1/BITING
Act of aggression or mark of frustration?
Mindy’s reign over the neighborhood went uncontested until I was 8. One afternoon that summer, I bit her. Hard–my teeth breaking the skin in the chewy part of her upper left arm.
Later that day, when Mindy had returned from her rendezvous with a tetanus shot at the pediatrician’s office, my mother made me walk up the block to apologize. Mindy’s mother, the benevolent music teacher at our elementary school, came to the door when I rang the bell. To my rehearsed statement, she replied through the screen door: “I know you were very frustrated.”
She was right. I was frustrated, and I felt powerless. And, according to the experts consulted for this issue of the Magazine, my experience was hardly unique.
Biting tops the list of reasons for expulsion from day care and nursery school, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Under different circumstances, an elementary school offender like me could have ended up in a juvenile detention facility.
On the spectrum of bad behavior, which includes hitting, hair-pulling, kicking and plain old meanness, biting is considered extreme. There are health risks to biting, particularly when skin is broken. Myths about the transmission of AIDS have heightened anxieties about an already-feared behavioral problem.
For most of us, the very idea of biting–and blood and saliva–evokes a visceral response. We’re repulsed by an act of aggression that seems feral, almost animalistic, and simultaneously undermines a child’s feeling of safety and security as well as parents’ impulse to protect their child from danger.
Most children who bite are not yet verbal. Infants and toddlers nip and gnaw, like puppies, eager to explore the world using all their senses. But older children tend to bite out of frustration, usually because they cannot express themselves. They bite because they feel powerless.
“Biting is the last weapon,” explains Jennifer Asimow, assistant professor of child development at Harold Washington College. “You have to remember that they don’t have a lot in their arsenals.”
What’s the best response to a biter? Experts agree on one thing: Never bite a child who bites, in an attempt to “show how it feels.” Instead, a survey of recent research recommends this response: *Immediately remove the child from the situation.
*State clearly that biting is not acceptable behavior. Ever.
*Give the child ways to feel more in control without inflicting harm, such as helping him to develop his language skills or placing him in a less frustrating environment.
The most important step in dealing with a biter in a classroom or at home is creating an environment where children can learn to express their emotions while feeling they have control over their situation.
“The less power children feel, the fewer choices they have and the greater chances for negative behavior,” Asimow says. “Children need to feel safe.”
What does all this have to do with Mindy? Thinking back, I can remember a sense that I was on the short end of the neighborhood power stick. I felt that as the neighborhood geek, the last one picked for every kickball game, I was relegated to the sidelines while Mindy exercised her supreme power over our little world.
And while it’s possible The Bite was prompted by an especially frustrating instance of Mindy’s stubborn (and clearly misguided) insistence that she was taller than I, there was clearly much more going on than either one of us could have realized.
Mindy’s mother, however, understood the situation perfectly, grasping the implications of what might have looked like a simple act of aggression. Her response, actually, is what I remember best about the experience: Here was a person who had the power to make a child feel small and worthless, but who chose to see me as a full person, with legitimate feelings.
Unlike most biters, I was old enough to process the incident, and even now, every detail of that afternoon is etched into my memory. But I keep coming back to the long walk up the street, certain that I would face hostility, only to find a kind of tacit understanding.
And that was an act of generosity. The bite must have hurt. At our 10th high school reunion, a group of us was joking around and I asked Mindy whether she still had the scar. She smiled and rolled up her sleeve, revealing a tiny, faded arc-a battle scar of childhood.
–Elizabeth Taylor
– – –
2/PRIVACY
Kids are wary about too much ‘me’ on MySpace
They get it, OK?
Colleges are clicking and potential employers are reading and predators are snooping and ex-boyfriends can track you down faster than you can say, “E-mail blocking software.”
Conventional wisdom holds that teens today are a privacy-shunning lot. They bare their souls on blogs. They post their videos on YouTube and their photos on Facebook. Their Hollywood counterparts on “The Hills” break up and make up and hook up, while millions watch from their living rooms.
