PARENTING:Is being self-confident an advantage or a drawback, and should it be earned through hard work and dedication, or instilled in children as their right? EOIN CUNNINGHAMhears both sides
IN HIS RECENT book, The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, David Brooks calls the human mind an "overconfidence machine": we give ourselves credit for things we haven't done, and fool each other that we have more control over our fate than we actually do.
He suggests that the overconfident mind plays a confidence trick on itself. Overconfidence puts us in a dream of our own making, and the further we drift into it, the more potentially serious the consequences. These days, when we think of great hubris, one thing comes immediately to mind – the global financial crisis – while at home nothing fits the description of uncontrolled exuberance so much as the property madness of the boom years. It all seems like a bad dream now, far from our current IMF hangover. But if overconfidence is responsible for the ghost towns, rising emigration and unemployment blighting the nation, should we be doing something about it?
Dr Brendan Kelly, senior lecturer in psychiatry at University College Dublin, believes Brooks’s basic theory is sound, though he questions some of his conclusions. “It’s reasonably accurate. The mind tries to make sense of things constantly. We’re uneasy with the idea that life is meaningless and random. We try to see patterns and impose them, reconcile apparent conflicts. It’s an important ability; it helps us to carry on, it can give meaning and value to things.”
Of course, there is one area where confidence is a central concern: childrearing. For decades, from Dr Spock to Gina Ford, from titles such as How To Talk So Kids Will Listen And Listen So Kids Will Talkto The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens (at numbers 10 and 11 in Amazon's rankings at time of writing), an industry has developed that relentlessly pushes often opposing ideas of what creates a happy child and adult, to great profit.
Much of the literature emphasises listening to your child, being emotionally open and fostering a loving environment, all very much common sense. But another popular idea – that competition can be harmful and that all effort, however unequal, should be rewarded – has prompted concerns from educators and psychologists in the US, where years of cotton-wool parenting is being blamed for a generation unprepared for the daily frustrations of adult life.
Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother exploded like a grenade into this environment. A Yale law professor, determined to bring her daughters up to be academically successful, she ignited a fierce debate between those who saw her approach as bordering on abusive, and others who believed it was the antidote to unfocused, entitled children.
It all boils down to confidence – for Chua it came out of achievement, something a child earns from hard work, whereas her detractors believe it should be innate and protected.
Dr Kelly suggests the former has some dangers: “That parent is imparting a very specific set of skills and values about what matters, in one case playing the violin. There are two things put forth there. Number one, playing the violin very well is important and number two, focusing very strongly on a specific skill is important. That means that person’s self-esteem is strongly linked to that single task and that of course means there’s a possibility that failure, when it comes, will be catastrophic.”
But simply cheering everything your child does is not without its pitfalls either. “I think what’s more important than confidence or mollycoddling is independent thought. In other words, what you call mollycoddling may impair the development of confidence. They don’t practise mastering failure; they don’t practise the skill of proportional judgment. Magnifying the effect of minor failure is one of the cognitive features of depression.”
Although Brooks puts the extravagant banker top of the list, the idea of confidence morphing into arrogance – before a fall – is as old as the hills. From the Tower of Babel to Frankenstein, we have long been fascinated with the figure shaking his fist at the heavens, swiftly followed by a comeuppance. When man overreaches himself and meddles with forces beyond his control, he is always put in his place.
At first glance, the narrative of the boom and bust seems clear: people confused self-importance with self-confidence and made staggeringly bad decisions, which we’re all paying for now. But perhaps overconfidence is not the bugbear in this scenario: “Bankers might have been an extreme version of this kind of self-confidence or this kind of mind, making sense of the world more than it should,” according to Dr Kelly. “We’re looking at a relatively small number of bankers, when we look at the whole boom and bust.”
However, as epic as the financial market errors were, in Ireland we blame the property craze for much of our current problems. Here, the idea of overconfidence is not as clear-cut. Dr. Kelly’s counter argument is compelling: “A whole lot of people bought a house at what would now be regarded as an inflated value. What’s really interesting is that those decisions – to buy houses at that time – you could say people were overconfident in their ability to pay it back. But you could look at it quite differently and say that what happened was that people looked at what other people were willing to pay. You could say people lacked the self-confidence to stand back from that peer evaluation and say ‘what do I think this house is worth? Don’t mind what others are saying, what do I think this house is worth? Is this three-bedroomed terraced house really worth €2 million?’”
It may be that this insecurity, both in the property market and in childrearing, may be more to blame for problems in both areas. Being too afraid of making the wrong choice can be just as hazardous as making the wrong one. In a talk given at the TED conference in 2006, the education expert Sir Ken Robinson suggested that the confidence to make a choice, wrong or not, is one of the most important factors in being creative: “Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.”
In the end, “Tiger Mother” Chua relaxed her authoritarian stance, largely because her youngest daughter’s revolt made it impossible to continue. Faced with the realities of raising a child in a very different environment from the Chinese one, she came to see that there is no 12-step program for parenting. This chimes with Dr Kelly’s advice for anyone considering any of the many parenting guides on the market. “Parents need to look at these books with a critical eye and remember that almost all of them will contain one or two pieces of advice which are useful, but they all play second fiddle to parental instinct, which is very strong, very potent, and generally correct.”
The Social Animal: A Story of How Success Happens, by David Brooks, is published by Short Books (£14.99/€17). Battle Hymn of The Tiger Mother, by Amy Chua, is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99/€19)
