Psychology Research

The father of Camryn Wilson, the first baby born in Summit County, Ohio in 2008, has been sentenced for shaking the baby to death. Sentenced to a term of 15 years to life, the 29 year-old man will probably serve 20 years in prison. To his credit, he offered no excuses for his crime. Stressed from an argument with the mother, he couldn’t tolerate the baby’s incessant crying. He insisted on a guilty plea, even though the autopsy showed evidence of previous abuse that might have implicated others and clouded prosecutorial certainty, as his lawyer, no doubt advocated. Hopefully, the young man is on a path to recovering his soul. Apart from recapitulating my post made at the time of the early adjudication of the case, I can’t help but wonder at the symbolism of the media using victims of the Madoff scam as a symbol of loss, when, as a country, the loss of this child is so much more damaging.    

Children are, in my book, off limits when writing about personal experiences.  As an author and psychotherapist with an expertise in family estrangement, I have not hesitated to share my personal experiences with readers.  Other writers and clinicians have also contributed their stories because like me, we feel our experiences can help others.  In my writing, however, my children are off limits when it comes to public exposure.  I feel strongly that they’re entitled to this respect and privacy; after all, thought they’re all grown up now, they’re still my children. This week I was shocked and appalled by a story in a British newspaper, The Independent , about an acclaimed writer named Julie Myerson who decided to write the story of her decision to cut off all ties with her 17 year old son.  Myerson, by the way, is no hack; she’s a well-known and critically acclaimed writer in the UK.   Myerson’s son Jake had developed a habituation to a form of marijuana called “skunk. ”  For some reason, skunk smoking has become epidemic among British adolescents. I don’t know why this trend hasn’t migrated to the US, but fortunately it hasn’t, at least to my knowledge.  Skunk is extremely powerful cannabis that is grown hydroponically and is up to 25 times more powerful than the pot smoked in the U.S.  It’s created a serious public health problem in Britain and has caused a dramatic rise in psychosis and hospital admissions due to skunk abuse are at their highest level.  In Myerson’s soon to be released semi-autobiographical book, “The Lost Child”, she writes that her son Jake’s drug abuse was so out of control that he became violent and posed a threat to his two younger siblings and to her and his father.  Because he refused treatment and became unmanageable to live with, she took the advice offered by drug abuse experts to throw him out of their home and in effect, to disown him.  To put it another way, she resigned from her job as Jake’s mother.    Ironically Myerson had been disowned by her own father and had promised Jake when he was 12 years old that she would never cut him out of her life because “we think a parent’s relationship with their child is the parent’s responsibility – however old or bad the child is.”  Good for you Julie, I agree with you there.  A parent is a parent and is always a parent of their children.  Having been cut off by my parents, I couldn’t agree with you more.  I also don’t disagree with the professionals who advised her that she needed to throw Jake out of the house.  That’s the only way to stop enabling the addiction with the hope the addict will hit bottom and get treatment.  Apparently Jake did become abstinent from drugs after a period of time and this drama could have been used as a stepping-stone to repairing the rift between Jake and his family. Instead Julie chose to publicly expose her child’s drug problems and the related behavioral problems caused by the drug abuse.  Now that, in my opinion, is off limits, indecent and obscene.  No one with a heart would publicly expose their child’s personal struggles.  Any parent with respect for their child and human decency, love and kindness would not be critical of their child in their writing and publicly humiliate them for their own glorification as a writer.  She made a choice to do this, though and never even gave her son the choice to have his and the family’s dirty laundry aired out in public. Every adolescent challenges their parent’s self-control and engages in unpleasant defiance and sometimes abusiveness.  I was no picnic as a teenager and certainly adolescence was not the easiest of times for me as a parent. Julie Myerson, however, made two indefensible moves: she not only publicly defamed her son but she never, at least in public, reflected on her role in her son’s problem.  I’m not saying her son became a drug abuser because of bad parenting, not at all, but I am saying that as parents we always have to look honestly at our part in perpetuating our children’s very normal human challenges.   Julie, its time as they say in AA, to make a searching and fearless moral inventory.  Addiction is a family disease after all. 

