrupted...again

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:31:30 +0000

This summer brought us a clever ad for a wireless company showing an eager mom and dad humiliating their kids in public: mom posting way too many "I love you" messages on the daughter's Facebook page; dad posting meaningless tweets from his mobile phone. It resonates with all of us, of course, because of what we have all experienced in the last two years. Young people, who, as early adopters, used to own social networking spaces, now have to share them with their later-adopting but relentlessly intrusive elders. Social networking sites on the Internet, including MySpace, Facebook, and more recently Twitter, used to be the special province of the under-25 set, and what the kids shared with each other was, they believed, a free space, sheltered from the prying and supervising eyes of parents. Now that we have invaded the space, young people, at least the ones I talk to, feel a sense of loss: their thing, their adult-less community, where they could be free with each other without danger, without predation, and without censure, is lost forever. We, the adults, couldn't stand being left out of their community, but what they valued about it was precisely that we were left out.

Sound familiar?

I was thinking of how this particular complaint resonates with the boomer generation of which I am a part. I recently finished the wonderful new Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice, which is set in Los Angeles during the days of the Charles Manson murder trial in 1970. Pynchon gets it all just right: our feelings about the love thing, the dope thing, the music thing, the anti-capitalist thing, all of which were our psychic reality for a little while. Hippie freaks really believed themselves to be a special, more evolved community who never exploited each other, who shared love and dope and everything else with a glorious innocence that our parents- because they were not freaks- could never understand. And, so the myth goes, because they could not understand it, they took it over, and spoiled it. They spied on, co-opted, criminalized, commodified, and finally brought the heel of the police state down on it. And we were kicked out of our self-created Eden.

Sure, it's a myth. But it resonates deeply with people of a certain age. The myth of the lost parent-free (and, therefore, in some way, reality-free) paradise has real power. Adolescents always know that the world they create with their peers has to be superior to the world their parents live in...they just know it. The irony, of course, is that we have this in common with our children (or in some cases grandchildren): we screwed up their paradise, just like our parents screwed up ours. Who cares if it is all a fantasy? I mean, in real reality, neither the pre-boomer-invasion Internet nor the Summer of Love were really all that perfect. But psychic reality is usually more real than real reality. And in psychic reality, we have one big thing in common: we got screwed.

We are always amused

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:41:22 +0000

Well, it's been a while, but your faithful correspondent has been doing fieldwork! That means in this case I have been spending time with my baby relatives, observing their little ways "up close and personal," as they used to say on TV. My own babies are long since grown up, in body if not always in spirit, so I always relish the opportunity to watch young families living their lives in real time. In the present case, spending some days at a vacation house with four children under the age of six was a real eye-opener (and a real ear-opener, especially in the wee hours of the morning...but I digress).

One of the things that has changed- gradually changed, but changed nevertheless, in the last decade- is the fact that new equipment for young is so amusing. I offer here a few examples: a plastic drinking bottle equipped with a cover and a straw designed for easy drinking. But it is also designed with a cute little whistle that makes a cute noise every time the child stops sucking the straw. The cute noise has no function, except to be cool, to amuse, to add a little fillip of entertainment to the pedestrian business of drinking from a cup.

Then there are the shoes, more and more of which do non-shoe things: they light up, they make little musical noises, they do all kinds of things to amuse. After a while they are so amusing they can actually get a little boring: they are kind of like bad comics who tell the same jokes over and over again, the Henny Youngmans of the kid-shoe world. This is just to say that they are not yet programmable, with a set of entertainment options and a "shuffle" function, although it is only a matter of time before children do have such shoes. Right now, they still do a lot more than shoes have ever done, even if they do it over and over.

Is this something new? In degree, yes, but not in kind. Our basic education in art history informs us of all the utilitarian objects that have been made amusing over the centuries: pitchers in the shapes of frogs, knives with snake handles, and so on. Upper-class people (and upper middle-class people, when they appeared on the historical stage) have always had a taste for the amusing object: where would P. G. Wodehouse be without his ubiquitous cow-creamers? People have always found it diverting to blur the lines between the functional and the decorative, and as long as the object remains truly functional (as a pitcher, or a knife, or a creamer, or a plastic cup or a shoe) who cares? Contemporary technology just makes it cheaper, and therefore easier and more widespread, for kids' stuff to call attention to itself.

