The Art of Manliness - #665： How Childhood Shapes Adulthood

00:00:00.000 I'm Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.080 Ask an adult, especially if they're struggling in life, what caused them to end up the way

00:00:15.160 they did, and they might cite certain factors from their childhood, like having a distant

00:00:18.580 cold mother or getting picked on as a kid.

00:00:20.680 The problem here, of course, is that memories change over time, and narratives about the

00:00:24.380 past develop to fit one's current situation.

00:00:26.380 My guests today work in the kind of research that corrects this problem to figure out how

00:00:30.280 aspects of childhood truly affect adulthood by studying humans from the time they're babies

00:00:34.480 through middle age and beyond.

00:00:35.820 Their names are Jay Belsky and Terry Moffitt, and they're both professors of human development

00:00:39.200 and two of the four contributors to The Origins of You, How Childhood Shapes Later Life.

00:00:43.640 To begin our conversation, Jay and Terry discuss the longitudinal studies that they and their

00:00:46.960 colleagues have used to track people over decades of their lives to show, among one things, how

00:00:50.960 aggressiveness and shyness in childhood end up impacting adulthood.

00:00:53.940 We then discuss the limitations of the famous marshmallow experiment, you probably heard

00:00:57.520 about that, and what these more expansive longitudinal studies have shown about the importance of

00:01:01.240 self-control in achieving a successful adulthood.

00:01:03.720 We unpack whether the negative outcomes associated with being bullied in childhood are inevitable,

00:01:08.200 who's most likely to become a bully, and who's most likely to be bullied, which, as it

00:01:12.160 turns out, isn't a matter of being overweight or wearing glasses.

00:01:15.020 We discuss how children who act out in childhood but avoid making certain mistakes in adolescence

00:01:18.740 can still turn out okay, and why you probably shouldn't worry about children who are good

00:01:21.780 as kids, but get into a little trouble during their teen years.

00:01:24.700 We also dig into the impact that child care has on kids and the role that genes play in

00:01:28.360 development.

00:01:29.040 We enter conversation with some allowance-related ideas for cultivating greater self-control in

00:01:32.860 your kids.

00:01:33.620 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood.

00:01:37.060 All right, Jay Belsky, Terry Moffitt, welcome to the show.

00:01:53.160 Great to be here.

00:01:54.580 You bet.

00:01:55.680 Okay, so you are both professors of human development and two of the four co-authors

00:01:59.620 of a book called The Origins of You, How Childhood Shapes Later Life.

00:02:03.260 And what this book is, it's a collection of insights this group of leading psychologists

00:02:07.140 has gleaned from years of studies about childhood development.

00:02:11.080 And Jay, you came in, you synthesized and summarized the studies for the book.

00:02:14.840 And the kind of studies that you've respectively done, these are called longitudinal studies.

00:02:19.520 And really, the highest quality of longitudinal studies where children, basically, they're followed

00:02:24.140 from birth and followed for decades into adulthood.

00:02:27.140 You had researchers coming in, checking in with the parents, doing in-depth interviews.

00:02:30.880 They're doing observations, they're doing tests, all to figure out how childhood affects adult life.

00:02:37.660 So let's start off with this.

00:02:38.920 Tell us more about these longitudinal studies, how they work, and what they look like.

00:02:43.480 Yeah, thanks.

00:02:44.200 Thanks for asking.

00:02:45.540 Longitudinal studies are my life's work, so I could talk about them for hours and hours,

00:02:50.340 but I'll try to keep it short.

00:02:52.440 The idea here is that you draw a sample of all the babies born in a certain place

00:03:00.440 in a certain time.

00:03:01.980 Usually, it's in one city in one year, but sometimes you do all the babies born in one country,

00:03:07.400 in one week, something like that.

00:03:09.740 And then you start collecting data on them and assessing them and their parents and families

00:03:14.500 and follow them forward through time.

00:03:17.380 The particular studies that Jay has written about in the book,

00:03:21.840 one of them takes place in Dunedin, New Zealand,

00:03:24.420 which started with all the babies born in that city in 1972.

00:03:28.020 There are about 1,000 of them, and they're now in their late 40s.

00:03:32.800 And the last time we saw them was April 2019, luckily before the pandemic,

00:03:37.960 when you could still collect data.

00:03:40.120 And at that point, 94% of those original babies still took part in the project.

00:03:45.100 So, that's really important scientifically because it means that the people who had poor health

00:03:53.960 or mental health problems or inadequate social development have not dropped out along the way.

00:04:00.840 The studies still represent the population.

00:04:03.780 The other ones, one of them was the NICHD, National Institute of Child Health and Development

00:04:10.160 Child Care Study, and that was a longitudinal study of children at the beginning of life

00:04:16.980 with the major focus on recording all of the time that they spent in child care

00:04:21.680 and measuring the quality of that child care to see how that major influence on their life

00:04:27.720 panned out.

00:04:28.680 And those children have now been followed.

00:04:30.720 How long, Jay?

00:04:31.480 How old are they?

00:04:32.520 Our funding was cut off at age 15.

00:04:34.620 So, we followed them intensively from birth to age 15.

00:04:38.600 Okay.

00:04:39.340 And so, what Jay just mentioned is that all of the success of this kind of endeavor does

00:04:43.520 really depend a lot on funding because nobody ever makes a commitment to fund a study for

00:04:49.760 five decades.

00:04:51.180 And you have to, the research team has to go along continuously writing new proposals and

00:04:58.760 putting forward new ideas and making a justification for collecting more information at the next

00:05:04.600 stage of life.

00:05:05.360 So, when the Dunedin study started, it was really a study of things like early development,

00:05:12.400 walking, talking, crawling, baby teeth, that kind of thing.

00:05:17.120 And now we're having to make the case for studying things like menopause and heart attacks.

00:05:22.300 So, you have to keep on your toes to keep pitching the research project to funding agencies

00:05:28.060 as you go along.

00:05:29.560 Well, let's talk about some of the insights that you all have gotten from this research.

00:05:33.520 Because I know a lot of our listeners, they're either, they're parents and they're probably

00:05:37.380 like a lot of parents in modern life, they're paranoid.

00:05:39.820 It's like, what am I, am I, am I doing things that are messing up my kid for the rest of their

00:05:42.920 life or, or there's their teachers or their coaches or their mentors.

00:05:47.080 And so, maybe you get some insights on things they can do.

00:05:50.220 And then also maybe like stuff that's out of their control.

00:05:52.720 So, let's talk about the first thing you talk about in the book is this idea of temperament,

00:05:57.720 right?