But a more nuanced look at the issue suggests that the teenage experience, no less angst-filled than ever, is still shrouded in a layer of secrecy–a thinning layer, but one that teens say they’re committed to protecting.
“I don’t think the Internet is where you should tell people everything about you,” says Allison Anderson, 16. “It’s my life. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t want people to see or hear about.”
Anderson, who just completed her junior year at Naperville North, has a Facebook page, which she uses to communicate with friends and show off her budding photography avocation. What doesn’t she post? “Stuff I don’t want people to see or hear about.”
With 93 percent of teenagers using the Internet regularly, and 55 percent of online teens using social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, the issue of privacy is one that likely comes up at many a dinner table. Amanda Lenhart, senior research specialist with the Pew Internet and America Life Project, offers parents a bit of encouraging news: Your kids are listening.
“Teens are, because of the attention from media, their parents, administrators warning them about protecting their privacy, relatively savvy about it,” Lenhart says. “The messages are getting pretty heavy-handed.”
A majority of online teens (66 percent) block some or all of their profile information so it’s not accessible to all Internet users, according to a recent Pew study on teens and social media. Among teens who allow their profiles to be accessed by anyone online, 46 percent say they fake some of their information, in part to protect themselves and in part to be pranksters.
“Privacy is an evolving notion,” Lenhart says. “Teens are wanting to share more with their peers-a known audience-than we’ve previously seen. But they are more privacy-conscious in terms of wanting to control their representation in front of adults. They’re more likely to say ‘I have a closed network. I don’t want my chemistry teacher or my mom or the administrators from my college to see that.’ “
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In fact, Lenhart says teens could probably teach their parents a thing or two (surprise, surprise) about protecting themselves online.
“Teens certainly protect their privacy a bit more than adults do,” says Lenhart. “Anyone who has even a modicum of tech-savvy can track down a tremendous amount of information about you. We all leave digital footprints.”
And a lot of us are wading into these relatively uncharted waters. MySpace saw 72,214,000 unique visitors in April ’08, according to comScore Inc., a global Internet information provider (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). Facebook received 35,652,000 and Flickr, the photo-sharing site, saw 15,027 visitors (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
Jason Block, a journalism teacher at Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, says social networking sites have been a boon to the student newspaper he advises. “They can do searches and set up interviews, and it’s a great way to get voices in our newspaper that we wouldn’t normally have,” Block says. “I can’t read another quote from the student body president or the captain of the football team. We don’t always have to go back to the old reliables now.”
Which is, ideally, a perfect analogy for what social networking sites represent to teens: an opportunity to connect with the world in ways that were much trickier-sometimes even unimaginable-just a decade ago. Still, Block devotes a portion of each semester to educating his students about the pitfalls of this new tool.
“It’s not my space, truly,” he tells his students. “It’s everyone’s space. Colleges are using it as part of the admissions process. They can type a kid’s name into MySpace and see a picture of him doing a beer bong. Kids can be naive about that.”
Just as perilous, Block says, is navigating high school’s social landscape-always treacherous, but made even more so by the breadth and speed of technology.
“If you had a problem with somebody before, you’d go talk to your friends about it or write a note to somebody in class,” he says. “Now you go on Facebook or MySpace and it’s like that note you wrote in class getting found and read by everyone.”
Note writing, in fact, is virtually obsolete, says Block, who graduated from high school in 1994.
“In six years of teaching, I’ve had to confiscate three or four notes,” he says. “I can remember bad weeks where I’d get three or four notes taken away from me.”
Which isn’t to say the gossip has gotten any less intense. “It’s all the same stuff,” he says. “There’s just a different outlet for it. The difference now is how public your angst is.”
But most teens have razor-sharp survival instincts, and, more than ever, they have little use for pursuits that aren’t working to their advantage.
