#mommyjuice — Social skills
Between 2011 and 2017 I worked in an international think tank that, among other things, specialised in collecting and comparing educational policies and outcomes in “WEIRD” countries. WEIRD is academic slang for the twelve percent of the globe made up of “Westernised educated rich democracies.” The analyses, run every five years with the results published twice every decade since World War II, occasionally included a “developing” or “recently developed” country, usually one of the “BRICs” — academic slang for Brazil, India, and China.
The institute’s collection of research into national educational policies showed unsurprisingly that the world is changing too quickly for the different educational systems to keep up, at least with regard to the acquisition of information. Collecting, analysing, and distributing information is the realm of machines now. We humans are simply too slow and our memories too limited and inconsistent. Instead, WEIRD education policy experts agree that students need to be “life-long learners”, skilled in being curious, innovative, flexible, and social.
In fact social skills tended to top the list of academic concerns for different national education systems. Curiosity, innovation, and flexibility can lead to amazing evolutions only if what is created or discovered can be successfully communicated. Social skills are the potential bottleneck to a lot of human progress.
This made sense to me thanks to my job. My job was to help organisations, like my former think tank, select and adapt new technology to their existing work. (We were always careful to say “adapt” because we wanted to present any new piece of tech as evolutionary and inevitable.) As inescapable as new tech may seem, the reality is people are very good at ignoring or at least sidestepping new ways of doing something. Any success I had at getting people to upgrade their systems or digitize their work flows resulted not from my technical skill, which is expansive, but from my social graces. Any failures as well.
I took this experience home with me when I quit my job at the think tank to care full-time for my two preschool-age children. I decided to make sure that my kids, no matter what they chose to pursue in life, did not have too much trouble working with and through other people. I wanted them to learn how to have “productive conflicts” and use “effective nonverbal communication.” I thought that in addition to the public preschool that they attended, teaching social skills was probably where I could contribute the most because I was in a unique position to understand the theory and the practice.
I sped up my plans to introduce social skills when my daughter started her new school and told me that she spent her recesses “all alone.” As the new kid in a rural school in a close-knit community, she was experiencing something all too familiar to me: loneliness. When my family moved when I was twelve, I spent the first year at my new school eating lunch in a bathroom stall to avoid appearing by myself at an otherwise busy lunch table. After that, I found a quiet corner in the library and learned to lose myself in imaginary worlds rather than try to find friends in the real one. I didn’t want my daughter to do the same. Friends, I later discovered, make life better — as any mental health researcher will tell you, “Other people matter.”
I enrolled my five-year-old and myself in an online course called “Friendology.” Friendology gave us a series of kid-centric videos and exercises exploring ideas like building self-confidence and what constitutes a healthy relationship.
Our first class focused on positive self-image and building and keeping a positive mindset. The teacher called it “smashing the ANTs.” ANTs stood for “automatic negative thoughts.” “One ANT attracts another,” the teacher explained. She told us to kill our ANTs quickly “with the truth.” During the exercise, my daughter told me her ANT was that she was not always a good person. I cited several times when she played very well with her brother just that morning and the day before. “No one is perfect, the teacher said,” I pointed out.
I wanted to tell her that most of us have skimmed a scandal at one point but, adhering to survivalist social skill theory, we keep mum and carry on, convinced that it can’t affect us, nor we it. I remembered how in one of my tech projects, I worked with a large pharmaceutical company. The entire pharmaceutical industry is, by most accounts, far more interested in moving product than healing people, and the budget of this company reflected market trends: whichever team’s drug brand sold the most got the most money in the next financial cycle. As an early analyst reviewing aggregate sets of so-called “big data”, online consumer chatter about the different drugs offered by the company and the different diseases addressed by these drugs, it was my job to glean insights about how the drugs or the disease could be more effectively marketed to consumers. How could we influence people to buy more of our drugs?
I and my colleagues sometimes lamented the state of affairs, but as lowly individuals in a massive profit-oriented machine in an even larger profit-oriented industry, we reasoned, what could we do? Shareholder dividends dictate healthcare in this country, possibly in every country where our company was present, so our individual behavior, however ethical, was a mere fly on the windshield of a runaway train careening from one crisis of care to the next, each crisis a goldmine for those with the stomach and stamina to exploit it. We all owned stock and we all shrugged our shoulders. And we were all extremely polite to each other and to our customers. That company’s employees were, on a day-to-day basis, the most socially skilled individuals with whom I have ever had the pleasure of working. Technically, this project counts as one of my change management successes.
In the next Friendology class, we explored realistic expectations for relationships. My daughter paused the video at minute ten with the space bar and told me matter-of-factly, “At school, if you don’t do what the other kids in your group want you to, they won’t be your friends. I just do what they want me to do to be done with it. Then we can just play.”
I nodded. Good social skills are not just about being good or responsible or exhibiting behavior that one wants to see in others, I began to explain to my daughter. I paused because my mind went immediately to a podcast that I followed in which an African-American mom discussed having “the talk” with her nine-year-old son. “The talk,” she explained, is a common coming-of-age amongst African-American families in the United States. The mother on the podcast, also matter-of-factly, described ordering her son to treat authority figures with exaggerated politeness. She made it clear that she scared her son because she was scared for him. I wasn’t scared for my daughter exactly, but I wondered what was the point of learning to have healthy relationships in a society that did not exactly encourage healthy interactions? But then, I thought, restarting the video, what else could we do?