00:05:57.940 So, you looked at kids and you, basically kids at a young age, they're either really

00:06:02.920 like shy and reserved or they're like hyperactive, super risk-taking, or they're just sort of

00:06:07.720 somewhere in between.

00:06:09.200 And I think a lot of parents are wondering, well, is my shy kid always going to be a shy

00:06:12.660 kid?

00:06:12.940 Or is this kid who's just like making a mess of things and like starts fires in the backyard?

00:06:17.860 Is he always going to be like that?

00:06:19.080 Is that going to have, is that going to haunt him in adulthood?

00:06:21.000 So, what does the research say about childhood temperament and its influence on adult life?

00:06:26.000 Jay, would you like me to speak first and then hand over to you?

00:06:29.460 Go for it, Timmy.

00:06:30.440 Okay.

00:06:31.220 I think the question here is, you know, if my child is a very shy child, will they always

00:06:36.060 be shy for the rest of their lives?

00:06:38.400 Or if they're an aggressive child who hurts others, will they always be in trouble for

00:06:42.740 the rest of their lives?

00:06:44.180 What our research with these longitudinal studies has shown absolutely yes and absolutely no.

00:06:49.900 So, like many things with human beings, it's quite difficult to have a simple answer.

00:06:58.460 Life is just too complex.

00:06:59.920 And that's one of the things that Jay really draws out in the book.

00:07:03.700 Now, I have to say that one-on-one, when a researcher does a project in a longitudinal

00:07:10.460 study and finds some continuity from early childhood temperament to midlife, and let's say

00:07:16.380 we have found things that children who were very shy at the age of three actually get married

00:07:21.580 later than children who were more outgoing.

00:07:24.800 So, it takes them longer to find a partner.

00:07:27.700 But when they do find a partner, they're less likely to get divorced.

00:07:31.220 So, they stick with that partner once they find them.

00:07:34.420 Now, that's not shyness.

00:07:36.280 That's marital stability. 1.00

00:07:38.320 But you can see when you start to think about it that it might have its roots in shyness,

00:07:43.080 that children who are quite careful around strangers when they're very young and a little

00:07:49.420 bit timid and who sort of wait and watch to see how things are going to go do turn out

00:07:57.120 to then later be the kinds of adults who are careful with their relationships.

00:08:03.360 So, you wouldn't say it's shyness that is carried along, but it's more this kind of careful

00:08:09.280 approach to relationships.

00:08:10.860 And developmental psychologists call that heterotypic continuity, which is kind of a

00:08:16.460 big phrase.

00:08:17.100 But what it actually means is that the relationship between childhood and adulthood doesn't need

00:08:21.980 to be absolutely one-to-one, shy-to-shy, or aggressive-to-aggressive, but you can see

00:08:28.220 in the adult behavior, you can see the roots of the childhood temperament.

00:08:33.380 Does that make sense?

00:08:34.580 That makes sense, yeah.

00:08:35.460 I mean, you want to talk about the other end of the distribution, the out-of-control, acting

00:08:40.020 out kids early on and their legacies?

00:08:42.880 Yes, yes.

00:08:43.700 So, some of the research that we've done, in particular in the Dunedin study and also

00:08:47.860 now in the e-risk study in Britain, the two longitudinal studies we have, is following

00:08:54.720 children who were very aggressive and to see how they turn out in adult life.

00:09:00.680 And here's what happens.

00:09:02.620 You have a lot of children who are sort of out of control when they are little, and they

00:09:08.300 have little boys who have difficulty adjusting to first grade.

00:09:12.240 That kind of thing is absolutely normal.

00:09:14.540 But what we're looking at is when a child is aggressive and badly behaved across situations

00:09:22.200 at home, at school, in the neighborhood, according to their preschool teacher, their first grade

00:09:27.420 teacher, second grade teacher, third grade teacher, fourth grade teacher, their mother

00:09:31.600 when interviewed repeatedly, their friends.

00:09:35.000 Everyone agrees that this child is aggressive and badly behaved, and they sustain it over many

00:09:42.460 years of childhood.

00:09:43.360 That kind of a beginning has turned out to be bad news for adulthood.

00:09:50.740 So, those young people tend to go through adolescence, getting involved in juvenile delinquency.

00:09:57.260 Adolescence is a time when a lot of kids break the law.

00:09:59.900 That's perfectly normal.

00:10:01.560 But these kids who started out aggression when they were two or three years old and continued

00:10:06.900 it right through primary school, according to all reporters, end up being the more physically

00:10:13.360 aggressive.

00:10:13.960 They're comfortable with solving social problems using violence.

00:10:18.120 And then when they get into adulthood, they've burnt a lot of bridges.

00:10:23.220 They don't have friends.

00:10:24.640 They've probably dropped out of school.

00:10:26.740 So, they don't have many alternatives to crime.

00:10:30.160 And they tend to have also damaged the relationships with their family.

00:10:34.400 So, they find themselves in young adulthood sort of at wit's end, and an antisocial lifestyle

00:10:40.280 seems appealing to them.

00:10:41.740 And it continues on.

00:10:43.860 And then in their 30s and 40s, it becomes worse.

00:10:47.220 And it spreads into all areas of life.

00:10:49.540 And they commit crimes at work, embezzle money, show up at work intoxicated.

00:10:54.620 They get involved in domestic violence with their partners.

00:10:57.920 And so, they really have a lot of very bad outcomes.

00:11:01.560 I have to caution, though, and say this is a very small group of mainly males.

00:11:07.440 So, we're talking about under 5% of little boys who would take this pathway.

00:11:13.560 And let me just build on what Temi said here, because I was intrigued that Temi was talking

00:11:19.640 about preschool and second grade and third grade and fourth grade and described it as

00:11:23.460 early.

00:11:24.000 From the standpoint of the entire life, it is early.

00:11:26.780 But what we have to appreciate is that when the Dunedin people first started characterizing

00:11:33.320 both these timid, inhibited, and these would-be antisocial children, it was at three years of age.

00:11:40.480 So, it really is what Temi is describing, just to amplify somewhat, early and continuous development

00:11:47.600 along the same track that becomes the forecast for similar functioning in the future.

00:11:53.480 So, that child who is very timid as a three-year-old, but gets encouraged to be a little more exploratory

00:12:01.300 and risk-taking and social by the time they're starting school in second grade and third grade

00:12:06.640 can grow out of it.

00:12:08.600 And by the same token, many of those children, or at least some of them, who start out with

00:12:14.100 those difficult personalities or difficult temperaments, if they get support and encouragement

00:12:20.520 and consistent discipline that's not too harsh and is proportionate to the, quote, childhood

00:12:27.440 misdeeds they commit, they can grow out of it too.

