Greater Good - The Science of a Meaningful Life

We all want to protect our children from bullying. Most parents, I imagine, would be horrified to hear that their children are being picked on at school, and equally horrified to hear that they are bullies themselves. (Right now my clairvoyance tells me that you are thinking that you have a really nice kid, certainly not one that is a bully. This is because you are a nice person.)

But can bad kids ever happen to nice parents? Or rather, do parents who value kindness and compassion ever raise mean kids?

I think it probably happens all the time. Thirteen million kids will be bullied in the US this year. Three million are absent from school each month because they feel unsafe there. Bullies aren’t necessarily “bad kids,” but clearly the bullying behavior of otherwise good kids adds up to a massive problem in our communities.

Bullying occurs—online and in person—when there is an imbalance of power. Bullies intend to harm others physically or emotionally, usually repeatedly, knowing that their victims may have a hard time defending themselves. (Thanks to The Bully Project for this definition.)

As parents, it is our responsibility to do what we can to make sure that our children aren’t bullies (besides hide behind our pure intentions and upstanding values). The good news is that we can consciously raise kids who are more likely to stand up for a victim of bullying than they are to be perpetrators. Here are five things we can teach our children so that they are kind and compassionate:

(1) How their actions affect others. Bullies tend to know that what they are doing is wrong, but they usually don’t understand how their behavior affects others. Truly understanding that meanness can hurt someone for a lifetime can change a bully’s willingness to harm others. Build empathy by watching videos of children hurt by bullying (a new documentary out this week, Bully, promises to be a good start). And let kids experience how their actions can affect others for the good by giving them opportunities to help others.

(2) How to understand their own emotions and feelings. Before a child can really understand his or her influence on other people’s feelings, they need to be able to understand their own emotions. Build this emotional intelligence by emotion coaching them.

(3) How to express negative feelings like anger, powerlessness, and stress without hurting others. Kids need to learn the difference between feeling bad (which is always okay) and behaving badly (not okay). Parents are powerful models in this arena.  When you are angry with your children or spouse do you call them names? Spank? When you are stressed are you likely to yell? Kids need to be taught directly how to deal with feelings like anger (e.g., to calm themselves down by taking a walk or deep breaths, or by petting the dog). They also need to be taught that indirectly, by observing us doing these things.

(4) Teach kids how to feel powerful within their relationships—in a positive way. Bullying can come from a sense of powerlessness, and it can often be prevented by showing kids how to feel powerful without being mean. Kids feel powerful when they contribute to something larger than themselves, so make sure your children have plenty of opportunities to genuinely help those around them. Giving kids chores and responsibilities around the house or classroom helps them see that they are useful and needed, giving them a sense of power.

(5) Treat others with compassion yourself. This goes without saying, but kids need to see their parents treating other people with empathy and without judgement. Recently I heard a mother comment to her pre-teen daughter, “That girl’s shirt is so trashy. I will never let you wear something like that.” Her daughter replied, “I know, right? It is so ugly.” This dialog, while it might have been intended to instruct, endorsed a mean-spiritedness towards others.

Can we prevent our children from being bullies? I think so. It starts with the obvious: being really clear about our expectations for how they will treat others, including their siblings, their classmates, and that chubby kid on the bus. But we can’t stop there. Raising kind kids requires an active effort to teach them the social skills they need to be powerful in their relationships—without hurting others.

So the next time you hear someone say “boys will be boys,” or you shake your head and wonder why “there are mean girls in every class,” don’t lie to yourself. Kids are not typically “cruel at this age,” (whatever age that might be). Don’t make excuses for bad behavior: teach kindness instead.

There is so much beyond these five things that we parents can do.  Dozens of suggestions can be found in this toolkit for parents from The Bully Project. 

What are you going to do to prevent bullying in your community? Inspire others by leaving a comment.

Watch the trailer for the new documentary, Bully:

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© 2012 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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The title of this post is misleading: Divorce is difficult and painful for everyone involved, especially kids. I’ve never known anyone to have a “good” divorce, in that way you have a good meal or good sex—even when divorce was the right thing to do for everyone, including the kids.