But does it change the kid? Are we subtly raising the bar for everyday objects, or for our children's own expectations of amusement? Will they slowly come to expect every single object- every pencil, every cup, every sock- to contribute to the general hilarity? Will they be more easily bored? Hard to say. Kids being kids, they may eventually rebel against the Baroque splendor of their childhood objects: the popularity of plainer-than-thou American apparel V-necks among post-adolescent hipsters may be just the kind of thing we would expect.

I was still mulling this over when we went to a special dinner without the charming and delightful children. But then the lovely waitress announced the dessert choices: "Tonight we're doing a triple chocolate mousse with a salted-pretzel crust and candied hazelnuts; a raspberry polenta cake with home-made sweet-corn ice cream; and a crème fraiche panna cotta with local blackberries and blackberry coulis," and I thought maybe I had my answer.

Rest in peace, Developmental Psychology

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:56:37 +0000

Well, it has been a while since we last spoke. I was teaching! It is an endeavor that takes time, especially if one aspires to do it well. I had a great term at Bennington College this spring, and plan to write more in future posts about my course on the psychology of electronic communication technology (entitled, in my usual grandiose fashion, "Thinking with the World Mind.")

But, when we last spoke, I was mourning the death of my dear friend and mentor, Developmental Psychology. DP, as we called him or her (like all great ideas, he/she was beyond gender), was accidentally killed off by one Miss Watson, a kindergarten teacher I know here in western Massachusetts, during this last school year. It seems Miss Watson, a new enthusiastic teacher who apparently had never heard of DP, was just trying to do her job. But her job, as she understand it, is to get children ready to learn. Children in Miss Watson's kindergarten class spend a lot of time sitting in their seats, and not much time playing or walking around. You see, they're getting ready for first grade. Miss Watson knows that first graders spend a lot of time sitting in their seats, so she tries to help her kindergarteners get ready for first grade by making them spend most of their time in their seats. (This is the logic of getting ready to ride a two-wheeled bike by riding a two-wheeled bike, or getting ready to eat by eating; preparation is simplistically equated with the thing being prepared for.)

Enter the little girl I'll call Maria (in honor of Maria Montessori; see last post), whose most cherished possession is her teddy bear we'll call Donald (in honor of Donald Winnicott, the child psychoanalyst who wrote so movingly about teddy bears as transitional objects). Maria is in kindergarten, but she is not really all that ready to sit in her seat all day long. As DP once said (but not to Miss Watson), "All children develop at different rates," and Maria is one of those who is developing a little more slowly when it comes to sitting still for long periods of time. Maria is also having a tough time at home: her parents are unemployed, and her older sister is chronically ill, and family strain is at an all-time high. So Donald, her beloved teddy bear, is a little more necessary than he was a few months ago. As DP once taught us, "Children's emotional and intellectual development are much more intertwined than those domains are in adults" so we should know that children like Maria will learn better and more efficiently if they are allowed to cuddle with their transitional objects in kindergarten: they think more clearly when they feel safe, especially when they are having a difficult period in their emotional lives.

But Miss Watson needs to get these children ready for first grade. So she has a classroom rule: "NO TOYS." Children are not allowed to play with toys they bring from home. It is a distraction from the all-important task of getting ready for first grade. So, since Miss Watson defines Donald as a "toy" (a definition that would horrify Winnicott, but Miss Watson has probably never heard of Winnicott) she takes him away. Maria, of course, freaks out, and tries to rescue him from the cubby where he has been banished. So Miss Watson gives Maria a time out, and then another, and then another. But she will not capitulate on the "NO TOYS" rule. Maria is eventually referred to the school psychologist to be worked up for a possible diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. Perhaps Maria needs to work on speech pragmatics with the speech and language pathologist? Miss Watson may never have heard of Winnicott, or Developmental Psychology, but she has heard of Asperger's Syndrome. Miss Watson will do whatever she can to help Maria get ready to learn.