00:12:30.840 So, we have to see the child's continuing development within the context that he or she is growing up.

00:12:38.040 Sadly, many of those timid children are encouraged to maintain their timidity, if you would.

00:12:44.360 And many of those problematic children at three and four don't get the kind of input that might

00:12:52.420 re-regulate their development.

00:12:54.880 Right.

00:12:55.080 I think an interesting point you made is the development of temperament, there's a multi-process

00:13:00.360 going on, and one of them is the reactive process, right?

00:13:03.460 When a child acts out or acts timid, the adults around them respond to that.

00:13:09.200 And that response, like, actually exacerbates, or could exacerbate the timidity or the aggressiveness.

00:13:16.980 That's exactly right.

00:13:18.100 That's what one of the authors, Afshalom Kaspian, nicely wrote about, you know, in this book and

00:13:22.820 elsewhere, which is called an evocative effect.

00:13:25.640 But there's also an appreciation that a child is a producer of its own development.

00:13:30.760 So, you know, the aggressive child might seek out other children who are aggressive,

00:13:37.420 or may be victims, and in that sense, keep producing the same behavior.

00:13:44.100 So, it's both the feedback you get from the world and the world you create for yourself

00:13:49.700 that become forces that either maintain who you are, or alternatively, if you're doing

00:13:57.680 opposite things, can change who you are.

00:13:59.680 So, it sounds like most kids, like, their temperament is somewhere in the middle between extreme

00:14:05.880 timidity and extreme aggressiveness, and the outliers, those are outliers.

00:14:09.920 And for the outliers, there's possible to intervene, but does it sound like it has to

00:14:13.540 be kind of, it has to be relatively early for there to be a good chance of having an effect?

00:14:18.480 Oh, you know, there has been a real push in the last 10 years towards early years interventions.

00:14:24.440 And I think it's important to keep those in the context of that before that, the alternative

00:14:31.280 was that you didn't really intervene with an aggressive child until they broke the law,

00:14:36.120 got, you know, got identified by the police, press charges, and go to jail.

00:14:42.060 And obviously, that was years too late.

00:14:44.860 Or you didn't really intervene with the child who was failing to learn to read until they

00:14:49.040 were around fourth grade and having difficulty making that transition to junior high school.

00:14:54.880 And we know that, we now know that's way too late.

00:14:57.680 So, there's been a, there's always swings and roundabouts in behavioral science.

00:15:03.060 And in the past 10 years, there's been a swing toward, we must intervene earlier.

00:15:08.580 That's absolutely true.

00:15:09.980 Nobody would disagree with it.

00:15:11.740 But that's not the same thing as saying, and it's hopeless if you intervene late.

00:15:16.600 There is a kind of a snowball effect that if a child is having difficulties in very early

00:15:22.880 life, and we don't intervene, then those difficulties can bring on more difficulties.

00:15:28.020 Let's take a child who has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they're very, very

00:15:33.200 overactive and sort of under controlled.

00:15:36.380 And because of that, they lose friends.

00:15:39.840 And so, while we're taking a wait and see attitude to see whether, you know, how this was going

00:15:44.500 to go, in the meantime, they've lost a lot of friends and they've lost a lot of time on

00:15:48.320 their educational building blocks as well.

00:15:51.100 So, if we wait until they're, say, 10 or 11 years old to start considering whether to

00:15:56.120 treat their ADHD, there may be some bridges burned for that child.

00:16:01.240 Whereas if we had done earlier intervention, the child might have ended up with better reading

00:16:06.000 and more friends at school and been happier at school.

00:16:09.400 So, undeniably, early intervention can prevent this kind of snowball effect where one simple

00:16:16.440 small problem grows into several very big problems and becomes harder and harder to change.

00:16:23.280 But we've also shown incidents where, in our longitudinal studies, where if young people who had poor

00:16:29.860 self-control made it through high school without getting addicted to anything and without getting

00:16:34.940 pregnant and without dropping out of high school, that their lives can be turned around. 1.00

00:16:40.280 So, that's suggesting that age 17, 18 is not too late.

00:16:45.160 It just, it all depends upon the kinds of interventions that you want to attempt.

00:16:49.980 And whether they're naturalistic ones or ones that are imposed.

00:16:53.520 Well, you mentioned self-control.

00:16:54.880 That was another thing you looked at.

00:16:56.000 And I think, by now, a lot of people have heard about the marshmallow test, right?

00:17:00.720 That you did this test on this guy.

00:17:02.380 I forgot who it was.

00:17:03.040 You know, did the test, the kids put in a room with a marshmallow.

00:17:06.500 If they're able to, like, control themselves and not eat the marshmallow, they get, like,

00:17:09.200 three marshmallows.

00:17:10.540 And so, now, parents are like, well, I got to teach my kid self-control.

00:17:13.780 And because that'll help them.

00:17:15.100 Because then they followed them and said, well, if you have self-control as a kid,

00:17:18.020 you'll have more self-control as an adult.

00:17:19.540 Is that what your longitudinal studies found as well?

00:17:22.120 Definitely so.

00:17:23.220 I'm a big fan of the marshmallow test.

00:17:24.980 I think it's so much fun.

00:17:26.640 And I know a lot of parents now are sort of trying it out on their children when they're around

00:17:31.960 two or three years old.

00:17:33.040 They spring them on cookies or marshmallows and see what they do.

00:17:36.620 We need to keep in mind that that test was only ever one sample of one behavior on one day.

00:17:45.340 And it's well known that every child has a bad day now and then or just isn't feeling well

00:17:52.040 or is a bit cranky.

00:17:53.580 There's a lot of reasons why a child might fail the marshmallow test on one day and it

00:17:58.580 doesn't have to have any repercussions for the rest of their lives.

00:18:02.920 So, that test is fun and it's fascinating that it predicts anything at all.

00:18:08.900 But in fact, most of the children who do poorly on the marshmallow test turn out with no worries

00:18:14.400 simply because it's a test that's full of error.

00:18:17.720 What we've done in our longitudinal studies sort of contrasts with that a bit.

00:18:21.580 And that is, again, we have used all of the data sources that we have.

00:18:26.200 The mothers, the teachers, the research workers, even the children themselves interviewed these

00:18:32.040 people over and over and over every year about the child's self-control style.

00:18:37.020 So, when I talk about a child who has good self-control or poor self-control, that means that it was,

00:18:44.400 that style was sustained over the first decade of life and that everyone agreed that that was

00:18:51.400 the child's style, the mothers, the teachers, the research workers, and so forth.

00:18:55.880 With that type of measurement of self-control, we do get continuities right up into their late

00:19:02.940 40s in the Dunedin study.