Divorce is horrible. It is the hardest, most painful thing I’ve ever done. And I had a “good” divorce.

Still, divorce is often better for kids than a deeply flawed marriage, and some divorces are better than others. Divorce can be done well, in a mature way that puts the kids’ needs first. There is a lot of research examining what makes divorce more beneficial—or at least less damaging—for kids.

Here is the main take-away from all that research: Divorce is not permission to hate.

When there are kids involved, you don’t get to throw in the towel and walk away from your ex. You don’t get to stop trying to make the relationship work. Divorce is only a way to change a relationship. You go from married and living together to co-parenting as divorced people living in separate households.

(Also, and I know this is obvious, but: Hate is not a happiness habit. It will not make your life better or happier to indulge a hatred toward someone, no matter how evil they seem to you. It will not make your kids resilient in the face of your divorce. Your hatred will hurt them, and yourself.)

In a “good” divorce, both parents work together to solve this problem that they have—that they can’t get along, they can’t live together anymore, or whatever. When parents establish a functional working relationship that puts their kids front and center, kids tend to have fewer problems.

My former husband and I took this very literally during our mediation. We sat side-by-side and looked at all of our paperwork together; I always imagined that we were explaining to the kids what we were doing, presenting it as a united front. Together, we were solving a problem. Together, we were trying to work out the best future for our children.

Which isn’t to say that it was easy. We were constantly set up as adversaries competing for limited resources, especially when looking at court paperwork that said CARTER v. MCLANAHAN* across the top of it. But we knew from all the research that discord and conflict are the most damaging things for kids.

Sociologist Paul Amato has studied this for decades. He writes that “the great majority of studies find that co-operation and low conflict between parents predicts positive divorce adjustment” in children.

My ex and I took this to heart: We knew that we needed to be on the same team and keep conflict low.

This took a huge amount of forgiveness. We had to forgive each other for all the things we’d done to damage the marriage. And, especially, we had to forgive ourselves for not being able to make it work.

It also took a good deal of acceptance. In order to justify getting divorced, I found myself keeping a running list of all the things that were wrong with my husband and our marriage. Constantly ruminating on his flaws and our broken marriage made it hard for me to feel anything other than pissed off at him, and deeply distraught about the situation.

But when I accepted the situation as though it was more of a natural disaster than something I could stop from happening—because at that point, I couldn’t stop it from happening—I could stop ruminating and feeling awful long enough to get through the day. This acceptance went something like this in my head: I am what I am, and right now I am getting divorced. The best I can do right now is to be present in this situation, and deal with it as it comes.

The research points to a handful of other things that make divorce less damaging for kids.

-Consistent contact with both parents is important, unless you just can’t keep conflict low. Sadly, the benefits of having a relationship with both parents doesn’t always outweigh the disadvantages of having parents who hate each other.

-Money matters: Many problems kids have after divorce, particularly academic ones, stem from economic hardship. Single parents are less likely to be able to pay for music lessons, high quality childcare, tutors, a safe neighborhood with good schools—you name it.

-“Good” divorces minimize the number of major transitions that kids need to make, because transitions usually bring stress. Generally speaking, the fewer household moves, the better. Remarriage can solve some problems, like those associated with economic strain, but it can bring more stressful transitions. It helps to be mindful of these stressors, and to look for ways to minimize their effects.

-Finally, when parents take care of themselves during a divorce, kids do better. “Stress impairs the quality of a parent’s childrearing skills,” Amato writes. For that reason, the “well-being of children is positively associated with the post-divorce psychological adjustment of the custodial parent.” In other words, how well you are doing tends to predict how well your children are doing.

So lean on your friends. Get therapy, or get a massage. Get enough sleep and exercise. Much of this blog is about how and why our happiness as parents matters, and that is certainly the case here, too.