At this point, DP, who was suffering from neglect, and deep despair over the fate of all the children he/she had tried to help over the years, and sheer exhaustion at having to explain him/herself over and over again, gave up the ghost. DP just up and died, like Mr. Bojangles' dog. He/she is buried in an unmarked grave in western Masachusetts, but he/she will be remembered fondly by his/her devotees until they, too, up and die, leaving Miss Watson and her ilk in charge of the world's children. Sorry, kids: it seems you're really just little grownups after all.

Developmental psychology is dead (again)

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:53:51 +0000

Yes, it is time to proclaim the death of our dear friend Developmental Psychology, who was killed off again in the waning months of 2008, this time by No Child Left Behind (otherwise known as No Developmental Psychology Left Alive) and its spiritual progeny and brethren. The final nail in the coffin was provided by a kindergarten teacher whom I shall call (for historical reasons) Miss Watson. But more on her later.

Developmental Psychology was about a hundred years old when it died; its date of birth (like most schools of thought in psychology) was never precisely documented. It was a newborn, some say, when Professor G. Stanley Hall set forth the idea, in his book on adolescence published in 1904, that children's and adolescents' characteristic modes of thinking and feeling are different from the thinking and feeling of adults. This idea is, and was, a scientific hypothesis: it is a testable proposition, and data can and has been collected over the last century to test the veracity of this proposition.

But, like most hypotheses concerning human behavior, it is not at all simple. There are some functions of human behavior that develop very early, and so in these domains, children do function like adults (some aspects of the visual system are in this category). In other domains, maturity of the function (whether it is an information-processing function or some aspect of emotional development, or their combination) is very late in coming. For example, all the hoo-hah in the last five years or so about adolescents' late-developing frontal lobes suggests that teenagers do not develop adult-like capacities for impulse control and delay until they are in their early twenties. So it is more correct, more in line with the data, to amend Hall's hypothesis: in some ways, children's characteristic modes of thinking and feeling are different from those of adults. But this still suggests we should treat them differently, that we have different expectations for them than we have for ourselves, or that our expectations for children should take their developmental level into account.

This was the great practical achievement of Developmental Psychology: metaphorically, it was the psychology whose greatest insight was the child-sized chair. Child-sized chairs and tables, and scissors, and all things ergonomically designed for children, are a relatively late development in the West, often credited to Maria Montessori and her Children's School founded in a Rome slum in 1905. Thanks to Montessori, we all recognized that children are more comfortable and therefore learn more efficiently in child-size chairs. They also learn more efficiently in child-sized curricula, which was one of the biggest achievements of Developmental Psychology until its recent demise.

Now, as a result of bracket creep, we have officially lost child-sized curricula, and therefore we have lost the whole idea of Developmental Psychology. Anxiety about "how is our children learning?" and its awful relative, the high-stakes testing movement first established these tests in high schools (like my local version, the MCAS or Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). But then, we needed to get kids ready for the high-stakes version of the test- the one which, if you don't pass it, you don't get a high school diploma- and so we have to prepare kids at earlier and earlier ages, and assess kids so as to know which of our schools are "underperforming." Meanwhile, the original, bracing and humane insight of our old friend Developmental Psychology has been gradually eroded. Adults' expectations of tests, what they measure, what they are for, etc., creeps down from older kids onto younger kids, whose understanding of tests and whose ability to perform on them is not the same as that of older kids and adults. And as the curriculum is warped to prepare kids to perform on tests, the ways in which young children are different from older children and adults are ignored, while the ways in which they are similar, or must try to be similar, are emphasized.

Developmental Psychology had a long list of rules to live by. Two of my particular favorites, and the two I will miss the most, are: "All children develop at different rates," and "Children's emotional and intellectual development are much more intertwined than those domains are in adults." Which brings me to (in my next post) Developmental Psychology's sad final moments: the curious case of Miss Watson and the teddy bear named Donald.