00:19:05.260 So, what we're finding now is that the children who had the best self-control when they were

00:19:10.100 three-year-olds and five-year-olds now have the most assets, they have the most highly

00:19:16.640 skilled occupations, they have the fewest health problems, they are the least likely to be addicted

00:19:23.740 to anything like tobacco or alcohol or cannabis, they have slower aging.

00:19:30.120 So, we're able to measure their pace of aging by tracking biomarkers over 20 years.

00:19:35.740 And the children who had the best self-control in very early life are actually biologically

00:19:40.560 younger today than their peers.

00:19:43.000 And that's pretty remarkable over five decades of following people.

00:19:47.640 You know, what we should also pay careful attention to here was not just as Timmy talked about,

00:19:54.500 which is the consequences of early self-control or the lack thereof, but it's determinants.

00:20:01.840 Because one of the things we tend to do when we only look at the child's behavior, and especially

00:20:07.900 when it predicts later on problematic things, is we risk blaming the victim.

00:20:13.040 And one of the things we know is that self-control is one of those domains of development that

00:20:18.940 environmental exposures and developmental experiences make a big difference for.

00:20:24.220 Surely, some children come into the world and developing self-control is easier, like the timid 1.00

00:20:29.920 child, in contrast to the child who is more rambunctious.

00:20:34.000 But how children are raised, the kind of risks they face, the kind of control they can exert

00:20:39.560 over their life makes a big difference.

00:20:41.480 In fact, if you stop and think about the marshmallow test, and I agree with Timmy's critique of it,

00:20:46.860 or appraisal of it, is that if you grow up in a family and in a community where your actions

00:20:53.580 don't have consequences, where what you do doesn't matter for how people subsequently

00:20:59.700 treat you, where you don't develop a sense of control, why would you trust these people

00:21:05.420 who say, if you wait, I'll give you three marshmallows, or you can have one right now?

00:21:10.520 In other words, being out of control is often something that's developmentally manufactured,

00:21:17.660 not necessarily something that's inborn.

00:21:19.660 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.

00:21:25.360 And now back to the show.

00:21:27.160 Another point you make in the book that I thought was interesting is that, yes, self-control

00:21:30.620 from that first decade, so ages one to 10 matters, but what can have more of an effect is what

00:21:36.160 the self-control looks like in the second decade of life, 10 to 20, because as I think one of

00:21:41.680 you alluded to, that's when addictions could start, that's when crime can start, and that

00:21:46.240 can have more of an impact on your 30s and 40s.

00:21:49.660 Yeah, we did a paper on what we call just teenagers' mistakes, and look, this is kind

00:21:55.760 of me-search because I made a lot of those mistakes when I was that age, so I didn't

00:22:01.000 need a fancy psychological theory to help me generate these hypotheses, but we just looked

00:22:06.260 at the children according to the amount of self-control that they had as toddlers, and

00:22:11.640 then we looked at the kinds of mistakes that they made when they were teenagers, and the children

00:22:17.180 with very low self-control when they were preschool children ended up being more likely to start

00:22:24.100 smoking, to get a police record, and that would interfere with their being able to get a job

00:22:29.380 later.

00:22:30.160 They were more likely to have an unplanned pregnancy or to get a girl pregnant, and they

00:22:34.920 were more likely to drop out of high school without qualifications.

00:22:37.900 So, these were the kinds of mistakes that a young person can make.

00:22:42.820 They sort of happen in a moment, but they can really change the whole course of the rest

00:22:47.980 of your life, and they're very difficult to overcome.

00:22:51.700 And those are the kinds of things that sort of led me to think that if you have a child

00:22:56.840 who has, you know, regardless of whether your child has good or poor self-control, but if

00:23:01.620 you have a child who's interested in trying new things and is lively and curious and you

00:23:05.880 think, therefore, they're at risk of maybe making a mistake as a teenager, the trick is

00:23:11.960 to get them through the adolescence years without any of those four mistakes.

00:23:16.760 You don't want an addiction.

00:23:18.040 You don't want a pregnancy. 1.00

00:23:19.160 You don't want a police record and so forth.

00:23:21.520 And so, I mean, there's two points of intervention that could happen there.

00:23:24.180 One, you can start doing intervention when they're kids.

00:23:26.640 And you talk about that, like Head Start has been shown to help kids get more self-control

00:23:30.520 because there's stability there, young kids.

00:23:32.860 But then in adolescence, that's a really important time.

00:23:36.020 If you can just do something to help kids avoid, like nudge them away from those police

00:23:41.760 record, alcohol, tobacco, they'll probably do okay, even if they had trouble with self-control

00:23:47.360 as a seven-year-old.

00:23:49.060 Yeah, the mistakes made in the teenage years accounted for about half of their adult outcomes.

00:23:55.460 So, you might say that if you had a child who was on a poor self-control trajectory in elementary

00:24:02.120 school, if you could get them past adolescence without any of those really bad life-altering

00:24:08.180 mistakes, they would have a second chance as a young adult.

00:24:12.560 And I think people know, you know, anecdotally, I've known a kid like that.

00:24:15.740 They're just a terror, right?

00:24:17.400 Ages seven through 10.

00:24:18.820 And then they found something.

00:24:19.700 You're talking about me.

00:24:20.560 Right, yeah, or they found a sport in adolescence, or they found something they got really passionate

00:24:25.900 about, and they were able to just direct, and they just turned their life around after

00:24:29.120 that.

00:24:29.960 Yes, absolutely.

00:24:31.600 And, you know, I think when we're trying to, when behavioral scientists are trying to get

00:24:36.120 our papers published in journals, we very often overemphasize the extent to which we were

00:24:40.840 found continuity from childhood to adulthood.

00:24:43.620 And we're able, you know, isn't it remarkable that we're able to predict, you know, a job

00:24:49.300 failure at age 35 from reading difficulties at age six?

00:24:55.720 That is remarkable.

00:24:57.200 But usually the effect sizes, the statistical effect sizes are quite modest.

00:25:02.600 And so, the flip side of that, which we seldom emphasize, is that most of the children

00:25:09.280 who had reading difficulties at age six did not go on to have employment failure at age

00:25:15.520 35.

00:25:16.540 And this is something that I really like about what Jay did with the book.

00:25:20.340 He honed in on each of those instances of lack of deterministic prediction to point out

00:25:28.780 that more kids turned out right than turned out wrong.

00:25:32.460 And so, I think he took a body of research and really made it be uplifting and encouraging.

00:25:39.280 For families, it's in a most terrific way.