A study of the children of older fathers has found subtle impairments of intelligence and other mental abilities during infancy and childhood. The story has been widely reported, but the findings have not been put in the proper context. This is only the latest in a series of problems identified in the children of older fathers, an area of study that has been widely overlooked. The risks faced by the children of older fathers are similar to those faced by the children of older mothers. But while we all know about the risks of Down syndrome in older mothers, most of us are ignorant of the risks in the children of older fathers. And the risks for older fathers are comparable to those for older mothers. As I noted in The Father Factor , an article on this subject in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Children born to fathers 40 or older have nearly a six-fold increase in the risk of autism as compared with kids whose fathers were younger than 30. Children of fathers older than 50 have a nine-fold risk of autism. And advanced paternal age, as it’s called, has also been linked to “an increased risk of birth defects, cleft lip and palate, water on the brain, dwarfism, miscarriage and ‘decreased intellectual capacity.’” And to an increased risk of schizophrenia. This risk rises for fathers with each passing year. The child of a 40-year-old father has a 2 percent chance of having schizophrenia-double the risk of a child whose father is younger than 30. And the kicker: A 40-year-old man’s risk of having a child with schizophrenia is the same as a 40-year-old woman’s risk of having a child with Down syndrome. More recent studies have linked fathers’ age to prostate and other cancers in their children. In September 2008, researchers linked older fathers to an increased risk of bipolar disorder in their children. Add to that the new finding , that the kids of older fathers score lower on IQ and other cognitive tests. The study, in the current issue of PLOS Medicine, noted that the cognitive deficits were small, and that the children of older fathers might “catch up” to their peers as they get older. But nobody knows whether these early deficits might have implications for the children’s development across their lifespans, the authors said. So why don’t we hear more about the risks faced by the children of older fathers? Why isn’t it part of the discussion about whether, and how long, to delay child-bearing? “I think there has been a bit of a cultural bias against even looking at this issue,” says Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who has done much of the pioneering research on this. “It turns out that the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father,” she told the New York Times. Do the findings offend middle-aged men’s sense of themselves, of their vitality and power? Do they puncture the image of the father as defender of the family? These risks should be understood by every older father who’s considering having children.

Steve Livingston writes: If many students are off-peak in their circadian rhythms early in the morning, and thus have a harder time learning, doesn’t it also stand to reason that many first-period teachers are equally off their game? Adults aren’t immune to being tired in the morning; in fact, it seems that they are more susceptible to the cognitive effects of sleep disruption. If true, then the engagement/communication/patience of teachers and the attention paid/information retained by students are reduced — a pedagogical ‘double whammy’. Many instructors complain about morning lectures full of sleepy students — I did it myself when teaching introductory psychology at 8:30 AM as a grad student — but rarely do we consider that we may be leading (failing?) by example. Very good points, though in fairness, there are important differences between adults and adolescents. In adults the tendency for the internal circadian clock to drift ever later is not as strong as it is in teenagers. One also expects adults to have a better understanding of the consequences of staying up until 2 AM watching TV. It is also probable that those teaching at 7:30 tend to be more alert in the morning (“larks”) than in the evening (“owls”). Broadly speaking, one can categorize people as larks or owls, with larks ready to bravely face the new day the moment the alarm goes off in the morning, while owls grumble in disbelief, roll over and bury their heads ever deeper into their pillows in a futile attempt to make it just GO AWAY so they can catch a few more hours of sleep. In the evening, the situation is reversed: larks yawn and zone out just as owls begin to really come into their own. While it is true that many people find themselves in situations they did not anticipate when first choosing their professions, one may assume that there is some degree of self-selection at work when it comes to making this choice (and sticking with it), and that most hard core owls soon realize that waking up at 6 AM five mornings a week in order to be ready for that 7:30 class just isn’t for them. The question remains whether we want the school day planned in such a way so that our children’s learning is optimal, or so that it is merely acceptable, while making sure that parents are able to get to work on time. It should be recognized that these (and other) conflicting needs result in a compromise which is not always to the children’s advantage.

