It is time now to talk about The Wheel
The basic gist of the psychiatric study covered in this article for New York Magazine is that praising a child for being smart only teaches the kid to avoid any effort that might fail. When the article was posted on MetaFilter a wide range of responses sprung up. “Frankly I think a lot of psychologists just make crap up off the top of their heads,” claims Delmoi, while MrMoonPie goes as far as to say, “This so completely mirrors my upbringing that I’m thinking about printing out the article and taking it to my therapist.”
Faint of Butt concurs with MrMoonPie:
I was a smart kid— too smart for my own good, in many ways— and almost always got good grades. But one thing that I distinctly remember is how much I loathed being praised for my effort. I hated getting a report card in grade school and seeing an “A” for results and another “A” for effort. It always felt like cheating, somehow. If I was going to be praised, I felt, it should be on my intrinsic merits, not just because I had “worked hard,” whatever that meant. After all, anyone can apply time and concentration to a task. I would know I had achieved true academic success, I believed, when I received an “A” for results and a failing grade for effort.
I never did.
Other people in the thread express sentiments similar to this, including Pastabagel, though they still have some problems with the idea that kids would be better off without praise: “I understand that children need self-discipline, but it’s wrong to turn them into achievement machines.”
It is into this fray that robocop is bleeding submits this absolutely fantastic story:
Growing up, my parents had obviously read all the studies about praise and punishment and their effect on a developing child. My father came from a distant, reserved family and was the middle of three brothers. My mother grew up in a close-knit, church going family as an older sister. He went to gradschool for plasma physics and she was the secretary that typed up his thesis.
They obviously disagreed on how to praise and punish me and my little sister. Too much praise led to inflated egos, too little led to dejection, and an imbalance between praising parents could lead to favoritism. The literature at the time was all over the place, what were they to do? How could they raise children who were prepared for the hurly-burly of the real world, where good actions do not always generate praise and bad deeds go unpunished?
Enter The Wheel. The Wheel was first developed by Dr. Benjamin Adler who was an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland. He had befriended my father over lunches in the school cafeteria and games of tennis. Dr. Adler (or “Adder” as my sister and I came to call him – he was a tall, skinny dude with big black eyes magnified by thick glasses) did not have children of his own, but he studied kids as part of his research. My dad, being a Man of Science then finishing up his post-doc, mentioned the quandary he and his wife were in when it came to molding my sister and me into real people, and asked Adder for his advice.
His advice was The Wheel. Dr. Adler said that praise/punishment was a major, driving motivation for a child’s behavior. The problem came when praise/punishment was shown to be fickle or imbalanced. Praising one child’s good report card more than the other’s similar report card was praised the year before frustrated the child and created tension between siblings. Praising the wrong thing (in the case of this post, intelligence over diligence) could lead to a disaster down the road. Already the symptoms were showing – I had been praised as being really smart for reading so many books and was in the process of failing fifth grade because I would skip doing homework in favor of reading. My sister, meanwhile, was praised for getting all her work done, but struggled to maintain a reading level on par with her class.
I still remember the night when The Wheel came home. It was a big, wooden thing, although looking back now at its charred remains, it seems much smaller, far too small to have the sort of impact that it did on our lives. The Wheel was similar to the wheel from Wheel of Fortune or that “pick a random beer” wheel you see in some bars with large selections. It had ten sections, six marked A, two B, one C, and one the dreaded D. Whenever my sister or I did anything that would warrant praise or punishment, my parents would Spin The Wheel then consult The Chart.
The Chart had a list of common praise or punish scenarios taken from Dr. Adler’s research. Stuff like “Minor Discipline Infraction” meant my sister and I fought in the car or I came home 15 minutes after curfew or something. “Major Academic Success” meant my sister got straight As or something. There was a giant list of these scenarios with more being added as my sister and I came up with new and more interesting ways to fail/succeed. Along with each scenario there was a response scaled to our age. So for “Minor Discipline Infraction” the standard, A Response was “No dessert”. B Response was a scaled up version of A, “Straight to bed with no dinner”. C Response was neutral and despite the scenario always read “Nothing happens”. D was the worst, the dreaded Flip Response that could turn punishment to praise and vice versa, so that teasing a sibling could suddenly grant the teaser the privilege of staying up an extra hour to watch TV before bed. It could also mean that, as in once instance, an almost-straight A report card got my sister grounded for a month.
The point of The Wheel, I guess, was to show that Real Life was fickle, that you shouldn’t expect praise for every good deed and that many bad deeds go unpunished. My sister and I learned that well. We knew that anything we did wrong had a 20% chance of being ignored, maybe even rewarded while anything good we did could land us in hot water or reward us more than we expected. We even received an allowance of “re-spins” that we could use to try to avoid some of The Wheel’s more chaotic results. I’m pretty sure that the re-spins were my Mom’s idea, a compromise thrown in to prevent some of the excesses that we’d soon be subject to. I don’t recall Dr. Adler being too fond of them, but he came up with a chart where a certain number of re-spins would have to be spent to get a do-over for a certain level of scenario.