00:25:42.840 Let me just add there that one reason I could do that was because the research revealed what

00:25:48.740 I like to call, given what Temi's just been referring to, is lawful discontinuity.

00:25:53.960 That is, when do we get the lack of prediction because we can explain it?

00:26:00.040 When we can explain why something doesn't predict, I almost think we understand it better than we

00:26:04.940 can just predict.

00:26:05.980 So, for example, one of the interesting findings that Temi and Afshalom and Richie's work in New

00:26:12.640 Zealand shows, or maybe I'm confusing it with the UK work, is that being bullied, you know,

00:26:19.440 is obviously, not surprisingly, not good for one's mental health.

00:26:22.640 And in fact, it even is related to obesity.

00:26:24.680 However, it turns out that if you have a supportive relationship at home with your parents or with

00:26:32.340 a sibling, all of a sudden, that that anticipated, almost expected negative effect of that bullying

00:26:40.920 is much lessened.

00:26:42.780 So, there we have an interesting lawful discontinuity in prediction.

00:26:48.060 A negative exposure does not realize a negative outcome because they're what we, in the jargon,

00:26:54.040 call protective factors or buffering processes that get in the way.

00:26:59.580 You might think of it as, you know, instead of the light switch turning on the light, somebody's

00:27:04.600 gone and metaphorically cut the wire that connects the two.

00:27:08.420 So, turning on the bullying does not get the obesity because somebody's cut the wire in

00:27:13.280 between.

00:27:14.440 Yeah, you can add resilience in the child through some, like a supportive family or friendships.

00:27:19.300 Well, I think I would modify that and say the resilience should not necessarily be attributed

00:27:25.220 exclusively to the child.

00:27:27.220 It's the ecology in which the child is growing up.

00:27:30.080 Gotcha.

00:27:30.400 So, it was that supportive family that is the resilience factor that enables the child,

00:27:36.900 if you would, to escape the negative effect of the risky condition.

00:27:42.080 In this case, bullying to, for example, obesity or mental health difficulties.

00:27:48.280 Well, speaking on this idea of bullying, I was wondering, I didn't think I read this in

00:27:51.660 the book, but were you able to suss out like who, like not only who was more likely to get

00:27:56.700 bullied, but like who would, who is more likely to be bullies?

00:27:59.980 Were you able to figure that out with your studies?

00:28:01.540 Yeah, you know, we looked at the who's more likely to be bullied and we thought, okay,

00:28:06.540 it'll be kids who are overweight.

00:28:08.380 And it wasn't.

00:28:09.900 And we thought maybe it's kids with red hair.

00:28:12.660 No, it wasn't that.

00:28:13.640 We thought it might be kids who are wearing glasses.

00:28:16.180 That was not it.

00:28:17.560 The best vulnerability factor that we could find is there were children who were already

00:28:23.280 withdrawn and timid and fearful.

00:28:27.740 And, you know, I think a bully can smell that.

00:28:31.860 So they go for those type of children and they see, they sense vulnerability and then,

00:28:38.460 you know, exacerbate it with their bullying behavior.

00:28:42.140 So if there's a vulnerability factor, that tended to be it.

00:28:46.420 It's that the child was already a little bit depressed and anxious before the bullying

00:28:51.360 even happened.

00:28:52.860 I think this is really consistent with what other bullying workers showed.

00:28:56.440 You know, bullies really are rarely real, true, honest, tough guys.

00:29:00.820 They pick on weak links who won't fight back.

00:29:05.180 And as soon as somebody fights back, it's often the case the bully takes off, skedaddles,

00:29:10.420 has to go find a weak link because the bully is sort of trying to gain status and power.

00:29:15.940 And it's really pseudo status and power often.

00:29:18.640 And that's why they pick on weak links, just like Temi has indicated.

00:29:22.820 What about the likelihood of someone being a bully?

00:29:24.420 Did you just see anything there?

00:29:27.220 Yeah, that comes back to what I was just talking about about 15 minutes ago,

00:29:31.080 but those children who started out being very aggressive at their very first social behaviors,

00:29:37.600 you know, kids who were biting and kicking and not sharing their toys and stealing other

00:29:43.080 children's toys when they were two.

00:29:44.800 And then, you know, they move along and then they become, they just get in the habit of using

00:29:51.180 aggression to get their way and to solve any kind of social problem.

00:29:55.300 And it's that bullying is sort of part of that picture.

00:29:59.620 So, when we think of the symptoms of conduct disorder, they include lying and cheating and

00:30:05.020 stealing and running away from home and breaking rules.

00:30:08.620 But they also include being cruel to others and exploiting the weakness of others.

00:30:14.620 So, bullying, I think, is part of the overall picture of a child who has conduct problems.

00:30:21.840 Well, and going back to this idea, I mean, of troubled kids, people who, kids who are having

00:30:27.580 aggression problems, oftentimes they're boys.

00:30:30.440 And there's been a lot of ink spilled about the problem with boys today.

00:30:34.300 Lots of, either they're just like disengaged or not interested or just lazy, or they're

00:30:39.980 hyper-aggressive, et cetera, et cetera.

00:30:41.840 And I know a lot of parents, you know, there might be parents of teenagers and they see 0.99

00:30:45.480 their kid, teenage boys doing really stupid stuff, maybe even getting involved with, you 0.96

00:30:50.900 know, breaking the law. 0.99

00:30:52.400 And they're like, man, my kid's going to, this is what's going to happen.

00:30:55.360 But what's interesting, your studies found that sometimes you don't like, yeah, it's bad.

00:30:59.560 They got, they had a run-in with the law, they're doing this dumb stuff, but they're probably

00:31:03.180 going to be okay as long as that they're acting up just happened in adolescence. 0.96

00:31:08.220 Yeah, that's right.

00:31:09.100 We found that if, you know, if a child is going to have a poor adulthood with an antisocial

00:31:16.520 lifestyle, it's almost always that started before they started school.

00:31:21.840 So then there's another kind of a kid who gets involved with a little bit of delinquency

00:31:26.200 and some testing the limits and, you know, drinking too much with peers and maybe having,

00:31:32.420 you know, a car crash or something like that.

00:31:34.900 That kind of thing is more like normative, normal adolescence.

00:31:39.100 Kids who get involved with that kind of thing, it's a good way to break the apron strings.

00:31:43.660 It's a good way to prove to the other kids that you're not a mama's boy anymore. 0.82

00:31:47.600 You know, go out with some friends and get into a little bit of trouble.

00:31:51.260 But because they had good performance at school, decent grades and warm relationships with their

00:31:58.940 families beforehand, before they hit that crazy period of adolescence, they tend to be able to pull out of that again.

00:32:07.520 They've got what it takes to have good, warm relationships when they become an adult.