I didn’t long for a baby who melted into me, who captured my hair between her soft fingers. I longed to be the type of woman who did. It seemed as though this trait were woven into my biology as much as the fair skin and curly hair. As a child I played with dolls, but didn’t fantasize about a real baby I could love, or dream of pregnancy the way some girls do. I never stuck a pillow beneath my dress to pretend I was having a baby. It scared me even then the whole idea of someone growing inside me, and having to push that little person out from between my skinny legs. The girls I played with shriveled their noses at me, then blithely offered to have the baby for me. Babies, with their hands like rose petals and their toes like creamy pebbles, were natural. My lack of maternal instinct was not. The truth is I’d always wanted to adopt. However, I never wanted to adopt a baby. Not that I have anything against babies (I don’t!). But when I spoke of adoption, the words baby, infant and birthmother were never used. I was more interested in adopting someone a bit older, a toddler or – gulp – a child. When my husband and I eventually did adopt, we went further than that. Our daughters were 10 and 13 (almost 11 and 14, actually) when we got them from a Russian detsky dom , children’s home: orphanage in 1999. A teen and a ‘tween–they were, indeed, not babies. Yet from the moment I saw them, during their brief stay as part of a dance troupe sponsored by the adoption agency, I wanted these grown children as much as any mother wants the unborn babies who swim silently in her womb. I don’t see adoption as better or worse than having biological children, stepchildren, foster children or no children at all. I do, however, see it as a different spin in the cycle of family. But I won’t go around saying you should think about adoption the way people (often) tell women they should think about having a baby because biological clocks run out and you’re not getting any younger . I think often about how I made adoption real, but I’m interested in all the people who do real – ancestral lines from the past and future – and the relationships we share with one another. Which makes Adoption Stories for all of us. If you’re adopted or have adopted, if you don’t understand why anyone would want to adopt-or why anyone wouldn’t. If you longed for a baby or didn’t.    

It’s bloody cold where I live. In the interminable cycle of snow and sub-freezing ambience, I have two daughters whose brains, literally, crave movement. But before we talk about that, let’s talk about rats with toys and rats without. In fact, let’s put rats off for a moment too. Let’s talk about Children’s Museums. That’ll take us to rats and their toys, and move us nicely then to the welfare of the brains of our children. The story goes like this: Anyone who has been a kid and now has one knows that children’s museums have been changing. What began often as tired wings of the more-adult institutions now have their own buildings and names (the Boston Children’s Museum, for example), and their own stuff. Parents often view these younger establishments with a mixture of dread and relief. Turn your kid loose! Every display cries out for this kind of freedom. But wait. Where the hell is my kid? And who is that ill-behaved little imp who just elbowed that sweet curly haired toddler in the kidney, and where are his parents, and would someone please tell me in this age of drug resistant bacteria why anyone designed a place where children could crawl all over each other and leave trails of snot the way a snail marks his progress across the sidewalk. I still to some extent see Children’s Museums as one giant petri dish, a happy place for viruses, bacteria, and a select few multi-cellular microbes to party. The humans are the ecosystem, the paradise for which these winter-time bugs long. And yet every weekend, tired parents and their wheezing progeny line up before the museum opens, push their way in through the doors like they’re going to see the Who in concert, and provide new and exciting homes for the mass of germs that lay in wait, like trap-door spiders, for the first little hand to move them to some new organic material. The circle of life is like this. Recently at our local Children’s Museum I set my children free. I unleashed them from the sweaters and coats and mittens and scarves that stilted their youthful and impossible movements, my daughter unraveling from her parka like a mummy eager to leave the darkness of his tomb, and off she went, climbing the fantastical web-like structure that is the center piece of the Boston Children’s Museum. Kids disappeared and reappeared 10 feet above, elbowing, clawing, climbing and moving. They were like ants with no purpose except to move from one stage to the next. And, undeniably, they were ecstatically happy. I found myself marveling that they volunteered for this. Even more, they crave it, more than I crave my morning coffee. And, as a guy who likes to think about brains, I also had to remind myself of the incredible process to which I was now being treated. I was watching little brains become big ones. I was watching, in vivo, neurogenesis. So, now, let’s talk about rats. For years, rats have had the misfortune of being laboratory animals with brains just big enough to be studied. In college, I lived in a co-op with a woman who practiced Wicca. She had sprung a rat from the school biology lab and carried him around on her shoulders. He was named after an African god whose title escapes me, but I still remember that white wonderful beast, clinging to his mistress’s hair and collarbone, and running down her left arm to eat at the