Inge Moran, 18, who is headed to Columbia College Chicago in the fall, says she’s been using her Facebook page to get acquainted with her soon-to-be classmates.
“I have almost 600 friends on Facebook now,” she says. “At first you don’t realize they’re really looking at your stuff, but then someone says, ‘I saw those pictures of you at prom,’ and it’s like, ‘Oh, wow. You saw that on my Facebook?’ “
Which is why she blocks certain users from her site, and doesn’t post anything potentially embarrassing.
“There’s a difference between putting your life story on a blog and every picture online, and just putting up pictures from prom and connecting with friends,” she says. “It’s not like I’m trying to broadcast myself to the whole world.”
So daily updates from a recent internship in Washington, yes. “But not personal things like, ‘I was so devastated that Johnny wouldn’t go to homecoming with me.” For that, Moran says . . .
“I have a paper journal.”
— Heidi Stevens
– – –
3/FRIENDS
When that ‘bad influence’ comes knocking
Your 6-year-old son is crestfallen. His buddy claims there is no Easter Bunny, and called your son a bad word that both hurt his feelings and detrimentally expanded his vocabulary.
Your 13-year-old daughter’s purported BFF has turned on her-as you long feared, that conniving little monster-and your daughter is carrying on like she just lost her best . . . well, like that.
You never did like those “friends.” Should you tell your kids they’re done with them? Or should you stay out of it, letting your daughter work things out on her own-like she’d listen to you anyway-and reassuring your son about the Bunny?
At a time when parents on the whole have never been more involved in their children’s lives-selecting their pursuits, coaching their teams, scheduling their playdates starting from the crawling stage-it might seem as though parents could control even who their kids’ friends are-and aren’t.
Maybe at first. But, as many parents can attest, children have their own way of making friends and, researchers say, the process is more complex than one might think and requires the child to master certain skills. Deciding how to handle the friends you don’t approve of should require some work on your part as well, the experts say. And that work ideally would start when a child first enters the social world.
Children, even very young ones, choose their friends based on a few core values that actually don’t differ much from how adults make friends, says Steven Asher, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Duke University who studies peer influence and friendships among children.
First, are they any fun? “This starts as young as 2 or 3 and never goes away,” Asher says. “You might care about someone or look out for them, but if they’re really not much fun to be with, that’s going to be a restraining factor.”
Another core value has to do with whether the kids can share, cooperate and get along. And a third factor, which grows in importance with age, involves whether they can count on each other for advice and emotional support.
With those core values in mind, parents and other adult caretakers can do a lot to help their children make and keep good friends. And a lot of it, they’re doing already.
For example, when parents sign their child up for an activity based on what the child is likely to enjoy, it exposes him or her to others with similar interests and sensibilities.
“When parents involve their kids in church groups, dance, sports, they’re taking responsibility for the kind of child he or she is going to become, and doing some planning into the kind of peer group they’d like their child to get involved with,” Asher says.
Karen Pierce, a child psychiatrist at Children’s Memorial Hospital, notes that more schools are teaching a “social curriculum,” which encourages compassion and empathy. While intended mainly to discourage bullying, it also helps to foster friendships.
“It’s about being nice; don’t be a bystander, be an upstander,” Pierce says. So when a child sees someone else getting bullied, it’s the upstander who will say, “Don’t say that to my friend.”
It’s also important for parents to always be aware of who their children’s friends are, says Leah Smethurst, a marriage and family therapist with the Family Institute at Northwestern University.
“Know them. Meet them. It’s not about trying to become their friends, but making a comfortable environment so that you know what’s going on,” she says.
Of course it’s still possible, despite the best attempts at social engineering, that a child will bring home a friend who makes Mom’s stomach churn.
But before immediately announcing this dislike, a timeout might be in order-for the parent.
