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Why do two men from very similar socioeconomic and educational backgrounds sometimes take very different life paths?<\/p>\n
Is nature or nurture more important in determining a man\u2019s success in his relationships and career?<\/p>\n
What physiological and psychological traits present in a man\u2019s younger years predict his chances of living a long, flourishing life?<\/p>\n
In 1938, researchers at Harvard\u2019s medical school began a study that aimed to answer these fascinating questions and discover what factors lead to an \u201coptimum\u201d life. The study recruited 268 of the university\u2019s sophomores from the all-male classes of 1939-1944, and set out to examine every aspect of their lives for at least a couple decades. The men selected were healthy in body and mind, and deemed likely to capitalize on their potential and become successful adults. While many of them came from well-off families, some were intelligent students who had been plucked from poor households and given full scholarships.<\/p>\n
The study\u2019s participants were signing on for extensive probing into their lives. They were given physicals and thorough psychological evaluations; researchers visited their homes to interview their parents, as well as three generations of relatives; each year the men filled out an exhaustive questionnaire that inquired about numerous aspects of their health, habits, family, political views, career, and marriage; and every 10-15 years, the men were interviewed face-to-face.<\/p>\n
This research project, known as the Grant Study, continues today, more than 75 years after its inception. Having been extended numerous times, it has become one of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted. When George Vaillant, who has been the study\u2019s director for several decades, first started working on the project, he was thirty-two, and the participants were in their fifties; today, Vaillant is pushing eighty, and the men are in their nineties. The participants continue to fill out their annual questionnaires, and Vaillant continues to study their answers.<\/p>\n
Nothing quite like the Grant Study has ever been attempted; as Vaillant puts it, this research represents \u201cone of the first vantage points the world has ever had on which to stand and look prospectively at a man\u2019s life from eighteen to ninety<\/strong>.\u201d The mountains of data collected over more than seven decades has become a rich trove for examining what factors present in a man\u2019s younger years best predict whether he will be successful and happy into old age. The study\u2019s researchers have continually sifted through the results and reports in an attempt to ferret out these promising elements. As Vaillant details in The Triumphs of Experience<\/em><\/a>, some of the researchers\u2019 original hypotheses did not pan out, and the job of untangling issues of causation and correlation goes on. Yet several insights have emerged very strongly and prominently from the data, offering brightly marked guideposts to a life well lived.<\/p>\n To discover what factors predicted a man\u2019s ability to become a successful, well-adjusted adult, Vaillant created a list of ten accomplishments, which included career success and professional prominence, mental and physical health, a good marriage, supportive friendships, closeness to one\u2019s children, the ability to enjoy work, love, and play, and a subjective level of happiness. He called this set of accomplishments the \u201cDecathlon of Flourishing\u201d, and measured the level to which each man in the study had achieved these \u201cevents\u201d between the ages 65-80. Vaillant then looked back over the men\u2019s personal histories to figure out what factors present earlier in the men\u2019s lives most predicted their Decathlon score.<\/p>\n When Vaillant crunched the numbers, he discovered no significant relationship between a man\u2019s level of flourishing and his IQ, his body type (mesomorph, ectomorph, endomorph), or the income and education level of his parents.<\/p>\n The factors that did loom large, and collectively predicted all ten Decathlon events, had one thing in common: relationships<\/em>. This rubric included:<\/p>\n Vaillant found that the men who had the best scores in these areas during their youth and mid-life, were the happiest, most successful, and best adjusted in their latter years. This is the finding of the Grant Study that has emerged most prominently: \u201cIt was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men\u2019s lives<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n The powerful effect of intimate relationships can be seen in a variety of factors in a man\u2019s life, including their income levels:<\/p>\n Remember that these men all entered the workforce with a Harvard education. Also remember that their parents\u2019 socioeconomic status turned out not <\/em>to be a significant factor in their own future income.<\/p>\n In addition to finding that warm relationships in general had a positive impact on the men\u2019s lives, Vaillant uncovered specific effects that stemmed from a man\u2019s childhood, and from the respective influence of his mother and father.