Sweet Caroline indeed

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:42:21 +0000

Caroline, it's not you...it's us. Okay?

Why, you might ask, does a parenting blogger care about the issue of Caroline Kennedy's recent foray into senatorial politics? The word is nepotism, my dears. Parents (except parents who are famous and/or well-connected) don't like nepotism, and, as times get tougher for all of us, especially our children, parents like it less and less.

Ms. Kennedy is obviously an accomplished lawyer, author and public-spirited soul. Yes, she evokes the grandeur of the JFK era. She can raise money. She came aboard the Barack juggernaut early and enthusiastically. She has, above all, name recognition. But didn't it occur to Ms. Kennedy or those around her that name recognition can be a liability as well as an asset? To politicos who need to raise money, name recognition is a boon. But to struggling folks who are terrified about their kids' prospects in a very competitive world, the question "Why should she get the job just because she is the daughter of a president?" is very real, and very compelling.

As a therapist who sees teenagers and their families, I am constantly made aware of parents' wishes to help their children get a leg up. Kids can get good grades, have stellar accomplishments and scintillating personalities, and still get rejected from top-flight colleges (not to mention the job world thereafter). If the parents are well connected, the kids have a better chance; we all know it, and few hesitate to use it. But the entire nation is still high from celebrating the up-from-nowhere victory of a man with a funny-sounding name, raised by his single mother, with no apparent advantages except mammoth quantities of intelligence, discipline and good old-fashioned grit, and with no obvious connections to anyone with name recognition. Does this sound like the time for anointing the relatives of the famous?

Why is this so difficult to understand? The punditocracy all seemed to be in Caroline's corner, and couldn't see why anyone wouldn't be. For example, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (teetering precariously, as usual, somewhere between over-the-top snarkiness and certifiable insanity) was wild for the Kennedy bid, just as she is now snarling "Kirsten who?" about the new senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand. But the public was clearly, as opinion polls showed, less than wild for Caroline. The only commentator who seemed to be in touch with the public mood was Susan Dominus, in her "Big City" column in the Times. I am happy to let Ms. Dominus speak for herself (the italics are mine):

"Maybe [Kennedy] started to sense that this moment was not hers- that what people are really embracing, in the new president and his family, is the flat-out miracle of their rise through a meritocracy...The spectacle of the Obama's family success would be heartening at any point in history. But people probably never need to believe in the self-made man or woman more than when they're feeling broke and scared." Amen, Ms. Dominus, and, as someone who listens every day to the scared, I salute you.

We can still wonder why no other media types seemed to read the Zeitgeist correctly. But then, why should the well connected be aware of how the unconnected feel? I myself followed the Kennedy story in the papers and also on MSNBC. They're the outfit that hired Luke Russert right out of college to be on-air talent for a national network. By the way, does that name sound familiar?

The Deadwood Effect

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:03:47 +0000

The patient has been reporting it for several months, but the skeptic inside me has been hard of hearing. He was prescribed an SSRI (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, in his case, Paxil) for depression several years ago. He immediately began experiencing an inability to reach orgasm, even though he had normal erections. But he also reports that, when he went off the SSRI, his sexual functioning never returned to normal.

Yes, I said never.

I thought he was exaggerating, until he brought me the article from the Boston Globe in which several urologists, psychiatrists and psychologists report the same effects (Carey Goldberg, "Antidepressants may damage more sex lives," Boston Globe, 12/15/2008). Now, it is not news that many who take SSRIs report delayed or even completely absent orgasms, although the numbers of people affected remain elusive. (Guess what? Drug manufacturers and the psychiatrists on their payrolls tend to give lower estimates of these effects than independent psychiatrists. Golly!) It has been thought that these effects are reversible: if the patient cannot tolerate the orgasm-depressing or orgasm-extinguishing effects, he or she goes off the drug, and sexual functioning returns to normal. But the increasing reports of people who never recover their orgasms is more worrisome, to say the least. This phenomenon is supposedly rare, but when it happens it is kind of dramatic (see the comment posts to the Globe article for some harrowing details). I guess my own patient is not exaggerating after all.