table with the rest of us at dinner. He looked at us thoughtfully, with every suggestion that he enjoyed his thoughts, and he grasped his little piece of bread in his hands not unlike a toddler, nibbling wisely with his mouth open. This was not a dumb animal. His friends, though, faced worse fates. A charitable narrative for his cousins involved life in the animal behavior labs rather than the medical research ones. This would mean an endless and increasingly complex array of mazes to negotiate, and then, as befits the noble fate of many lab animals, the insensitive and blunt probing into how his brain changes after mastering the maze itself. Unfortunately, this often involved a high tech blender, which to this day creates conflicts for me, but that is the subject of another blog. Here’s what was discovered, and keep in mind that this is hardly surprising and therefore not the punch-line of the story. Rats that spend their days in mazes have bigger and more robust brains than rats that sit around in sterile laboratory cages and eat and sleep all day. They especially enjoy neuronal growth in the frontal lobes, the executive regions of the brain, the places they go to biologically when it is time to solve problems. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If you spend all day solving puzzles, you’re brain is likely to grow to accommodate the changing environment. That’s what neuroplasticity is all about. But, what if it isn’t the maze that causes their brains to grow? And what if the optimal time for growth is limited. It turns out that older rats that run mazes don’t learn as quickly, and their brains are less likely to morph for the better. This jives with what we know about brain injuries in general. Younger patients recover function more quickly, their childish brains more willing and able to bend from their original tasks. So, here is the punch-line: The maze matters, but not nearly as much as the running around itself. Free form play, the exploration of novel stimuli, the equivalent of recess at a grade school without rules (in the laboratory setting this means a cage with cool stuff to climb on) correlates with the most neuronal growth of all. It ain’t the maze. It’s the act of playing, non-directive playing, that makes the difference. It’s the damn germ laden web-like climbing structure in the Boston Children’s Museum that makes our kids happiest, and, more importantly, that makes our kids brains grow like dandelions in a June front lawn. The Boston Children’s Museum’s web-like climbing structure is way cool…and our kids crave way cool. You can almost see their little dendrites and axons talking. So, let’s wrap up by considering the rest of the life of a child. In fact, this story could be all about policy. My daughter goes to a wonderful school where recess if preserved. There are cool things to climb on, monkey bars to master (she broke her wrist on the monkey bars while demonstrating her simian prowess to her friends), and slides to race down and around. Rules are generated by the children and for the children, and we know from the rats that this is what makes their brains happy. Increasingly, however, we stifle recess, organize activities, schedule play, and mandate fun. We take the rats out of the cage with cool stuff and put them back in the boring mazes. It’s better than the cages where they can only eat and sleep, but not by much. The social forces that propel such intensely organized activities have been much discussed, but think for a moment. How incredible, and how sad, that we have not worked harder to preserve the deceptively simple and optimal setting for the brains of our children. The science is there to support the loosening of the reigns. Let’s hope that the policy follows. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

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?   © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

My soul has been stirred by many of nature’s wonders–by orange and yellow leaves sparkling in the autumn sun, by mallards landing softly on still waters at dusk, by clouds drifting by as I lay on my back gazing upward. But, of all of nature’s scenes that I have enjoyed and pondered, none have enthralled me more than those of children playing–playing on their own, without adults guiding or interrupting them. Intervening in children’s play seems to me to be like shooting those mallards that are landing on the water. My words are poor substitutes for the actual scenes, but let me try to convey two examples that have moved me more than any poetry. There is nothing special about these examples; they are like play everywhere. What made them special to me is that I took the time just to watch and enjoy them, to look at them as some people listen to concerts or admire great paintings. I report on them here partly in an attempt to convey their beauty, but also to point out how adults might well have ruined them by supervising, praising, or in other ways intervening, as happens all too often today. Both of these examples happen to have occurred at the church to which I belong. I present them in the present tense in the attempt to paint a verbal portrait. Example 1: A game of keep-away The Sunday service has ended. Bored by the adults’ coffee hour, I go upstairs to the large open room where children sometimes play while they wait for their parents to finish socializing. Fourteen children–of both sexes and ranging from 3 to about 12 years old–are playing keep-away with an inflated ball, about twice the diameter of a basketball. Fourteen human bodies of greatly different sizes are moving rapidly about, each following a rather random path, at its own