<\/p>\n \u201cWoe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love, to put its trust in life.\u201d \u2013Joseph Conrad<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In order to gauge the effect of a man\u2019s childhood on his future prospects in life, Vaillant scored the quality of the participants\u2019 upbringing according to these criteria:<\/p>\n When the outcomes of the men\u2019s lives were analyzed, and compared to this set of criteria, it became quite clear that \u201cfor good or ill, the effects of childhood last a long time.\u201d A warm childhood proved a much stronger predictor of many aspects of a man\u2019s flourishing later in life, including his overall contentment in his late seventies, than either his parent\u2019s social class or his own income<\/strong>. These effects are particularly striking when the men with the warmest childhoods (who were dubbed \u201cthe Cherished\u201d) are compared with those in the bottom tenth (who were called \u201cthe Loveless\u201d):<\/p>\n A loving, supportive upbringing seemed to both bolster a man\u2019s chances for success in his relationships and career, and inoculate him against future psychological distress.<\/p>\n While parenting pundits at various times in our history have worried that a household full of unwavering love and support could turn out a young man who was too coddled and dependent, the Grant Study found that abundant familial love, when coupled with an emphasis on autonomy and initiative, actually produced the most <\/em>stoical (able to keep a stiff upper lip) and independent men. <\/strong>Such men, Vaillant explains, had learned to be comfortable with their feelings, and \u201cthat they could put their trust in life, which gave them courage to go out and face it.\u201d In contrast, the men from the worst childhoods turned out to be the most dependent, and struggled with taking initiative.<\/p>\n This correlation held up even when examined in relation to the traditionally masculine pursuit of attaining military rank. Since the Grant Study began at the outset of WWII, its researchers were naturally interested in tracking which aspects of the men\u2019s physical and psychological make-up would best predict their likelihood of becoming officers during the war. They found that the rank the men had attained at the time of their discharge had no relation to their body type, intelligence, or their parents\u2019 social class. Instead, higher rank was most strongly correlated with a loving childhood, and whether a man had warm relationships with his mother and siblings<\/strong>. \u201cTwenty-four of the twenty-seven men with the warmest childhoods made at least first lieutenant, and four became majors. In contrast, of the thirty men with the worst childhoods, thirteen failed to make first lieutenant, and none became majors.\u201d As Vaillant concludes, \u201cWe don\u2019t breed good officers; we don\u2019t even build them on the playing fields of Eton; we raise them in loving homes<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n In studying the powerful impact a man\u2019s childhood has on his prospects for health, happiness, and success, an important corollary was discovered: \u201cit is not any one thing for good or ill\u2014social advantage, abusive parents, physical weakness\u2014that determines the way children adapt to life, but the quality of their total experience.\u201d Basically, what the Grant Study found is that even if a lot of bad things happen during your childhood, if they\u2019re outweighed by the good things, you\u2019ll still turn out okay<\/strong>. So if, say, a man had an absent father but a warm relationship with his mother and siblings, or cold parents, but loving grandparents, his prospects for future flourishing were still good. It was not any one factor, or constellation of factors, Vaillant reports, but the quality of one\u2019s childhood as a whole that mattered most.<\/p>\n This point is driven home by the findings of a study that was done in tandem with the Grant Study. Since the participants in the Grant Study were not a terribly diverse group, in 1940 researchers began to run the Gluek Study alongside it, which included a second cohort of 456 disadvantaged non-delinquent inner-city youths from the Boston area. When the childhoods of the men in this study were examined, it was found that even if the family was poor, the father was on welfare, and the family had numerous other problems, sons who were loved by their mothers, admired their dads, and had good friendships went on to become successful and attain a higher socioeconomic status. This explains why men who grew up in impoverished households, but who go on to flourish anyway, often say things like, \u201cEven though we were poor, we never realized it when we were children, because our parents made our home such a wonderful place.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaillant further found that in both studies, \u201cEven the death of a parent was relatively unimportant predictively by the time the men were fifty<\/strong>; by the time they were eighty, men who had lost parents when young were as mentally and physically healthy as men whose parents had lovingly watched them graduate from high school.