Slowly, The Wheel took over our lives. Every little action netted a spin. It was pretty easy on my parents, who no longer had to discuss between themselves in order to mete out punishment. They even started carrying around a ten-sided die as a traveling surrogate for The Wheel. I learned pretty quickly what all kids learn eventually – “hide everything from your parents”. I would not tell them of my successes in hopes of saving up my re-spins to get me out of trouble for my failures. On the other hand, Shelly told them everything in hopes of netting that 20% chance of a better-than-expected response. The only problem was that though my sister and I were pretty similar kids, I was by far luckier than her. I got out of so much punishment that my Dad had to check The Wheel for signs of tampering. Shelly was not so lucky. Every time she spun, up would come the dreaded D, turning a minor victory on her part into a punishment and causing her to spend some re-spins. I remember one night after she did well at a solo viola concert that she and my folks were up late, Shelly crying a spending re-spin after re-spin to avoid being grounded for a week and therefore missing her first middle school dance. My parents felt sorry for her, they even upped the B response into paying for her new dress for the dance, but no matter what she did or how much she spun, D always came up. No dress, no dance, no luck.
Don’t get me wrong, I got burned by The Wheel too. I lost the right to ever, ever own a Super Nintendo after it came to light that I had been blowing off study for video games. I could have used my re-spins, but opted not to as I had just discovered smoking and knew that would be Bad News once that got out. It did, but my re-spin bankroll was so large at the time that I was able to take it and the arrest that came from shoplifting cigarettes in stride. In fact, I think I ended up getting a carton of Camels out of that. I traded them to my friend Jerry for pot which, when found, got me free gas for a week thanks to a good spin.
By the time I made it to college (state school – my grades were purposefully average, a great boon in a house with The Wheel, not so much when it came to applications), we didn’t really think too much about The Wheel. It had become just another part of our lives, something to laugh and joke and cry about around the dinner table.
I had learned to work Dr. Adler’s system for everything I could, so if anything, The Wheel taught me to be self-reliant, to not expect too much from the world around me, to blend in. That’s what I was doing – blending in – though my sophomore year at college when I got the call that I had to come home right away.
Shelly, always down on her luck, maybe even addicted to The Wheel like some sort of gambling addict, was in jail. She had set fire to the house one night after getting accepted to Princeton. The Wheel told her that she couldn’t go. It was a pretty bad fire, spreading quickly up the walls through the house. By the time the firefighters arrived, my Dad was pretty hurt from smoke inhalation and Mom was dead.
Shelly had to go to an institution, I don’t think the government would have let her spin The Wheel to see if she could get off, no matter how many re-spins I would have loaned her for it. I still visit her occasionally when she’s not on suicide watch. When I go, though, I have to empty my pockets of all coins, the ten-sider I carry around, and any pictures of my family. Shelly has been under orders to avoid all anything random like a die-roll or a coin flip since the one time Dad visited her and she asked him for forgiveness and to pick a number. He said yes, he forgave her and four, which I guess was the B response on Shelly’s chart so she tried to slit her wrists with a pen.
Now that I’m a husband and father, I’m nearing the same stage my parents where in when they first brought home The Wheel. I know now how damaging The Wheel can be, so there’s no way I’m letting something like that in my home. Being worried about the right praise/punishment response is one thing, but limiting those responses to a simple spin of a ten-option wheel is not the right answer. Life is much more complex than A, B, C, or Ds, especially now when you consider the algorithms and random number generators we have available to us. My “Wheel” will be a computer program, likely a Palm applet for ease of portability, and I think it will truly solve all my family’s problems before they even begin. I’ve been in touch with Dr. Adler, who is retired now, and he’s working on a more modern, viable Parenting Matrix.
I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Crazy, hua? Good thing it’s not true, according to a later comment by Robocop:
The story is mostly false - my sister’s name is not Shelly, she is not in an institution, nor did she get accepted to Princeton. The Wheel, however, did exist briefly for a summer, created by my physicist father and later removed by my non-dead mother. My sister, the real one, did have horrible luck and I really was a lucky sumbitch, which is what led to The Wheel’s removal. There was no option D that turned victory to sorrow and neferious deeds to filthy lucre.
I have in recent months attempted to resuscitate The Wheel as a tool for training the pet rabbits. This has met with mixed results as rabbits, as a species, are not bright enough to associate punishment or reward with their behavior. Beef Wellington, the youngest, does enjoy going for a spin though. My wife has already vetoed any application for The Wheel on our own future children. Given the steely look in her eye whenever I mention it, I’m pretty sure the idea will always be a non-starter.