pace, with its own flair. Yet, somehow, all fourteen blend together, accented by the bright green ball, into a single fluid organism. I feel that I am watching a beautifully choreographed dance, but there is no choreographer. Nobody dominates; nobody is left out; nobody bumps into anybody else; nobody complains; all of the shrieks are of joy. Every child who wants the ball receives it for a fair period of time. The older players dribble the ball as they run with it, daring the others to steal it; the younger ones just run with it until they pass it toward the outstretched arms of an eager teammate. The 3-year-old runs joyfully in circles, his arms sometimes flailing above his head, showing no interest in the ball at all, just delighted to be out there running with these amazing older kids. Despite the differences in age, size, and ball-playing ability, all of the players are treated as equal–as equally worthy, equally deserving of having their needs met. The game goes on like this for the entire twenty minutes that I can stay and watch. As I watch I learn lessons of movement, rhythm, coordination, and unselfish self-expression, in which joy comes from anticipating and fulfilling the needs and desires of the others. I see democracy, in its most ideal form, in action. The kids and I are lucky that no other adults are paying attention and that my attention is inconspicuous. I’ve often seen such games ruined by well-meaning adults who intervened–for the sake of safety, or because they believed that someone was being treated unfairly, or because they believed that they knew better than the children how to make the game fun for children. Attentive adults can ruin games even if they don’t intend to intervene. Children perceive them as potential enforcers of safety, solvers of conflicts, and audiences for whining; and this perception invites the children to act unsafely, to squabble, and to whine. Play requires self-control, and the too-obvious presence of adults can lead children to relinquish their self-control. Example 2: Making a Christmas Ornament I am helping to manage the church’s annual "Green Christmas" celebration, at which church members of all ages create earth-friendly decorations, wrapping papers, and gifts. I’m in charge of the natural ornaments table, which contains such materials as pinecones, milkweed pods, and seeds and shells of various colors and shapes. The table also contains hot glue guns, which people can use to fasten the natural materials together to form ornaments for their Christmas trees or statues for their tables. Most people are doing this rather quickly, eager to get something made and to move on to another table so they can complete the rounds. They make big, flashy ornaments, using many materials, but they put relatively little care into making them. As they work, they laugh and joke with others around them. Those people are not, in my view, playing; or, if they are playing, their play lies in their socializing, not in ornament making. They are making ornaments just because that is what they are supposed to do at this table. But one little boy, who appears to be about 4 or 5 years old, takes an entirely different approach. He ignores the hustle and bustle around him and allows himself to become completely absorbed by his project. On his own, he decides to glue small, round white beans onto a large pinecone in such a way that each of the roughly 60 lobes of the pinecone will have exactly one bean precisely in its center. He doesn’t announce this to anyone; he just starts doing it. His expression is one of intense concentration. Using the glue gun, very carefully with his little hands, he squeezes a single tiny drop of hot glue squarely onto the center of one of the pinecone lobes and then, before the glue hardens, places a bean ever so gently on the drop of glue. It takes him about half an hour to finish his task of gluing a bean onto every lobe. During this entire time he does not move from his work place. He does not say a word, and nobody–I am pleased to observe–says a word to him. As I watch, a woman asks me if I think it is safe for such a little child to use a hot glue gun. I tell her that I have been watching him and he is being more careful than anyone else at the table. There is no need to caution him or to do the gluing for him. The former would interrupt his concentration and the latter would spoil his play completely. I am grateful that the boy’s parents and all others who see him are wise enough to leave him alone at this activity. Imagine all the ways that an over-involved adult could ruin his play. The adult could deprive him of the challenge by kindly doing all the difficult or "dangerous" parts for him, distract his concentration with unsolicited advice or cheerful chatter, hurry him along so he could get to other projects but have inadequate time for this one, or praise his work in ways that would shift his attention away from the process (which is most important to him) and toward the product (which is less important). Because nobody disturbs him, this boy experiences sublime solo immersion in artistic creation, and I experience the joy of watching him and learning from him. I learn lessons of self-determination, concentration, persistence, and painstaking craftsmanship. Many years ago Lev Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist and a great observer of children’s play, wrote that at play a child "behaves above his daily behavior, … as though he were a head taller than himself." I would add that the same is true for adults. We are all at our best when we are playing. That is a theme of many of the essays that I have already presented in this blog, and it is a theme about which there is still much more to say. Let us learn to cherish play, in others as well as ourselves. © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