00:32:11.900 They've got what it takes to achieve in life and go on and finish their educations and succeed in the labor market.

00:32:19.620 But there's a sort of just a period during adolescence where kids just will act out.

00:32:26.060 And I don't think we should make too much of it.

00:32:28.100 A lot of my research has been following kids through this adolescent period and pointing out that the vast majority of kids who break the law are not destined to be lifetime criminal offenders.

00:32:40.980 They're just having a little too much fun.

00:32:43.580 And therefore, that suggests that policing and juvenile justice system policies should take this into account.

00:32:52.760 So, you know, our juvenile justice system was set up on the notion that you should just identify on the basis of the current crime and choose the punishment to fit the crime.

00:33:02.840 But in fact, if you look developmentally back at the history of the child, you can differentiate between a child who has been doing everything wrong from the outset versus a child who has just recently kind of gone off the rails and made a bad mistake.

00:33:19.000 And so now more and more justice systems have these policies in place and are working really hard in the courts and in the community policing as well to differentiate between these two kinds of kids and really divert those kids who have a good future ahead of them away from criminal charges, away from a criminal record, away from the courts, and certainly away from prison.

00:33:44.980 So I think it's a real step forward in how we do juvenile justice.

00:33:49.000 One of the longitudinal studies you were all taking part in or looked at here was daycare, kids in daycare, and like the effect daycare had on them later on in life.

00:33:57.160 I know a lot of parents, when they start, when they have kids and they got to go back to work, that's something that they start, they kind of fret about, wring their hands, like, oh, what's going to happen if we put our kid in daycare?

00:34:06.320 Is it going to like affect them?

00:34:07.780 What does the research say?

00:34:09.320 Well, I think in order to understand the research, we have to put it once again in context or at least development in context.

00:34:15.940 Next, we live in a society here in America, in contrast, let's say, to a place like Norway, where I've also done some daycare research, where we don't really have a childcare system.

00:34:26.400 It's up to every parent to figure out this problem for themselves.

00:34:30.260 While we have paid parental leave for somewhat in California, we don't have it in other places.

00:34:36.380 And so that's the first thing to consider.

00:34:38.560 The second thing to consider is over the last 30, 40 years, a major change has taken place in how non-poor Americans raise their children.

00:34:47.940 And that is that if a child is going to be in a non-parental care arrangement, be it family daycare or daycare center or even a nanny, when they're four years of age, it's because they started in the first year of life, in the first six months of life.

00:35:01.920 So we end up with a population of children who are getting some kind of non-familial care from the time they're three, four, five, six months of age until they start school.

00:35:15.140 That is quite a different experience than certainly when I grew up or even the immediate generation thereafter. 0.98

00:35:21.920 What we found when we started the large-scale American daycare study, the mantra among daycare advocates and progressives, for the most part, was that it's quality stupid. 0.93

00:35:35.140 That is to say, as long as the quality of care was good, everything was fine and dandy. 0.94

00:35:39.840 And by quality, we meant that the caregivers were attentive, responsive, stimulating, affectionate, the kind of care you'd want for your children.

00:35:47.580 Well, it turned out the story was not that simple.

00:35:53.520 In fact, it turned out that the quality of care that a child experienced over the first four and a half years of life informed the child's cognitive and language development.

00:36:03.760 And better quality care was somewhat modestly related to better cognitive and language development.

00:36:09.600 At the same time, what we discovered was that the more time you spent in care, hours, days, weeks, months, from birth through four and a half years of life, you were somewhat more likely to be aggressive and disobedient.

00:36:25.540 By the time you started school, in childhood, and in adolescence, you were also more likely to be impulsive and a risk taker.

00:36:34.420 Now, again, these child care effects were small in magnitude per the individual child.

00:36:41.320 But what we have to think about is all the children we're talking about.

00:36:46.740 So, as I like to pose it, or dislike to pose it, is what's more important, a bigger effect that affects few or a small effect that affects many?

00:36:55.020 And one of the things some other work has discovered is the more kids in a kindergarten classroom who've had lots of child care, the more all the kids are somewhat aggressive and disobedient.

00:37:06.640 Now, having said that, let me qualify it in one important way.

00:37:10.080 Families turned out to be more important than child care. 0.96

00:37:13.580 And invariably, that's because it's not only how marriages get along, how people parent, what sibling relations are like, how organized the household is, but also what the genetics parents pass on to their children.

00:37:29.820 So, all this is not to say that child care doesn't matter.

00:37:33.900 It does.

00:37:34.780 But it's to keep it, again, in the context of a broader ecology.

00:37:38.660 What is the society's policies about child care?

00:37:41.040 What kind of family foundations is that child growing up in?

00:37:45.300 And intriguingly, when we go to Norway, where children don't have any child care other than family care for their first year of life, and thereafter, almost all of them go into high-quality center-based care, where caregivers receive a decent wage and have training, we don't see these negative outcomes of child care anyplace like we see in America.

00:38:07.960 So, we don't want to come to the conclusion that daycare and the separation of children from parents inevitably leads to something.

00:38:17.720 Rather, we need to appreciate that in the current context and the continuing context that we have here in America, then it's a different story.

00:38:27.360 And here we see both good news, good quality care is good for children's cognitive and language development, and bad news, lots of time in care, which has become normative, seems to undermine, broadly speaking, self-control to some extent.

00:38:41.780 Okay, so let's summarize things here a little bit.

00:38:44.420 The reason there's a negative effect in the form of increased aggressiveness, disobedience, when you look at child care in the U.S., is that American parents are more likely to put their babies into daycare or child care right after they're born.

00:38:57.280 Whereas in Norway, you don't see that problem because there, the parents get a year of parental leave, so the kids aren't going into daycare for at least a year.

00:39:05.000 They can put it off some.

00:39:05.800 So it seems like starting later, spending less overall time in daycare mitigates possible negative effects to daycare.

00:39:13.440 But another takeaway from your research, too, was that if you had to put your kid into daycare, having a supportive family life can also mitigate possible negative effects, too.

00:39:22.380 So, yes, if you can secure good quality care, or even if it's not the best quality care, and you're going to get a lot of support for the children at home, I wouldn't say don't do it.

00:39:32.560 But I think we have to come back and think about this from a collective society level, and that even if these children are only becoming a little bit more aggressive and disobedient, what happens when you're a teacher with 20 kids in a classroom, and instead of having two or three of them a little more aggressive and disobedient, you have six or seven of them.

00:39:54.800 And, in fact, what the evidence is beginning to show is that even affects the kids who've had little daycare.

00:40:01.460 It's almost like you have a kind of behavioral infection that spreads.