\u201d<\/p>\n Not only did a man\u2019s overall childhood experience greatly impact the rest of his life, but his mother and father each influenced it in a particular way. The Grant Study found that a warm relationship with his mother was significantly associated with a man\u2019s:<\/p>\n On the flip side of that last point is the fact that \u201ca poor relationship with his mother was very significantly, and very surprisingly, associated with dementia.\u201d Men who lacked a warm relationship with their mothers were 3X more likely to get dementia in their old age<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One of the findings of the study that I personally found most interesting, was that \u201ca mother who could enjoy her son\u2019s initiative and autonomy was a tremendous boon to his future<\/strong>.\u201d Mothers of men who scored highly on the Decathlon of Flourishing admired their sons\u2019 assertiveness, and boasted to researchers that their boys were \u201cfearless to the point of being reckless,\u201d \u201ccould fight any kid on the block,\u201d and \u201cis a tyrant in a way that I adore.\u201d In other words, mothers who celebrated their boys\u2019 boyishness bolstered their chances of achieving a successful, mature manhood<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The Grant Study also found influences that were associated exclusively with dads. Loving fathers imparted to their sons:<\/p>\n In the negative column, it \u201cwas not the men with poor mothering but the ones with poor fathering who were significantly more likely to have poor marriages over their lifetimes.\u201d Men who lacked a positive relationship with their fathers were also \u201cmuch more likely to call themselves pessimists and to report having trouble letting others get close.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n If there was ever any doubt, fathers matter, a lot<\/em>: When all is said and done, a man\u2019s relationship with his father very significantly predicted his overall life satisfaction at age 75 — \u201ca variable not even suggestively associated with the maternal relationship<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n When Grant Study researchers examined whether the longevity of a man\u2019s immediate relatives affected his chances of flourishing, they found that the age of death of his mother, father, maternal grandmother, and both paternal grandparents wasn\u2019t associated at all with his Decathlon score. Yet there emerged a \u201cmarked and unexpected association between age at death of maternal grandfathers [MGFs] and the mental health of their grandsons\u201d:<\/p>\n From these intriguing data points, Vaillant concludes that \u201clong-lived maternal grandfathers predict unusual psychological stability in their grandsons<\/strong>.\u201d Why this would be is still unknown \u2013 it may be that a man\u2019s mental health is partly genetic and springs from the MGF.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A man\u2019s relationships in childhood were not the only ones that affected his life\u2019s outcome. His friendships in mid-life also played a role, as did, of course, the quality of his marriage.<\/p>\n When several decades ago Vaillant evaluated the men according to \u201cAdult Adjustment Outcome determinations\u201d (a kind of earlier version of the Decathlon of Flourishing, from what I gather), he found that:<\/p>\n \u201call of the fifty-five Best Outcomes had gotten married relatively early and stayed married for most of their adult lives<\/strong>. (And by the time those men were eighty-five, we learned later, only one marriage had ended in divorce.) In contrast, among the seventy-eight Worst Outcomes, five had never married, and by seventy-five years of age, thirty-five (45 percent) of the marriages had ended in divorce. Proportionately three times as many of the Best Adjusted men enjoyed lifelong happy marriages as the Worst.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The effect of marriage was even starker for the inner-city men of the Glueck Study: \u201ctwo-thirds of the never-married were in the bottom fifth in overall social relations, 57 percent were in the bottom fifth in income, and 71 percent were classified by the Study raters as mentally ill.\u201d<\/p>\n These results were not too surprising \u2013 marriage has been found to correlate to better life outcomes for men in other studies as well. But Vaillant did make a few other findings that were less expected:<\/p>\n Overall, the Grant Study showed that a happy marriage is an incredibly positive thing in a man\u2019s life. What then makes for wedded bliss? Vaillant doesn\u2019t delve too much into that question, but holds up what is perhaps the most successful marriage in the study as an example. This couple, who Vaillant calls \u201cthe Chipps\u201d (a pseudonym), enjoyed doing various activities — they regularly sailed, took a yearly canoeing trip to Nova Scotia, and walked 3 miles a day together. They always kept a sense of humor about everything. Instead of resorting to passive aggression, husband and wife talked openly talked about their issues and \u201ceven conflict was filled with laughter.