
I often berated my younger self for being a “good child,” “good student,” and “good girl.” A random replay of any regretful past event in my head always prompted me to question her:
Why do you not confront Mom when she says all those things to you?
Why do you not confront Dad when he says all those things to you?
Why did you not express your doubt when your thirty-year-old teacher lied to the whole class that he had met that famous author who had actually been dead for more than half a century?
Why did you not stand your ground when your parents refused to send you to that school that you’d always aspired to go to?
Why are you buying all those expensive gifts for your family and your family-to-be before your wedding? Why are you trying to honor that ridiculous tradition?
The list goes on and on.
Why was I so insistent on following the advice of elders, the norms of society? Why did I force myself to believe that they must be right?
I was full of blind trust.
I often chided the younger me for her blindness, for her inability to think critically or independently—until I read Carl Zimmer’s She Has Her Mother’s Laugh.
In its sixteenth chapter of the book on heredity, Zimmer introduces an episode where her daughter Charlotte takes a test that involves opening a box. The box comes with a door with a knob, a bar on the top, four walls fastened together with Velcro, and a green toy turtle inside. Charlotte successfully retrieves the toy by ripping one of the walls from its Velcro. Given that she could’ve just opened the door to fetch the toy, the researcher in charge comments that her approach was unusual but that the important thing was that she ignored the bar on the top, which had no use at all for opening the box.
In the following trial, Charlotte is presented with another box with a door and a bar. This time, she’s asked to watch a research assistant opening the box first. The assistant adds some useless steps, though; she pulls the bar back and forth across the top, picks up a stick and gives the box three gentle taps before she finally turns the doorknob and pulls out the toy.
Upon her turn to open the box, Charlotte imitates all the irrelevant steps the assistant has demonstrated. Even when presented with four other boxes, Charlotte diligently takes all the unnecessary steps that she has just been taught, even though she did open a box during the previous trial without pulling the bar on the top or tapping the box with a stick.
Zimmer calls this pattern of behavior “extreme imitation.” It is, he says, a smart strategy that allows children to learn and internalize human culture without reinventing it from scratch. He quotes the British psychologist Cecilia Heyes as saying, “blind trust is at least as important as smart thinking.”
Granted, there are risks to imitation since there are always people who don’t know what they’re doing. For example, there can be a teacher who lies to his students that he personally met a famous writer, there can be a parent who blames his/her child for his/her failure, and there can be a whole group of people too obsessed with tradition to allow exceptions. If children end up imitating those people, they’ll only reproduce failure.
I did try to imitate those people as a child and as a young adult, trying to fit myself into the molds designed by them, the molds for a good child, a good student, a good girl. In so doing, I learned how to conform, how to blend in, how to turn a blind eye to hypocrisy and falsehood, and how to navigate my life’s path without rocking the boat. Thankfully, though, I vividly remember the tortured feelings I’d had growing up and now I view my childhood role models as negative models.
That said, I still feel grateful to them for showing me how not to treat children, especially how not to treat my own child.
And I’m grateful to the book She Has Her Mother’s Laugh for helping me realize how not to treat the child inside me—a little kid full of blind yet unyielding trust, diligently following the words and deeds of elders in her life, seeking to internalize their culture with a desperate desire to belong in it.