“What parents need to ask themselves is why they don’t like their children’s friends,” says Smethurst. “They have to have an idea of what’s stimulating those negative feelings. That’s Step One, no matter what the age.”
Obviously, if the parents know the friend is using drugs or taking part in activities that the parents don’t want their child involved in, they need to address that quickly and directly.
But if it’s more of a personality issue or a fear that the friend is having a bad influence, talking and, especially, listening, are the best solutions.
“One of the most important parts of having a good relationship with your child and having a positive influence is that it demands communication,” Smethurst says. “So be respectful and listen to why your child likes the friend, and then bring up your concerns.”
Pierce agrees that talking is far more effective than two other options: ignoring the issue or trying to force your child to end the friendship.
“In adolescence, especially, when kids pick their own friends, if you don’t like them you’ve got to step up to being a parent. You don’t forbid-you can’t make the friends enticing, forbidden fruit-but you can’t avoid the issue either.”
Parents also have to pick their battles. “You want to be able to keep those lines of communication open,” Smethurst says. “You can’t fight about every little thing because that person doesn’t meet your standards.”
“Negative influence comes in different shapes and sizes,” agrees Asher. “Some degree of it, you might just have to live with, especially if there’s a lot more going on in that friendship.”
Sometimes it means holding your tongue even if you fear your child could get wounded. Pierce recalls when her daughter became friends with a mean girl.
“Everyone was afraid of her, so everyone tried to make her their friend. Then she turned on my kid. She was really hurt, but I couldn’t stop her from going and playing with her.”
“You can’t teach kids these life rules,” Pierce says. “You have to live life and let your kid live life-and make mistakes.
“What growing up is, and having friends and peers is, is teaching kids life rules in the safety of their home,” Pierce says. “If you don’t dose frustration at home, life is going to dose it much bigger.”
— Desiree Chen
– – –
4/DISCIPLINE
The trouble with when they get into trouble
Like everything else, it begins in the cradle.
“Babies quickly learn how much they have to cry to get their parents to pick them up,” says Melissa Webster, a clinical social worker at the University of Michigan’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department.
“One of the first challenges that parents face is getting their kids to stay in the crib,” she says.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the earliest discipline strategy is passive and occurs as parents provide structured daily routines for feeding, sleeping and awakening.
But as children grow older, parental discipline strategies have to become more proactive, and inevitably parents are faced with the eternal question: to spank or not to spank.
Nearly six decades after Dr. Benjamin Spock recommended that the Baby Boom generation be spared the rod, almost all of the academic literature and research has strongly argued against spanking, yet according to recent studies, more than 90 percent of American families have spanked their children, and 59 percent of American pediatricians “support the use of corporal punishment, at least in certain situations,” according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“In general, we don’t recommend spanking,” says Webster. “But in my opinion, it really comes down to what behavior you are trying to change. Spanking is definitely a ‘no’ when you are trying to change aggressive behavior.”
The spanking question also has a cultural component. Current research indicates that spanking is more common in African-American households, where it is often administered promptly, matter-of-factly and quite possibly to better effect.
For parents who try to avoid using physical punishment but don’t want to rule it out entirely, problems arise when they wait too long to spank.
“One of the things we’ve done by making parents feel guilty (about spanking) is that it is not the first mode of intervention. It’s used as a last resort when they get frustrated, when they are angrier, more emotional-and that’s when it is least effective and most likely to injure the child,” says Daniel Fischer, director of the Child and Family Life program and the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
Benjamin Lahey, a University of Chicago psychologist who specializes in the behavioral and emotional problems of children, describes himself as a strong believer in not using corporal punishment under any circumstances and cautions that certain types of parental personalities should be extra careful about adopting it as a discipline strategy.
“Parents who feel that they tend to react to their child’s misbehavior with strong negative emotions or who tend to get upset very easily. . . should absolutely forswear physical punishment,” he says.
Parents who recognize these tendencies in themselves should also avoid making immediate decisions on punishment.