\u201d By the time this gentleman was 80, \u201che (and his wife) had been giving their marriage rave reviews for six decades\u201d; \u201cI\u2019ve lived happily ever after,\u201d he gushed to his interviewer. Indeed, as Vaillant looked through his notes on him, he found he had written that Mr. Chipps was \u201cperhaps the happiest man in the study.\u201d<\/p>\n In looking over the association between childhood, marriage, and the trajectory of a man\u2019s life, Vaillant concludes that \u201cThe majority of the men who flourished found love before thirty, and that was why they flourished<\/strong>.\u201d Whether familial, romantic, or even platonic, men who enjoyed warm relationships in their youth went on to live the fullest, happiest, most successful lives.<\/p>\n Why would this be so? Men who were loved, and learned to love in their younger years, develop positive mental health, resilience, and a capacity for intimacy — qualities that \u201creflect the process of replacing narcissism with empathy\u201d and lead to greater confidence, autonomy, social and emotional intelligence, and maturity. These traits in turn lead not only to more relationships, but success in other areas (like one\u2019s career). In contrast, men who had bleak childhoods have a harder time forming intimate relationships, are more likely \u201cto be pessimistic and self-doubting,\u201d and are \u201chandicapped later in mastering the assertiveness, initiative, and autonomy that are the foundation of successful adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n For those readers who enjoyed warm, loving support in their younger years, the above findings have likely been an interesting look at some of the reasons they\u2019ve been able to find a positive path in life. For those who are currently or hope to one day be fathers, it hopefully inspires you to create a warm and nurturing household for your own children.<\/p>\n But for readers whose upbringing left much to be desired, these findings may seem depressing and fatalistic. Yet all hope is not lost. The Grant Study does show that a grim childhood definitely stacks the deck against you \u2013 there\u2019s no way around that. But the study also revealed that \u201cpeople really can change, and people really can grow. Childhood need be neither destiny nor doom<\/strong>.\u201d Some of the participants who had an inauspicious start in life were able to turn their lives around, and go on to flourish in their later years. How did they do it? Vaillant points to \u201crestorative marriages and maturing [psychological] defenses\u201d as \u201cthe soil out of which new resilience and post-traumatic growth emerge.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n As we have seen, a warm childhood strongly predicted a man\u2019s score in most of the events in the Decathlon of Flourishing. But not all of them. Vaillant was surprised to find that \u201cbleak childhoods were not always associated with bleak marriages<\/strong>\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cWith the exception of a man\u2019s closeness to his father, childhood environment did not predict stable marriage, and even where a warm paternal relationship was lacking, good marriages could be made\u2014eventually. Indeed, marriage seemed to be a means for making good on a poor childhood<\/strong>. After almost fifty years of following disadvantaged youths, psychologist Emmy Werner noted that \u2018the most salient turning points . . . for most of these troubled individuals were meeting a caring friend and marrying an accepting spouse.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Vaillant found that the men in the study who hadn\u2019t learned to love, and be loved as a boy, but who went on to flourish against the odds, used marriage as a second chance to figure out the landscape of intimacy. (Having children provided a similar opportunity to open their hearts in a new way.) While Vaillant found that \u201cThe most dependent adults came from the most unhappy childhoods,\u201d as mentioned above, mutual dependence can actually be a healthy thing. For these men, it indeed turned out to be quite healing. Ultimately, marriage, \u201chowever imperfect, is an opportunity to assuage some of the loneliness of bleak early years.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s even more interesting is that while many folks think that two people with \u201cbaggage\u201d will have a tough time making a go at a successful marriage together, Vaillant found that this was not necessarily the case: \u201cIt turned out that happy marriages after eighty were not associated either with warm childhoods or with mature defenses in early adulthood\u2014that is, you don\u2019t have to start out \u2018all grown up\u2019 to end up solidly married.\u201d<\/strong> Instead, marriage might just be the best \u201cclassroom\u201d for learning how to be a mature man.<\/p>\n Beyond warm relationships, two of the factors that most strongly predicted a man\u2019s Decathlon score were mature defenses and character traits.