Supernormal. Мэг Джей

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ [until recently] the survivors and thrivers appeared to pass almost unnoticed.” Suddenly, though, enthusiasm for these survivors and thrivers ran high. Young people like Helen were called “keepers of the dream” because, from the outside at least, they represented the promise of the American Dream: triumph over hardship, scrappy self-sufficiency, hope for a better future, and a seeming equal opportunity for success.

      Resilient children captured the imagination of professionals and laypeople alike, and many early descriptions in academia and the popular press suggested there was something truly incredible about them. Headlines, journal articles, and book titles rang out with superheroic superlatives: “Superkids.” “Invulnerable.” “Invincible.” “Children of steel.” “Supernormal.” These invulnerable, invincible kids displayed an almost otherworldly ability to adapt and succeed, but how?

      ***

      Resilient children are often counted on to save the day at home or at school, and, for a time it seemed, researchers thought that resilient children just might save social science, too. These “children who will not break,” as trauma expert Julius Segal referred to them in a 1978 book, had to have some special strength, it seemed, and if only scientists could discover the secret of resilience, then they could reveal to the world the secret of success. “The invulnerable children!” exclaimed Segal in his writings about resilient boys and girls. “They may be our best research hope.”

      Segal was not the only one who thought so, and all around scientists delved into the lives of resilient kids with zeal. The quest for a short list of personal qualities that seemed to make a person resilient generated a pretty long list of purported assets, not all of which need be present in any one individual, or else that person would be super indeed: at least average intelligence, a pleasant or engaging temperament, problem-solving skills, self-control, independence, self-confidence, good communication skills, humor, determination, ability to form friendships, optimism, attractiveness, a sense of faith or meaning, conscientiousness, and some talent or hobby that attracted the attention of others.

      Yet as tempting as it was to believe that these superkids used their superstrengths to fight back against what was bad about their surroundings, it soon became apparent that many had help from what was good about their environments, too. The most fortunate were sustained by having at least one parent or adult who loved them, and who provided consistent warmth and supervision. Some survived and thrived not because of their parents but because of siblings who cared, or who looked after them. Others were propped up by supportive relationships outside the home, such as with teachers or coaches or mentors or relatives or friends, or by resources in their communities: good schools that fed their minds or fed them lunch; safe neighborhoods or community centers where they could go and just be kids; libraries or churches or gymnasiums or music centers where they could escape and even be inspired.

      As renowned resilience researcher Ann Masten so aptly described, those like Helen do not really have superpowers. Perhaps even more surprising, they use, she said, the “power of the ordinary”—or the everyday attributes that can be found in minds, families, and communities—to make something out of nothing, to make a lot out of a little, to pull a rabbit out of a hat. As is usually the case with magic, however, things are not quite what they seem.

      The closer—and the longer—scientists followed the lives of resilient children and adults, the more they found that resilience is something that goes in and out of view depending on how and when one looks at it. Most often, researchers look for an “observable track record” of good performance, the most easily observable of all being doing well at work or school. But what about those parts of life that researchers cannot see so easily? Soon it was discovered that many kids who woke up to hard times at home yet did well in the classroom—especially those considered to be resilient—felt stressed and lonely on the inside, making their difficulties tough to spot. Similarly, many adults who excelled at work seemingly unfazed by years of troubles were found to be struggling covertly with their relationships and their health. Perhaps decades of research had revealed the secret behind childhood resilience after all: that no child—and no adult—is truly invulnerable.

      ***

      In the middle of the twentieth century, Heinz Hartmann suggested that normal development takes place in what he called an “average, expectable” environment. Something like what pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott referred to as a “good-enough” upbringing, the average, expectable environment is a home—or a school or a neighborhood—where there is enough safety, enough food, enough affection, enough peace, enough discipline, enough supervision, enough role modeling, enough attention, enough love, and at least one good-enough parent or adult who cares. In the good-enough childhood, life need not be without problems, as moderate, age-appropriate challenges are good for us. Still, according to Hartmann and Winnicott, those problems ought to be predictable and they ought to feel normal, whatever we as a culture think that might be.

      Ironically, the average, expectable environment that Hartmann envisioned may be neither average nor expectable. Many more people than we might like to think grow up with what Hartmann called “above-average environmental burdens.” A 2010 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, as children, about 25 percent of adults were the targets of verbal abuse, 15 percent suffered physical abuse, and 10 percent were the victims of sexual abuse. About 30 percent watched their parents divorce. Approximately 30 percent lived in a home where a family member abused drugs or alcohol, and 15 percent witnessed some form of violence. About 5 percent grew up with a parent in jail, and 20 percent shared a home with a family member who was mentally ill.

      These might sound like problems that “other people” have, or ones that reside only below the poverty line, and financial hardship can surely lead to or result from problems in the home. Yet the landmark study that stunned the medical community with just how prevalent and harmful these early stressors are—the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, begun in the late 1990s and sponsored by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente and conducted by co-principal-investigators Vincent J. Felitti and Robert F. Anda—was an examination of nearly eighteen thousand mostly middle-class families. Of these, nearly two-thirds reported at least one of the aforementioned adversities, and almost half reported two or more.

      What this means is that, for all kinds of children and teens, adversity has a way of piling up. Tough times may come bundled together in what has been called an “adversity package,” such as in Helen’s childhood, when one misfortune sets off other problems. In a 2004 study that examined the interrelatedness of hardships, 80 percent of children who lived with one adversity were also exposed to at least one more, and 50 percent were exposed to at least three more.

      On top of this, the most prevalent early adversities aren’t one-time events; they affect the life of the child over and over and over again. Rather than “shock traumas”—to use the words of psychoanalyst Ernst Kris—the most common troubles are “strain traumas” in that they burden the child, and then the adult child, in an ongoing way. They are what fellow psychoanalyst Masud Khan called “cumulative traumas,” or problems that build up across childhood, the full weight of which may not be realized until adulthood: “only cumulatively and in retrospect,” Khan said.

      What makes most childhood adversities so dangerous, then, is not necessarily their gigantic proportions but their wear and tear on the daily lives of children, and on developing bodies and brains. Difficult experiences get under our skin in the form of what is now widely known as toxic stress, or chronic stress. Chronic stress takes its toll—metaphorically—much in the same way as do repetitive blows to the head. When, for example, an athlete is struck once seriously enough to lose consciousness—when he has incurred a concussion—we intervene, we take him out of the game. When a player receives a lesser blow, however, maybe he seems all right and we send him back to the game, back to his life. But, as neurologists have found, the hits, big and small, add up.

      In 2011, Robert Block, the past president СКАЧАТЬ