A large proportion of parents display consistent favoritism toward one child over another. This favoritism can manifest in different ways: more time spent with one child, more affection given, more privileges, less discipline, or less abuse. Research by sociologist Jill Suitor examines some of the causes and consequences of parental favoritism, which occurs in 1/3 to 2/3 of American families. Despite its taboo in our society, we consider some cases of parental favoritism to be fair and even necessary. For example, parents give more attention to newborns than they do to their older children. The same goes for children who are sick or disabled. In these situations, parents often discuss the unequal treatment with the disfavored children in order to assure them that it’s nothing personal. Other reasons for parental favoritism most of us would judge as unfair, yet they don’t surprise us much. Parents might spend more time with and feel closer to same-gender children than to opposite-gender children. In mixed families, parents favor their biological children over step-children. In patriarchal cultures, parents simply favor boys over girls. There are several additional factors that predict favoritism, one of which is birth order: parents favor first- and last-born children over middle children. This occurs in part because middle children will never be the only child living at home – at some point first-borns and last-borns will have their parents all to themselves. Overall, first-borns get the most privileges and last-borns receive the most parental affection. A child’s personality and behavior can also affect how parents treat them. Parents behave more affectionately toward children who are pleasant and affectionate, and they direct more discipline toward children who act out or engage in deviant behavior. Because girls tend to be warmer and less aggressive than boys, parents generally favor daughters over sons (but only in non-patriarchal cultures). Favoritism is also more likely when parents are under a great deal of stress (e.g., marital problems, financial worries). In these cases, parents may be unable to inhibit their true feelings or monitor how fair they’re behaving. Evolutionary theorists argue that when emotional or material resources are limited, parents will favor children who have the most potential to thrive and reproduce. Unfortunately, the consequences of parental favoritism are what you might expect – they’re mostly bad. Disfavored children experience worse outcomes across the board: more depression, greater aggressiveness, lower self-esteem, and poorer academic performance. These repercussions are far more extreme than any benefits the favored children get out of it (negative things just have a stronger impact on people than positive things). And it’s not all rosy for the favored children either – their siblings often come to resent them, poisoning those relationships. Many of these consequences persist long after children have grown up and moved out of the house. People don’t soon forget that they were disfavored by their parents, and many people report that being disfavored as a child continues to affect their self-esteem and their relationships in adulthood. To make matters worse, parents are even more likely to play favorites once their children are grown up, sustaining the toxic family dynamics (e.g., bad feelings, sibling resentment). The causes of the favoritism, however, are a bit different once the children become adults. Parents still favor daughters and less deviant children, but they also give preference to children who live closer, share the parents’ values, and, not surprisingly, have provided the parents with emotional or financial support. It’s important to keep in mind that parental favoritism is only problematic when there are consistent and arbitrary differences in treatment. In cases where favoritism is unavoidable (e.g., with newborns, needier children), parents who explain its necessity to the other children can usually offset any negative consequences. Interestingly, children’s well-being is highest when parents exhibit no favoritism toward anyone, even higher than the well-being of children who are favored by their parents. This disparity may occur because favored children have to contend with sibling hostility, or perhaps because families that practice favoritism tend to be dysfunctional in other ways. Nearly all parents worry about whether they play favorites. But even when parents vow to treat their children equally, they soon find that this is just not possible. Every child is different and parents must respond to their unique characteristics appropriately. You shouldn’t react to a 3-year-old’s tantrums in the same way as you would to a 13-year-old’s. You can’t deal with aggressive children in the same way as passive children. Even identical twins can’t be treated identically. When it comes down to it, every child wants to feel like they’re different, not clones of their siblings. The best parents can do is stay aware of any differential treatment they give and try to be as fair as possible. (This post was co-authored by Josh Foster.) © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all crimes. (Proverbs, 10: 12) If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (The Apostleship of Paul, Corinthians, 13, 3-7) I started to ask myself: What should I accuse myself for? Am I guilty for going and loving her? That I loved the girl? What did I do, after all? I loved her. She broke me. (A