Psychology Today Blogs - Digital Children

Generational Kinship

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Mon, 12 May 2008 08:27:46 -0700

Generational Kinship

I have observed an interesting phenomenon as my hair has gone white and my neck skin has gone south. When I am at the drugstore or at the market or at a restaurant I find that others, who share the same characteristics of advanced maturity, are especially friendly and civil to me as I am to them. When I smile at a white haired woman and she smiles back, it is free of any sexual innuendo. And between we men the smiles and the courtesy are genuine and lack the undercurrent of competitiveness, over wealth and social status,
that might have been present at an earlier age. There is thus a camaraderie amongst we seniors that stems from being at the same stage of life, freed from many of our earlier anxieties, and faced with new ones that we share in common. There is great comfort and support in knowing that others are going through the same scary changes with strength and good humor. It is one form of generational kinship.

But we are not alone, as in many psychological domains; there are parallels between those at either end of the life cycle. I have observed the same phenomenon of generational kinship when my preschool grandchildren meet children of about the same size and age at the beach or the playground. They immediately play with one another and enjoy each others company even though have never seen one another before and may not even speak the same language. Like we seniors, they sense the sameness of their position, relatively small, relatively powerless, and in need of the kind of reassurance that only age mates can provide-namely-that we are in the same boat and are surviving.

We are social beings, and the truth of that is never more obvious than at beginning and towards the end of life. For it is at those points, perhaps more that at any other, that we need reassurance about our common humanness.

Ruminations on the IQ and Virtue

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:17:53 -0700

Ruminations on the IQ and Virtue

Psychologists have long assumed that measures of infant intelligence are of little value in predicting later mental ability. This makes sense because intelligence tests are heavily verbal while the language skills of infants and young children are not well developed. New research, however, suggests that measures of curiosity and of selective attention in infants and young children do indeed predict later mental test scores. I anticipate that these findings will lead many companies to create kits for assessing and raising young children's IQs. Such kits will simply add to the current overemphasis on the IQ, and upon tests of academic achievement. This overemphasis has already led to an epidemic of cheating at all levels of education and to undue pressure on teachers to give good grades.

These reflections brought about my ruminations on the IQ. Individuals vary in their levels of brightness, their ability to adapt to new situations. Brightness is determined in part by heredity and in part by the environment and is generally constant across the life span. Individuals also differ in particular areas of mental functioning. I, for example, have absolutely no sense of direction while my wife is just the opposite and always knows just where we are. Another important consideration is that intellectual ability is not highly correlated with creativity. Many of our most gifted writers, musicians, and painters would probably not be admitted to a Mensa meeting.

It seems to me that the contemporary overemphasis on the IQ, and academic success, misses a very important corollary of high mental ability. In the broadest sense intelligence is a form of freedom. It affords one the ability to evaluate and make choices. The brighter the individual, the greater the freedom of choice. But freedom is necessarily linked to virtue, the ability to make moral choices. An emphasis upon intellectual achievement and academic success without an equal emphasis on virtue is one-sided and can work against the common good. Those who crafted the multi leveraged credit schemes that led to the current mortgage crises were ingenious. But they were lacking in virtue.

This is not to say that we should not value intellectual ability and academic achievement. It is only to say that high intelligence carries with it a moral imperative. As parents we need to ensure that our children appreciate not only the choices, but moral responsibility, that goes with superior mental ability.

My Brain and I

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:44:55 -0700

I was correcting a student's paper recently, and I found the phrase, "the brains ability." Without thinking I wrote in the margin "brains don't have abilities but people do." That in turn started a whole series of reflections. The current explosion in brain research has had many powerful and beneficial effects. But it has also been used to justify early intellectual stimulation in infants and young children. The argument is that the brain is growing so fast during the first years of life that we need to capitalize on that growth and load infants and young children down with cognitive stimulation in increase their intelligence. I am a gardener and this argument never made sense to me. One of the first lessons I learned was that you don't prune during the growing season. Loading young children with stimulation is a form of pruning. Another fallacy of that argument is that it is not the number of neurons but their interrelation which is correlated emerging ability. In any case, there is a lot of synaptic pruning going on so that older children have fewer neurons than younger ones.

But the issue raised by my student is more profound than that and goes to the heart of contemporary discussions about the brain. Let me put it simply, do I tell my brain I want pizza, or does my brain tell me that I want it. That is to say we are looking at two quite different levels of phenomena, electrochemical processes on the one hand, and conscious experience on the other. Brain research has given us a much better sense of the connection, but certainly it is far from explaining my ideas, my feelings, my desires, my personality my free will.

It raises questions like: Where does the I reside? I tend to locate ideas in my head and sensory experiences in my body, but my thoughts and experiences are not electro-chemical. I certainly have no use for the mystical explanation of a spirit world that can be reached by séances and wedge boards. I simply remained mystified and awed by my conscious experience. I realize that it is an epiphenomena but that really doesn't take me very far.

The aim of this rumination is simply to make us a bit more careful and a bit more awed about the brain and our conscious experience and behavior. They are very different levels of phenomena, and while they are necessarily correlated, they are far from being identical. The brain doesn't have abilities, values, beliefs and prejudices, people do.

Too Young to Be Sexy?

David Elkind, Ph.D. — Thu, 01 May 2008 10:06:24 -0700

In their book So Sexy So Soon, Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne document the many ways in which young children in our society are being sexualized by the media. In their language, clothing styles, and actions even young children are aping their TV and music idols. The furor over the sexy photos of Miley Cyrus, star of the Disney Hannah/Montana show and role model for the 5- to 12-year-old girl contingent is a case in point. The author's argue that young children are learning sexual behavior, sexualization, before they understand true sexuality and sexual relationships. This leads to distorted attitudes both towards themselves and the opposite sex and can have long term consequences for later healthy sexual adjustment. Levin and Kilbourne offer parents many helpful suggestions and strategies for minimizing the damage to their children from too early sexualization.

It does not take away from the value and usefulness of this book to point out that there is another contributor to early sexualization over and above the media. More of our young children are in child care than ever before. More than 80 percent of our young children are non parental care part or full time. What this means is that children are being socialized to age mates earlier than ever before. With two-year-olds in a child-care center, one can already observe patterns of social hierarchy, leadership and follower ship. As a consequence children are being introduced to peer pressure, and the need to conform and compete, at ever earlier ages. Even 4-year-olds now show concern over the logos on their sneakers, jeans and shirts.

This preschool peer socialization appears in other ways as well. Many of the behaviors we once saw among older children, such as relationship bullying (social exclusion) are now appearing at ever earlier ages. While such socialization need not be bad and could have strong benefits for cooperative efforts, this does not seem to be the way this development is moving. In any case I think we have to appreciate that it is the early socialization of so many of our contemporary young children which makes them particularly susceptible to media exploitation. Even young children now feel that have to idolize and imitate the current teen stars in order to be accepted by their peers.