So here's my question. Has anybody told the kids? Has anybody told the thousands and thousands of teenagers who are prescribed SSRIs every day that there is this little problem- what one Globe post commentator calls (in an admittedly phallocentric view)"the Deadwood Effect"? Okay, it's rare. But don't you think kids ought to be told anyway?

Experts interviewed for the Globe story, and some commentators, recite the same old sad Hobson's Choice argument: one can choose to take the meds to ameliorate debilitating, life-threatening depression, and suffer sexual side effects but at least be alive, or one can go without these meds and risk death by suicide or the living death of depression. We've heard it before: it's the same argument made regarding the risk of adolescent suicide and SSRIs: on balance, more lives are saved by taking the medication. Fair enough, when we're talking about life-threatening depressions.

But of course we're not always talking about life-threatening depressions. We're talking about the thousands of kids who come in to their family doctors with adolescent moodiness and leave with a prescription for an SSRI in their hot little hands. As a college professor and advisor, I can't begin to count the number of 19 year olds I have met on SSRIs who have never ever seen a mental health professional. The choice is less Hobsonian if it is framed as follows: do you want a period of adolescent grouchiness, lethargy and perhaps less-than-enthusiastic attention to schoolwork, but fully-functioning orgasmic potential? Or take an SSRI, which will help the grouchiness a little, and take a chance on a lifetime of orgasmic suppression? I know which one I would pick. What about you? What about your kid?

A Modest Proposal for 2009

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 21:40:06 +0000

Yes, "Young Americans" has been on hiatus; too much other work going on! But it's 2009, and time to begin the New Year right...by laughing. Or at least stop trying to shut down other people's laughing.

The New York Times reported in its end-of-the-year review of advertising campaigns (did I mention that I am now an assiduous reader of the Business section of the Times? I used to line my bird cage with it; now I scrutinize it for portents, like our forbears scrutinized tea leaves or animal intestines. But I digress....) that two ad campaigns came in for particular censure during 2008. Both campaigns were directed to mothers, and both had the temerity to suggest that, for some moms somewhere, babies could be thought of as fashion accessories. The doomed Motrin campaign, in print and on the Internet, referred to carrying babies in a sling or backpack, and the voice-over "mom" sassily said, (wearing one of these things) "totally makes me look like an official mom." And also, by the way, might cause an aching back or neck, thus the Motrin. Johnson and Johnson, makers of Motrin, were pummeled by angry moms for daring to suggest that any mother anywhere might think about she presented herself to the world, or might wear the sling or backpack because she liked showing off her baby. Oh my Lord! No! Moms never think about that! They only think about "what's right for my baby." That's all they ever think about. I swear.

The other campaign, this one on television, featured Brooke Shields; in it she supposedly scolded customers for coveting the Volkswagen Routan, a minivan just oozing "German engineering," so much that they are having babies just as an excuse to buy the car. This campaign, too, was roundly booed by mothers, who apparently were deeply offended by....what was it they were offended by? That someone would make a very silly joke about having a baby to justify buying a car? No, no. Oh, God, no. Please don't jest about that.

As the Times article says, "Maybe Americans consider motherhood no laughing matter." No kidding. As I have discovered over and over as a parenting writer, making fun of "Moms" in America is like making fun of you-know-who in Jidda or Tehran; it is a form of blasphemy. Even making fun of some moms, or imaginary moms whose motives might be impure, is seen as a slur against all "Moms." I'm all for solidarity among "Moms," but is it true that a joke about one mom is a slur against all "Moms"?