00:40:05.940 I don't want to be catastrophic or hyperbolic about this, but I want to get us thinking about not just effects on the individual, but effects on many individuals, and then we put all these individuals together in classrooms and schools and neighborhoods and the like.

00:40:24.100 In your research, you also looked at genetics a bit.

00:40:28.760 How did genetics influence these outcomes in these longitudinal studies?

00:40:32.840 Some of the work that we did was actually quite celebrated at the time.

00:40:37.480 This was around the year 2000, 2002, 2003.

00:40:41.340 We published papers that identified a specific gene.

00:40:46.700 So, one of those was the MAOA gene, which was thought to be, in mice, a risk factor for aggression, and the serotonin transporter gene, which was thought in humans to be a risk factor for depression.

00:41:02.480 So, we looked at those two, and what we found is that those genes didn't have much of any association with the study members' outcomes,

00:41:11.240 unless the study members were experiencing an adverse home environment or life environment.

00:41:19.260 So, the children who had the MAOA gene that was supposed to be at risk for aggression, unless they were exposed to a lot of maltreatment and harsh physical discipline, it wasn't really related to their behavior.

00:41:33.500 It seemed that more like these genes worked in terms of determining sensitivity to the environment.

00:41:41.780 Now, I have to put out a cautionary note there, is that at that time, between 1996 and 2003, when we were doing that work, one could only study one gene at the time.

00:41:54.240 That was all the technology allowed.

00:41:56.360 And then soon after there, that the genome-wide association study methods became available and affordable to scientists.

00:42:05.620 And so, the field has moved right away from studying one gene at the time.

00:42:11.440 And if you think about it, that was always a kind of a weak approach, but it was the best that we had.

00:42:18.740 It's implausible that one gene could control very much of human behavior, but that was all we could do at that time.

00:42:25.480 And we wanted to get into the business of studying measured genes.

00:42:30.500 So, we got our feet wet.

00:42:32.340 But those findings were very interesting from the point of view that they attracted a lot of public attention then and were celebrated in the media.

00:42:42.380 They were published in the journal Science, which is a very prestigious and discerning journal.

00:42:47.940 And that helped the news spread around that genes were simply not deterministic because up until that point, everybody had been assuming if you found a gene that was associated, it was the cause, like the gene for homosexuality or the gene for bipolar disorder or the gene for violence, the warrior gene, that kind of thing.

00:43:10.140 And what our research was showing was that the genes were actually pretty weak and how they worked depended upon the environmental setting that the child was growing up in.

00:43:21.680 So, I think that's the lesson that we take away from those studies at that time.

00:43:27.720 So, yeah, genes play a role, but the environment also plays a role.

00:43:31.000 Let me just add that this is exactly the theme we've been expressing throughout this, that knowing about the child's behavior or the other child characteristics, in this case genetics, the meaning and the importance or the influence of those personal characteristics are going to depend upon the context in which that child grows up.

00:43:53.320 The gene for X, Y, and Z will not yield X, Y, and Z, usually, if the environment doesn't sustain the expression of X, Y, and Z.

00:44:04.580 Temi and I have a friend who wrote a great book about the biological determinants of crime, and he's not a criminal, yet, as he points out in his book, he meets almost, he repeatedly meets criteria for having biological factors that dispose one toward crime.

00:44:22.420 So, it becomes a very interesting question, and I think the early study that Temi was referring to began to shed light on this, which is that if we're not taking context into consideration, then we're going to be pretty limited in just looking at characteristics of children, especially if those are measured at one point in time or with a single gene.

00:44:42.060 So, what's the future of this research?

00:44:43.640 I mean, are there any questions that you're exploring now?

00:44:46.060 One thing I thought today was, do you know if there's any studies getting started about how COVID, like all the things that happened in the pandemic, school shutting down, kids having to go home, how that will affect them later on in life?

00:44:59.040 Is there anything like that going on?

00:45:00.640 Yeah, yeah, there's lots.

00:45:01.700 And in fact, when we get off of this Zoom call, I'm going to be having one with the Canadian longitudinal study of all the children growing up in Western Canada, which has done just that.

00:45:11.880 We've been madly collecting data on how the family's experience of COVID has been and how it's affecting the children's adjustment.

00:45:20.760 So, yes, there's been quite a scramble to collect data on this, and as you may imagine, it's pretty complicated.

00:45:28.520 You've got to do it fast.

00:45:29.600 You've got to get in there.

00:45:30.860 It's a time when people are stressed and uncomfortable.

00:45:34.080 The last thing they want to be doing is talking to a researcher.

00:45:36.580 So, it's been a challenge to collect the data, but we need to have information on how the pandemic has affected family relationships, how the pandemic has affected anxiety levels, sleep, appetite, how the pandemic has affected the children's ability to study and keep up at school, whether they've been going to school or staying home,

00:45:59.460 and who in the family has actually tested positive for the virus, who's been sick, and has anyone in the family passed away because of COVID.

00:46:09.120 So, there's a lot of data to collect and very little time to do it in, and it's also a moving target.

00:46:15.980 So, you can't ask the family these questions just once.

00:46:19.020 You need to go back a couple of months or three months later and ask them again because the pandemic is lasting a long time, and people who had no difficulty with it three months ago are now having serious difficulties because of it.

00:46:33.720 And we're starting to see some fascinating findings, and there'll be more.

00:46:36.680 But I think that we can generate some reasonable hypotheses here based on everything we've said so far, which is that even children who you might anticipate are most vulnerable to the isolation, the lack of schooling, etc., from the effects of COVID,

00:46:55.440 to the extent that they find themselves in supportive, nurturing families that have the resources, psychological, economic, and otherwise, to compensate for the losses of experience,

00:47:07.220 they're going to do better than other kids who start out with the same vulnerabilities, but don't get that.

00:47:13.540 So, it's really when you're carrying, when you're vulnerable yourself for genetic reasons, for temperamental reasons, for behavioral reasons,

00:47:22.260 and then your family is also limited, it's a chaotic household, it's maybe a poor household, it may be a household in which mother and father are not getting along, or siblings are not getting along, now you get a double whammy.

00:47:38.380 And so, again, the moral of the story is, look at the child's development in the context of who he or she is as a biological and a behavioral organism,

00:47:48.400 and in the context of the world that child is living in.

00:47:53.500 In this case, it's going to be often a sheltering-in-place family.

00:47:58.240 So, Brett, can I turn things around and ask you a question?

00:48:01.640 Sure. Yeah, go ahead.

00:48:03.080 Yeah, how did you pick this book?

00:48:05.040 I just, I came across it.