“Say to the child, ‘You’re in trouble; go to your room. I need to calm down; I’ll talk to you in a few minutes,’ ” Lahey says. That way parents can avoid over-punishing their child for a relatively minor infraction and needlessly escalating the confrontation.
Timeouts are the recommended alternative to spanking, but many parents complain that timeouts don’t seem effective for their child.
“Timeouts don’t work if they are not implemented properly, or if they are not started at an early age,” says Webster.
The rule of thumb for timeouts, many experts say, is one minute per year of the child’s age.
“A child is not going to want to go to the timeout spot, so it is important for you to be persistent. You have to work at it until the child stays there,” she says. “Good parenting comes down to being consistent and always following through on what you say you are going to do.”
Webster also sings the praises of praise.
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“The best parenting strategy is to always praise positive behavior,” she says.
Children love attention, she explains, and if they only get attention for negative behavior, it could actually encourage negative behavior.
Withdrawing certain privileges-a favorite toy or television show, or “grounding” an older child-is another useful discipline strategy, but one that is more effective if the privileges are understood by the child to be part of a package of positive reinforcements that can be withdrawn if certain expectations are not met.
For example, explains Fischer, if taking your child to the Dairy Queen or renting a favorite video is one of the regular activities you share with your child, make it clear that these perks are the fruit of positive behavior.
“This lets kids know that the things they want are things they can control based on their behavior,” he says.
Both Webster and Fischer advise parents to be cautious about seeking advice on the Internet, particularly with regard to discipline.
“What you often find are two extremes,” says Webster. “If you are reading anything at one extreme, you need to be careful,” she says.
Fischer’s advice: “Go to the Web sites of established institutions.” In addition to the American Academy of Pediatrics, he recommends the American Psychological Association and the National Association of Social Workers.
It is almost a given of parenting that at some point a discipline issue will succeed in driving you to the brink; you will handle it badly and then feel guilty or incompetent. Is it time for you and your child to seek professional help?
Probably not. According to Fischer, parents should get help “when they find that a child’s behavior is significantly falling out of the norm of other children that age, or when [the parents] clearly feel frustrated and don’t know how to cope with the challenges they are facing.”
He added that parent-child relationships are “bi-directional,” meaning that children influence the behavior of parents. If parents are finding that their behavior toward their child is consistently harsher or angrier than they would like, it may be time to talk about it with the family pediatrician.
— Tom Hundley
– – –
5/HOMEWORK
When is enough, enough?
No, your memory isn’t fuzzy and your child isn’t just whining: That is a lot of homework, and it is a lot more than you had when you were her age.
According to a 2004 national survey conducted by the University of Michigan, kids are spending twice as much time on homework as they did in 1981. And elementary-school children account for the brunt of that jump.
Yet controversy rages on among not only parents but also educators and researchers about whether this is good or bad, and whether there’s such a thing as an ideal amount of homework.
What’s behind the increase? Some point to 2002’s No Child Left Behind Act, which called for higher educational standards, as a key factor. Educators under more pressure to improve their pupils’ performance might have started assigning more homework to help achieve that.
Others put the increase squarely on demanding parents.
“I think parents at some point got very competitive about what their children’s projects looked like, and then teachers’ expectations got out of whack as a result,” says Sara Bennett, co-author of 2006’s “The Case Against Homework.”
“I think parents have to take some responsibility for that.”
Is the increase in homework helping students?
Alfie Kohn, author of “The Homework Myth,” thinks giving homework is a tradition based in folk wisdom and that, in reality, it does more harm than good.
“The amount of homework is increasing-at least for younger children-at precisely the same time that more research is failing to show any benefit whatsoever,” he says.
Kohn would be pleased to see homework become the exception rather than the default. “Not only is there no evidence showing that homework is beneficial academically, but it may be the single greatest extinguisher of children’s curiosity yet invented. It’s all pain, no gain,” he says.