In the end, I find that again and again it all comes back to conflict: If we can’t keep conflict low in a marriage, often the best thing for the kids is to end the marriage. In so doing, we may very well create more conflict. But when we take the long view and the high road, the best thing for the kids—and our own happiness—is to end the war with peace, compassion, and forgiveness.

*Not his real name.
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© 2012 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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Last week, the best-selling author and popular blogger Penelope Trunk declared divorce “immature and selfish.” She claimed divorce is “nearly always terrible for kids” (and “your case is not the exception”); that it is a sign of mental illness (specifically, of Borderline Personality Disorder); and that it is something that “dumb people” do at higher rates than well-educated ones.

Trunk tends to base most of her writing, for her blog and for national media outlets like CNN, on pretty solid scientific research, so I was surprised by this post. That said, she’s most famous for blogging about highly personal and controversial topics, and so this might be, in part, a publicity stunt.

Unfortunately, her post is freaking out thousands of people who are doing their best to raise happy and well-adjusted children. My former husband even asked me, in a panicky whisper outside of our teacher conference, if our own much-deliberated and highly-agonized-over divorce could have damaged our kids in ways we were not yet seeing several years out.

Is Trunk correct? Is it usually better for kids to have unhappily married parents who stay together? Or, are there some cases where divorce is actually better for kids than remaining married?

There is no denying that divorce is pretty tough on everyone involved. When you look at the general population, about 10 percent of kids have behavioral or school-related problems, but about 20 percent of kids whose parents divorce have these problems.# While it’s true that 80 percent of kids with divorced parents are doing fine, divorce seems to double the risk that kids will have problems. Does this mean that unhappily married folks actually should stay together for the kids?

Not necessarily. This is because some of the risk factors that divorce can create for kids actually exist before an unhappily married couple divorces. As I’ve written before, conflict in a relationship is the real doozy for everyone involved. While it’s true that kids being raised by “harmoniously married” parents do better than others, both sociologists and psychologists consistently find that kids who are raised by unhappily married parents do worse than kids whose unhappily married parents get divorced. Let me state that again: The worst situation for kids is when unhappily married parents, particularly those in high-conflict marriages, stay together.

Are you wondering if you are in a high-conflict or distressed marriage?  Violence and abuse make a relationship high-conflict, of course; researchers also tend to classify relationships characterized by contempt, stonewalling (when one person ignores another’s attempts to engage), criticism, or defensiveness as distressed.

(The Wallerstein book that Trunk cites as evidence that “divorce is nearly always terrible for kids,” was, by the way, debunked ages ago. Wallerstein’s research looks only at children whose parents were being treated for mental illness, and so the results aren’t generalizable to all families. That study got so much press, however, that it inspired a plethora of high-quality research that is actually quite useful for helping us understand how or why divorce might hurt kids.)

“Does divorce harm kids?” is not actually the right question, although we ask it all the time. A better question is this: “What circumstances make divorce harmful or beneficial to kids?” And the answer is that, on average, divorce actually helps kids when it ends an unhappy, high-conflict marriage.

There’s another important factor: The quality of the divorce itself. The difference between a “bad” and “good” divorce can be critical for kids. Researchers refer to divorce-related problems as “post-disruption effects,” and studies of them are numerous and complicated. Post-divorce problems—such as losing contact with a parent, or financial hardship, or having parents who continue to fight bitterly—tend to accumulate. When they do, children benefit substantially from therapy and other forms of support.

So it isn’t that divorce never causes problems for kids. Children whose parents divorce actually do tend to have more problems than children whose parents stay together—but divorce may often be a symptom of a bigger problem rather than the cause of it. And the negative effects of divorce, on average, are surprisingly small, especially compared to some of the other things that can go wrong in childhood.

I would never call a process as difficult and painful as divorce “immature,” as Penelope Trunk did. I think divorcing well—in a way that won’t scar the children deeply and permanently—takes great maturity and courage—which, of course, not everyone has.

But is divorce selfish? Not if you are in a distressed or high-conflict marriage. If you are, but you are staying because you think it would be selfish to leave, don’t leave for yourself. Do it for your kids.
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© 2012 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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