00:48:06.840 I don't know how I come across it.

00:48:08.020 I just, I'm always on the prowl for books.

00:48:10.280 And I just, I'm very interested in how, first off, I'm interested in logical studies.

00:48:14.780 Like, I've read the book about the grant study and found that fascinating.

00:48:18.600 And then I'm also, as a parent, got two young kids.

00:48:22.100 I'm always, maybe I'm always, maybe I'm being too paranoid about or too neurotic.

00:48:27.060 Like, what can I do?

00:48:28.680 Like, yeah, I'm like, am I screwing my kid up?

00:48:30.680 And whenever I read these books, it's kind of comforting because it's like, no, you're probably not.

00:48:36.520 Like, you're doing okay.

00:48:39.020 And that's what I got from this.

00:48:41.160 I'd say that's a very true message.

00:48:43.480 Was there any particular chapter or finding in the book that you liked best or that resonated with you?

00:48:49.640 Well, actually, the section about self-control was really good.

00:48:53.160 And we actually, so my family, every week we have like a family meeting night where we start off, like we go talk about what's going on in our schedules, get that synced up.

00:49:01.260 And then we also share like a short message.

00:49:02.960 And we, I did the message about self-control.

00:49:06.540 And I had the kids read the William Wordsworth poem.

00:49:09.760 Yeah.

00:49:10.320 Child, and like ask, what does that mean?

00:49:11.660 You know, the child is father of the man.

00:49:13.620 And it was really sick.

00:49:14.320 My kids, you know, my son is 10.

00:49:16.360 My daughter, Scout, she's seven.

00:49:18.800 And I was really surprised.

00:49:19.960 Like, they got it.

00:49:20.660 Like, they understood what this romantic poet was getting at.

00:49:24.200 Like, what happens to them as a child, as a kid, can have influence as, you know, basically, like my son said, like, I'm raising my future self.

00:49:35.120 And I'm like, being a kid, you got it.

00:49:37.620 And it was fun.

00:49:38.540 Yeah.

00:49:38.820 The fact that you're having family meetings, too, answers the question of, you know, are you doing anything wrong?

00:49:45.020 No, you're not.

00:49:45.760 So, having family meetings is one real clear characteristic of a very functional, very positive family who raises great kids, I think.

00:49:57.240 Well, I would just modify that a little bit, Demi.

00:49:59.700 If you're not doing something wrong, you're not human.

00:50:03.000 You know, you don't have to bat a thousand to raise kids well.

00:50:07.340 You just, you know, I sometimes think that the reason Americans like baseball is because 300 is a really good batting message.

00:50:17.100 And the idea you have to get it all right to do well, to win, so to speak, is really one of, you know, it's the perfectionist dilemma.

00:50:26.740 So, I would say, I would agree with Demi that a family meeting is a good indication of a well-structured, organized household.

00:50:34.100 But I'm sure you're not doing everything right and don't expect to.

00:50:37.840 Right, no, no, definitely not.

00:50:39.280 Yeah, I remember when we first did the paper on self-control and it came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

00:50:46.560 And quite a few journalists were contacting me and asking me, well, what do you do to foster self-control in a child?

00:50:53.200 And I don't have any children, so what do I know?

00:50:55.900 So, I'm calling up Jay and going, Jay, tell me what to say.

00:50:59.500 And he said, well, something that families could do is instead of just giving a kid their allowance and just, you know, giving them the money, handing them the money, you could have a family meeting and you could try to anticipate all the things that are going to happen during the week that they could spend that money on and have them choose which ones are the most important to them.

00:51:19.780 So, that, you know, so they won't end up at the end of the week having the most fun and exciting thing, but they're already out of money.

00:51:26.120 So, just planning how to spend one's allowance with your dad turns out to be the best training in self-control.

00:51:34.080 And I have never forgotten that.

00:51:36.360 No, yeah, we've done it with my kids.

00:51:37.480 We give my kids allowance once a week, but I also started a savings account for them.

00:51:42.180 And I said, I give them the money, like it's cash.

00:51:45.260 I'm like, all right, you can either keep this and you spend it however you want, or you can put it in your savings account.

00:51:48.760 What would you like to do?

00:51:49.880 And at first, they're like, I'm going to spend it.

00:51:51.920 But then they quickly realized, ah, I played with this Lego for two nights and I'm done with it.

00:51:57.500 So, now they've become savers.

00:51:59.580 They're little Warren Buffett's now.

00:52:01.140 Let me make a suggestion to modify that a bit, and if you want to, is, and I've thought about this as a teenage pregnancy prevention strategy, which is, let's say you give your kid $2, okay?

00:52:15.520 You can say, well, $2, nobody gives their kid $2 anymore.

00:52:19.340 $2 doesn't go anywhere.

00:52:20.680 So, you have my age here at 68, but be that as it may.

00:52:24.380 Let's say you give your kid $2.

00:52:25.980 You can say, you know, that's yours to spend.

00:52:28.000 But everything you put in, up to a dollar in a savings account, I'll match it.

00:52:36.220 So, now, and what you're doing is inducing consideration of the future.

00:52:42.200 And this is where it comes back to the fact that, you know, often kids who grow up without self-control are never given the opportunity to acquire control.

00:52:52.320 Actions don't have consequences.

00:52:54.080 They're not structured to provide, but the family's not structured to provide planning.

00:52:59.980 So, why would you, you know, delay gratification as the marshmallow test for something that's promised later on versus something to get right now if promises haven't been kept?

00:53:11.680 If, when you followed the rules, you haven't gotten the payoffs?

00:53:14.720 So, I think a Warren Buffett, the strategy would be, you get $2, up to a dollar, you put it in your savings account, I'll match it.

00:53:25.060 Because now you've got a $3 allowance, not a $2 allowance.

00:53:28.140 Yeah.

00:53:28.920 Yeah.

00:53:29.160 Start the 401k matching.

00:53:30.480 Yeah.

00:53:32.060 Well, Terry, Jay, this has been a great conversation.

00:53:34.040 Thanks for your time.

00:53:34.600 It's been a pleasure.

00:53:36.080 Yeah.

00:53:36.340 Thank you.

00:53:37.120 I've loved it.

00:53:37.920 Thanks so much for inviting us.

00:53:40.620 My guests, they were Terry Moffitt and Jay Belsky.

00:53:42.360 They are the co-authors of a book called The Origins of You, How Childhood Shapes Later Life.

00:53:46.560 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:53:48.660 You can also check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.

00:54:01.240 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

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00:54:23.480 And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

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00:54:36.640 Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only the Listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.

The Art of Manliness - December 02, 2020

#665： How Childhood Shapes Adulthood

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