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Posts by Paul Costello1
The congratulatory greeting cards are nice, but let’s face it: When new grads rip one open, they really hope there’s cash or a check inside.
But what we should be giving graduates is something that will endure — financial knowledge — that will help them build lasting wealth.I
Since a lot of personal finance advice doesn’t change — even when the nation is freaking out about the possibility of a government default — I like to revisit the guidance I often give to new high school and college graduates.
It goes back to the poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson’s complaint about our failing to teach students basic life skills: “We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for 10 or 15 years and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.”
How true that statement is, especially as it relates to money.
Here are six basic yet vital tips to help young adults keep their debt burden down and their net worth climbing.
I’m sure you’ve heard someone say: “Well, they said you need to buy a home to build wealth.” Or maybe: “Paying rent is a waste of money.”
They may say: “Don’t worry about paying off your college debt right away because it’s good debt. Invest instead.”
Who are “they?”
I’ll tell you who. Most often, it’s people with a biased interest in how you spend your money.
They are frequently wrong. They will contribute to your financial stress, making you feel you’re not succeeding fast enough.
Lenders and real estate professionals need home buyers. But until you are ready for such an expensive move, rent.
In certain high-cost areas, you may never be able to afford a home. And for some of you, that’s okay. You are not throwing money away when paying to put a roof over your head.
And yes, eventually, you want to invest so that you have a chance of your money beating inflation. But if you are leaving college with debt, tackle that first. You still have time to invest.
Referring to debt with an adjective is unhelpful. It’s just debt, and it can be destructive and oppressive if overused.
At aBerkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting, billionaire Warren Buffett was asked by a 14-year-old what financial concepts he would give young people who still have time to implement them.
Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world, didn’t talk about how to pick the right individual stock, as many might have thought he would.
His first tip was about avoiding debt.
“If I had one piece of advice to give to young people … it would be just don’t get in debt,” Buffett said.
Financial aid letters don’t reveal the real cost of college
If you’re graduating college with studentdebt, don’t wait until you have to start paying back the loans (for federal loans, typically six months after graduating) to figure out what you owe.
The grace period is a time to practice. You need to feel the pressure of how those payments will affect your monthly budget.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
For whatever time you have before the payments kick in, put that monthly amount in a savings account. Get used to how it feels to have less to spend because of the loans.
What to know ahead of Supreme Court ruling on student loan forgiveness
Always look at the totality of what you’re borrowing. And by that, I don’t just mean whether you can handle the monthly payment and the interest you’re being charged.
What will that loan cost you in the long run?
Consider what else you could do with that money if you weren’t servicing debt all the time.
If you borrow too much for a car, that’s money you can’t invest. If your mortgage is too high, overextending your budget, you can’t build an emergency fund for when life happens.
Car payments are $1,000 for a lot of consumers. Here’s why.
Ever been in love?
Treat your budget like a love interest. Stay connected to it. Change when necessary and appropriate to make things work out.
If you don’t know the song “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” go find it on YouTube. I like Jennifer Hudson’s version from the movie “Dreamgirls.”
Here’s howit starts: “And I am telling you, I’m not going. You’re the best man I’ll ever know. There’s no way I can ever go. No, no, no there’s no way. No, no, no, no way I’m living without you.”
Now replace the words “best man” with “best budget.”
That’s how you should view your budget.
No, no, no, no way you should be living without it.
7 bad money habits to ditch in 2023
Me: What’s your total student loan debt?
Young adult: I don’t know.
Me: What is the difference between your gross pay and net income?
Young adult: I don’t know.
Me: What’s FICA?
Young adult: I don’t know?
Financial illiteracy will keep you broke or impede your ability to grow your wealth.
I’m going to need you to know some things.
There’s a point in your life when ignorance about your personal finances is a choice, and it’s one that will not serve you well.
Children can say theydon’t know because they typically have parents or guardians who are supposed to know for them. But by the time you graduate from high school or college, you have to take responsibility and learn as much as you can about budgeting, credit, saving and investing.
You can no longer afford to say “I don’t know.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/31/money-tips-new-graduates/
By Katie ShepherdAugust 9, 2023 at 5:26 p.m. EDT
The unemployment rate hit a 33-year low of 1.5 percent in Montgomery County in June, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reflecting an overall decline in joblessness.
Preliminary numbers show unemployment reached 1.7 percent in Maryland, 2.5 percent in the Washington metro area and 3.6 percent nationally in June, significantly lower than the peaks experienced in spring 2020 as the pandemic upended the economy and cost millions of workers their jobs.Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.
Solid, if slowing, job growth accompanied by low unemployment at the national level has raised hopes that the United States could avoid an economic downturn this year. And wages are rising nationally, too. Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich at a news briefing on Wednesday lauded the milestone and credited county efforts to recruit new business, particularly life-science-related enterprises, and programs to educate and retrain workers as well as connect jobseekers with employers.
Elrich said the county, which is the third-largest bioscience hub in the nation, has built more than 1 million square feet in lab space since he took office in 2018. The county is continuing to expand its bioscience footprint with a $40 million investment in a partnership with the University of Maryland to construct an Institute for Health Computing that will focus on research related to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Even in the face of the economic trials of the pandemic, we’re seeing indications that our local economy is faring well and doing better than five years ago,” Elrich said.