<\/p>\n Mature defenses are our \u201cinvoluntary psychological coping style\u201d \u2013 the ways we instinctively respond to and deal with setbacks, frustration, pain, etc. Immature defenses include things like passive aggression, projection, and denial. They seek to put the responsibility for what happens on other people. In contrast, men with mature defenses take ownership of what happens to them, and try to figure out a healthy way to deal with life\u2019s challenges. These healthy coping methods include things like keeping a sense of humor, finding a gratifying alternative when you can\u2019t get what you want, being altruistic, and facing problems with resilience and stoicism. Mature defenses are a huge factor both in rewarding relationships, and success in one\u2019s career; the twelve men with the most mature coping styles made over $200k more a year than the sixteen men with the most immature coping styles<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Vaillant points out that these mature defenses can unfortunately not be developed through willpower alone \u2013 your upbringing, environment, and even genetics play a role. But they are at least partially under your control, and can be actively strengthened and developed throughout your life.<\/p>\n There are also several character traits strongly associated with flourishing, and their cultivation is happily within our control to a greater degree.<\/p>\n When Vaillant looked at 26 personality traits the men in the Grant Study had been evaluated on in college, he found that a trait called \u201cPractical, Organized\u201d best predicted their mental health in middle-age<\/strong>. This trait involves, obviously, the ability to organize one\u2019s life, as well as to delay gratification. In a related study, \u201cprudence, forethought, willpower, and perseverance in junior high school were the best predictors of vocational success at age fifty<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n Vaillant uncovered another related trait that correlated with a whopping 8 Decathlon events: \u201cWell Integrated.\u201d Men who were \u201cwell integrated\u201d were deemed to be \u201csteady, dependable, thorough, sincere, and trustworthy,\u201d while those who were Incompletely Integrated lacked perseverance and were seen as \u201cerratic, unreliable, sporadic, undependable, ill directed and little organized.\u201d Compared to the Incompletely Integrated, the Well Integrated men:<\/p>\n Finally, while body type turned out not to predict a man\u2019s score on the Decathlon of Flourishing, athletic prowess was in fact strongly associated with it<\/strong>. That is, it seems that while the body type a man was born with didn\u2019t <\/em>affect the trajectory of his life, what he did<\/em> with that body mattered (remember that Churchill was born an endomorph<\/a> and fought it every step of the way!). This association between fitness and flourishing may possibly be chalked up to the benefits that physical training provides; staying in shape, as we know, can strengthen our discipline, boost our minds, and impart metaphorical life lessons as to the importance of things like humility and consistency<\/a>. It is perhaps for this reason that the participants\u2019 performance in a physical test of endurance turned out to be a better predictor of their ability to form successful relationships than even of their health later in life. Exercise makes us better people.<\/p>\n That qualities like organization, discipline, and dependability would so strongly predict flourishing in middle and late life should not be surprising; they are, Vaillant notes, \u201cprecisely the traits people need to find ways around failures, and make the most of successes when they come along.\u201d So too they are fortunately qualities that we can develop in ourselves, no matter how much, or how little, training we got in them in our youth. Those who were never taught as a boy the importance of scheduling their time, persevering in the face of setbacks, and developing their trustworthiness will certainly have a tougher row to hoe, but learning these skills is possible at any age.<\/p>\nThe Importance of Relationships<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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The Impact of a Man\u2019s Childhood<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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A Loving Childhood Develops Independence and Resilience<\/h3>\n
What Goes Right Matters More Than What Goes Wrong<\/h3>\n
The Influence of a Mother<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nThe Influence of a Father<\/h3>\n
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The Mysterious Influence of the Maternal Grandfather<\/h3>\n
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Men and Marriage<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Hope for Those Who Had an Inauspicious Start in Life<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nMarriage as a Healer<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nMature Defenses<\/h3>\n
Character Traits<\/h3>\n
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Being Active<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\nWhatever Your Upbringing, You Can Become the Man You Want to Be<\/h3>\n
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