My guess is that these ads were dreamed up by, and/or approved by Dads, or perhaps young women who are not "Moms." (Guess what? Sometimes young women who are not yet "Moms" feel oppressed by those who are, and feel that "Moms" are show-offs, and feel moved to make fun of them.) Dads and non-"Moms" are always getting in trouble for stuff like this. But, this being 2009 and the whole world going down the toilet and all, maybe we could lighten up a little? Maybe just a little? A joke now and then, even if it is a joke about "Moms," might make the whole year a little more bearable.

A loaf of bread, an Amethyst, and thou

David Anderegg, Ph.D. — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:31:35 +0000

So, kids, wanna have a nice cold one? Sorry. We're here to protect you from that.

But all that might change. In the news this week are reports of the burgeoning Amethyst Initiative, the movement among college presidents to lower the legal drinking age from 21 to 18. Signatories to the Initiative now number 123; that's 123 college presidents who officially advocate for a change in the culture of teenage drinking. (Full disclosure: the president of the college where I teach, Elizabeth Coleman of Bennington College, is a signatory to the Amethyst Initiative, although we have never discussed it.) The Amethystians have a sophisticated argument going for them, which boils down to something like this: college kids are going to drink one way or the other. Making it illegal to drink alcohol until a kid is 21 forces drinking into an underground, off-campus culture dominated by binge drinking, and this way of consuming alcohol is more dangerous to kids than if it were legal at age 18 and therefore more integrated into normal campus life.

The Amethyst Initiative is bitterly opposed by pressure groups like Mothers Against Drink Driving, who point to research which demonstrates that when and where the legal age has been lowered to age 18, more kids in the 18 to 21 age bracket are killed in drunk driving accidents. MADD's argument is, basically, that kids should be prevented from drinking until they are mature enough to handle responsible drinking. On the other side, the Amethystians point out that shifting the legal age to 21 simply shifts the preponderance of fatal drunk-driving accidents to the 21-25 age bracket. They argue that some kids will drink to excess when they are learning how much they can handle, whether they are 18 or 21: raising the legal age doesn't mean there are fewer deaths, just older deaths. And the "brain maturity" argument doesn't really hold much water: since neuroscientists now demonstrate that kids' brains don't fully mature until age 25, using this reasoning the legal drinking age should be raised to 25, a neo-Prohibitionist stance which no one would tolerate.

MADD has scored one good point in this argument, especially the what's-in-it-for-you point: nowhere in the Amethystian literature to date (at least not that I could find) does the Initiative make the obvious point about colleges' own self-interest. Colleges spend tons of money on security personnel whose sole job it is to prevent college kids from drinking, a losing battle if ever there was one. And the cost of defensive legal action is enormous, because under current laws if a kid drinks herself to death on campus the college is, of course, at fault. So colleges have a big economic stake in this argument, and the Amethystians' pure "we're only concerned about our students' health" argument is disingenuous at best.

On the other hand, why should colleges pay dearly to protect kids from the consequences of their own actions? When people bitch about the escalating cost of higher education, perhaps they should consider how much it actually costs to treat kids like babies. Two-year-olds really do need to be protected, but 18-year-olds? There is a developmental point of view here, and it needs to be proclaimed: kids don't learn to be responsible by being protected until they are adults, when they suddenly become responsible. They learn to be responsible by gradually taking charge of their own lives.

As a college teacher, I see far too many kids forced into a regressed position regarding drinking: it becomes a cat-and-mouse game with college security personnel, and defeating the killjoy adults is part of the game. As a result, personal responsibility is deferred. The fantasy is that omnipotent adults (i.e. Mommy and Daddy) will make everything turn out all right, so I can take as many risks with my body as I want. As a clinician, I see this kind of thing all the time with younger kids: for example, with the teenage boys who punch their dads and then are genuinely surprised when Dad gets physically injured ("But Dad is omnipotent! He can't be hurt by a little kid like me!") This drinking fantasy is more of the same: "I'm not a grownup; Mom and Dad (or the dean, or RA, or whoever is in charge on campus) will always make sure I'm okay...so I can drink as much as I want!"

Guess again, kid. You're on your own now. So, as the Amethystians suggest, why not make it official?