man who murdered his wife) Love is typically evaluated in very positive terms. However, as there are various kinds of love, some of them -especially the romantic or erotic one-have been frequently criticized. The different views of love can be extreme; thus, while some people consider love to be a supreme source of moral value and strength, others regard it as a kind of disease or destructive intoxication that can makes lovers abandon their moral values. Can love be quite as pure as we would like it to be? Aristotle takes love to be a wish for good things to happen to another person, with no benefit for the subject. The lover wishes the other’s benefit for its own sake, without calculating whether there is any personal benefit to be drawn. Thus, love is not measured in terms of its practical value as a means to achieve certain ends. For instance, loving someone as a means to satisfy one’s sexual desire or to become rich is partial and transient; the moment the end is achieved, or a better means is found, love disappears. Disinterested care is not the same as indifference. Disinterested care implies that the beloved is evaluated as having intrinsic worth and not as something that may give us some future benefits. Although Aristotle considers the essence of love to be caring for the other, love is not an entirely selfless emotion. Aristotle argues that the good things an individual wishes for other people are the same things he wishes for himself. So in a sense, our activities for promoting the good things for the beloved will in fact brings good things for us as well. Aristotle also emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in love, as a lover is someone who loves and is loved in return. The virtuous aspect of love is emphasized in many cultures that consider true love to be modeled on God’s bestowal of love on humans: an unconditional act that lacks any association with deservedness. It is a kind of gift the beloved receives. Erich Fromm defines love as "the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love." True love has less to do with the lover’s own needs and more with concern for the other. Accordingly, love has often been considered to be pure in the moral sense: love involves merely good deeds and "love can do no evil." Hence, it has been claimed that those who fail to love should be considered sinners. Romantic Ideology even upgrades the moral status of love and considers it to be a moral seal of approval, a synonym for purity of intention. Therefore, everything that is done for the sake of love, because of love, and in the name of love is justified precisely for that reason. As Esther, a widow in her late fifties, who had many affairs with married men, says: "I really, truly believe that all love is good wherever you find it-independently of what status your lover is." In such a view, love is considered an ultimate justification for either self-sacrifice or for evil; thus, it can even be considered worth dying or killing for. Although romantic love encompasses genuine care for the beloved, it is not a general concern for the beloved’s happiness in all circumstances. Typically, the lover desires the beloved’s happiness only insofar as the lover is either a part or the cause of this happiness. The spouse can be an extension of our self only in a conditional manner: the condition is being connected to us. In particular, we do not want our beloved to be sexually happy with another person. Pablo Picasso expressed this concern in a rather extreme manner when saying "I would prefer to see a woman dead than see her happy with another man." The egoistic nature of romantic love generates an inherent contradiction: whereas romantic love expresses great concern for the beloved, it cancels the beloved’s autonomy. Moreover, the lover’s care for the beloved may focus on those aspects that the beloved does not consider to be significant. Despite, or more precisely because of, the profound moral value of love, love has been used as an excuse for justifying immoral deeds, such as a husband who murders his wife because she plans to leave him. Ronald de Sousa argues that "It is a commonplace that love motivates some of our worst behavior, ranging from dishonesty to murder. … But what is most astonishing is that we regard love as a justification for treating people far worse than we would ever condone treating a stranger." Despite the high moral value of love (like that of religion), people can allow themselves to act in quite immoral, and sometimes evil, manner. In extreme cases of unrequited love, rejected lovers have committed suicide; in fact, certain genres of literature even regard such suicides as perfect expressions of true love. The aura of love, as a moral, noble emotion that can do no evil, can be taken to imply limitless justification, which may be used to legitimize whatever is done "in the name of love." This notion encourages people to reject any compromise. Accordingly, men who murder their partners sometimes use it as a moral defense and to avoid recognizing themselves as murderers. They can often use it as a defense against feelings of guilt or even to see themselves as victims of the women who violated their love. Love may be indeed be "a many splendid thing," but love also hurts a lot, can be dangerous, and may lead us to behave foolishly. It is indeed advisable to make love, not war, but sometimes war and its associated atrocities are enacted, on a private scale, within romantic love itself. Adapted from In the Name of Love © 2009 Psychology Today. This RSS Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact blogs@psychologytoday.com so we can take legal action immediately.