But Duke University professor Harris Cooper, author of the 2006 article, “Does Homework Improve Academic Achievement?” defends homework’s worth-in measured doses and for certain grade levels.
“Students who do homework appear to do better than students who don’t,” he says in his review, “but only in developmentally appropriate amounts.”
Cooper used the available research to frame out what has come to be called “The 10 Minute Rule.” It stipulates 10 minutes of homework per night, per grade level beginning in 1st grade. So 1st graders should get no more than 10 minutes of homework each night, 2nd graders 20 minutes, etc.
The standard closely resembles the guidelines set by the National Education Association and PTA, and is the official homework policy of many schools across the country, including the Chicago Public Schools.
If only the execution of the guidelines were as clean-cut. Laura Hankins, a doctoral student of school psychology at Penn State University, is conducting a study that she hopes will produce a more standardized tool for measuring how much homework is given.
It’s not as easy as it might seem. For instance, in one of the school districts taking part in the study-the Blue Ridge School District in Downstate Illinois-half of the 1st-grade teachers reported giving out “less than 30 minutes a night” of homework. But it’s unclear which, if any, of those teachers are assigning 1 minute and which are assigning 29 minutes, but the range does leave lots of room for exceeding the 10-minute guideline.
Still, using the guideline as a general benchmark, Cooper sees the current state of homework as largely in step.
“Yes, there are a lot of kids out there receiving too much homework, but the numbers are about 1 in 5,” he says. “About 1 in 5 parents complain their kids get too much. For that 1 in 5 it is a real issue, but that is not the majority.”
For those “real issue” moms and dads, who see homework eroding their kids’ sleep, affecting their health or eliminating their free time, experts encourage them to take the issue back to the school.
“I always start by talking to the teacher,” Bennett says. “I let them know how I feel about it; get a read on how they feel about it.”
Dr. Raymond Lechter, superintendent of Wilmette District 39, points out that as kids get older, the homework problem can compound.
“It gets tricky . . . because they’ll have as many as five teachers, and that can pile up to more than 70 or 80 minutes of homework a night,” he says.
“That’s where the parents need to come in and say, ‘This is causing us pain at home; we’re having fights at home, or it’s causing stress and loss of sleep, what can we do at school?”
At that point, a team of teachers may work together to come up with a plan.
“They may decide that for this student, maybe it’s not so important that he completes every problem, but perhaps every other problem. Or they’ll talk about it and discover it’s really just math he’s having a problem with, so let’s figure out a way to get him some support,” he says.
When talking with individual teachers isn’t enough, Bennett and Kohn advocate pulling in like-minded parents. Bennett runs Stop Homework, an organization and blog.
“I provide resources, put people in touch with each other,” Bennett says.
“The idea is to help parents and educators advocate for saner homework practices.”
— Shaila Wunderlich
– – –
Vox Populi / Fiendish acts
What do you do that drives your parents crazy?
Emma McCauley, 7
When I ride my scooter in the house.
Elora McCauley, 8
When I’m changing and I don’t pick up my clothes.
James McKenna, 13
When I don’t wear my hearing aid.
Seth Hallstrom, 9
My mom gets mad when I don’t listen to her.
Leah Patterson, 9
I ignore [my mom] when I’m watching TV too much.
Lily Sabsowitz, 14
When I don’t do my laundry.
Omy Garza, 14
When I talk back and lie.
Jade Thayer, 13
When I’m told to get off the computer and I don’t.
Brandon Lopez, 8
When I fight with my brother.
Teran Madigan, 10
My parents get upset when I fight with my sister.
Will Regan, 8
I annoy my dad–I don’t brush my teeth; but when my mom tells me, I do it.
Taryn Harsy, 8
I don’t clean my room.
Kassandra Guerra, 12
When I don’t help clean the house.
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— Reported and photographed by Beth Palmer and Jessica Rosenberg.