In my coaching classes at work, we spent a lot of time discussing how people are different from each other but not really. Inevitably, the idea of universal human traits comes up. As an “expert,” I can cite two popular studies that identify five to six ubiquitous qualities in human beings. The sixth trait is not frequently discussed not only because it is controversial, it is also difficult to discuss in a corporate environment that aspires to be meritocratic: dominance.
The trait dominance is common to academic research into other primates, but in human corporate psychological retreats, we like to focus on the first more accepted and acceptable five. But the idea of dominance is not far from any adult’s experience of social and professional life, or any child’s for that matter. Asserting and maintaining dominance, influencing the dominant group, or just avoiding the dominant individual’s ire is a social skill, and one which people have cultivated and continue to cultivate because to not indulge in influential behavior can quickly lead to assimilation or extinction, both for the individual and his or her team — however, they may define that team. As Dave Chappelle said to his pro-MeToo fans, “You can’t make a lasting peace this way. You got all the bad guys scared. And that’s good, but the minute they’re not scared anymore, it will get worse than it was before. Fear does not make lasting peace. Ask black people.”
In the third week, Friendology moved on to building conversation skills. Now that we had learned what healthy friendships looked and felt like — and a healthy friendship did not include overt coercion, the teacher confirmed — we could work on building and maintaining voluntary relationships that were “good for us.” The teacher said that since making friends was a skill, we needed to practice it, like reading or writing, until it became easy for us. My daughter and I, along with all the other distance-learning “friendologists,” tossed an imaginary ball back and forth as we shared one interesting fact about ourselves and asked a follow-up question for the other person. With each question, we tried to move closer and closer to things we might have in common or that we could use to build something in common. My daughter said she liked learning how to draw and asked if I could teach her. I said no, but that I’d like to learn too, would she like to learn together? She agreed and we asked follow-up questions on the logistics of when we would learn together and what we might learn to draw.
I reflected that this basic skill eluded my father and a lot of white men of his generation, the so-called “baby boomers.” He grew up in a mafia neighborhood where the fewer questions asked, the better, and he lives his life accordingly. Our relationship is very thin with a minimum of pleasantries punctuated by the occasional monologue (him) on the role of the United States in winning World War II or some other admirable aspect of the US military. I know for a fact he isn’t sure what my job is (he’s never asked), who I have worked for (it never came up), nor in what I got my two Masters degrees (both graduations passed unacknowledged by him though, in full fairness, he helped pay for the first one.) Any inquiries into his personal life came up empty as well. I am still not sure how many family members Dad has because he’s never shared if he has any uncles, aunts, or cousins or any other minor details with regard to his family tree. He’s just not able to discuss individual histories, his or anyone else’s. He just never learned to play verbal catch, and he hasn’t really got any friends with whom he could begin to practice as a result.
In Friendology class four, using our knowledge of what we expected from a friend, we drew a “friend meter.” The friend meter resembled the fuel meter of a car, with unhealthy friendships falling in the “red” or empty zone and healthy friendships falling in the “green” or full zone. Every interaction in a relationship, the teacher suggested, is made up of the two people involved and wherever they are and whatever they are doing in that moment. Change the variables if the experience is going badly, and start with the what and the where before moving on to the who. My daughter thought about this and easily sorted her existing friendships according to the friend meter. Overall, her sports friends tend to remain in the green zone, especially when doing the actual sport, while her school friends rested around yellow unless she was playing an outdoor game at recess. My daughter, it seems, is most social during organised sports.
I started out similarly. I loved baseball, and my elementary school team made up my circle of closest friends. We had slumber parties, shared birthday celebrations, and even took field trips to national parks together. We just “gelled,” as we said back then. When I moved, I joined a local baseball team and had a very different experience. The coach had team members compete against each other for their positions on the field, and I threatened a long-standing second baseman, the coach’s own daughter, with my skills. She organised with her existing teammates to bully me, quietly and effectively, with nasty notes, whispered insults, isolating bus rides, and at one time a baseball glove whipped against my head while the coaches weren’t looking. I told my mom I wanted to try track and field the next season.
Our last class took up an hour one Thursday afternoon. The teacher took us through two inevitable and uncomfortable situations. The first she explained, was a fight between friends. In a fight between friends, the hurt is largely unintentional and the solution is a quiet discussion about what the offending individual has done and how that action had made the other friend feel. Between friends, the teacher explained, “you can talk it out.” She said friends must talk it out because emotions need to be expressed and explained or the friendship and the friends will suffer.
The other situation, the teacher cautioned, is not as simple. The teacher said sometimes people are “mean-on-purpose.” In a mean-on-purpose situation, there are no friends and there is no talking it out. The teacher said that in preparation for such situations, we need to develop a couple of “quick comebacks,” phrases that we can use to shut down the other person, such as “Not cool,” “Stop that,” and “Oh, be quiet.” (These kids are in preschool.) The teacher emphasised that we should not be aggressive when we deliver these comebacks as we don’t want to appear invested in the conflict or, more particularly, the mean-on-purpose person’s response. Then we need to walk away and, if possible, tell an adult what just happened. “Remember,” the teacher repeated something she’d said several times in every class, and my daughter rolled her eyes as I mouthed the words at her, “you can’t control other people. You can only control yourself.”