While overperforming some national trends, Montgomery County reported a rising rate of office vacancy, an issue that has been highly publicized in the downtown cores of American cities but has also increasingly bled into the suburbs. Montgomery’s office vacancy increased by 4.6 percent in the second quarter of 2023 to 16.7 percent — a vacancy rate that outstrips the state of Maryland, at 12.5 percent, and the D.C. metro area, at 15.9 percent, according to data shared by the county executive’s office.
D.C.’s suburbs, not just downtown, are feeling the crunch of remote work
Across the D.C. region, only Arlington County and Fairfax County had a higher office vacancy rate than Montgomery over the last quarter, with 22.1 percent and 18.5 percent, respectively. The office vacancy rate is rising faster in Montgomery than in any neighboring jurisdiction, according to an analysis shared by the executive’s office.
Elrich also noted that unemployment numbers do not reflect the complete economic health of the county, which will need to build tens of thousands of new housing units to meet the needs of its growing population over the next two decades. The figure does not capture anyone who has given up on finding a job. Nor does the unemployment rate capture the quality of employment — it does not reflect how many workers are in minimum-wage or low-wage jobs.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
“The other side of the housing crisis is actually a wage crisis,” Elrich said.
Several economic conditions, including strong income tax revenue and a rising minimum wage set by the county that hit $16.70 for businesses with more than 50 employees this year and $15 for most other employers, indicate that wages are also rising as unemployment is dropping, he said. But the median household income in the county is $117,345 — far out of reach for workers earning the newly raised minimum wage.
Elrich noted that county residents who may be working but only make minimum wage can hardly afford to live in an apartment with a $900 rent. “Good luck with finding that because they don’t exist,” he added.
In Maryland’s most populous county, a historically wealthy slice of the D.C. suburbs, about 8.5 percent of residents — nearly 90,000 people — live below the federal poverty line. Policymakers said Wednesday that they are focused on connecting people with programs to help.
“We want to make sure we’re engaging the [low-wage] population to make sure we keep moving the needle,” said Anthony Featherstone, executive director of WorkSource Montgomery, which connects jobseekers with new skills to make them more competitive in the employment market.
Bill Tompkins, president and CEO of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation, said efforts to continue improving the county’s economy cannot rest despite the positive signs that the worst impacts of the pandemic have now faded. He said his organization is targeting 5,000 companies for expansion into Montgomery County, with the hope of creating more jobs and filling office buildings.
“While things are looking good, and are looking better, we’re not letting up,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/09/montgomery-county-unemployment-low/
By Lauren Lumpkin, Karina Elwood and Nicole AsburyUpdated August 9, 2023 at 1:54 p.m. EDT|Published August 9, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Dorothy Clowers arrived early at Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School on a recent afternoon so that she could secure a good spot at the front of the gym. Around her, dozens of other elementary school administrators would also vie for recruits, hoping to fill about 1,500 teacher and 479 staff vacancies before the first day of school.F
Clowers, the principal of William Paca Elementary in Prince George’s County, Md., eagerly held on to a sign bearing her school’s name as prospective teachers walked by. She wanted them to know that her school was ready to hire a kindergarten teacher, two fourth-grade teachers and a part-time fifth-grade teacher, among other positions.
“Generally speaking, I don’t have to come to these looking for teachers. But when you have staff retiring, and you don’t have a plethora of candidates coming out of college, this summer has been different,” said Clowers, who has been to two other hiring fairs — or “paloozas” — hosted by the school district this year. “But we do have a few more weeks, and we have another palooza. And I’m hopeful that we will get the candidates that we need so that we will be fully staffed when students arrive at school.”
Clowers isn’t alone. Elsewhere in the D.C. region, other schools are trying to fill at least 800 teaching vacancies before students return to classrooms this month. The scramble comes after another year of climbing teacher resignations locally and across the country. While teachers nationwide reported that their well-being was better in January than in 2021 and 2022, 23 percent said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2022-2023 school year — citing factors including pay, stress and disappointment, according to a survey from the Rand Corp.
In most D.C.-area districts, more teachers resigned during the 2022-2023 school year than in the term prior, data shows. Alexandria saw 325 teachers leave last year, compared with 212 in 2021-2022. More than 500 teachers left Loudoun County Public Schools last year, up from 339 in the school year prior. In Prince George’s County, officials counted 1,126 resignations between July 2022 and this July — the district last year reported losing 989 teachers between June 2021 and July 2022.
D.C.-area schools see spike in teacher resignations
In Maryland’s largest school system — Montgomery County Public Schools — 625 teachers have resigned since the start of the 2022-2023school year, which is about 2.4 percent of the total workforce. In 2021-2022, 576 teachers resigned their positions, TheWashington Post previously reported.
“This is the problem that we run into each year, that we have vacancies that do not get filled and then we end up with classes that have to be combined,” said Jennifer Martin, president of the Montgomery County Education Association, the county’s teacher’s union. School district officials estimate that there are about 397 teacher and 591 support staff vacancies ahead of the upcoming school year.
Martin said she has heard of several teachers who are retiring earlier than they have to. She also said she has heard more often of younger teachers leaving for other professions with better work-life balance and pay. “There’s just a decision that people come to, that they’ve given all they can give, and they’re not getting the satisfaction from the work that they deserve for the effort they’re putting into it,” Martin said.
Elsewhere in the region, however, Arlington has reported a decrease in resignations — from 284 during the 2021-2022 school year to 164 last school year.
“I’m encouraged with the progress that we’re at a better place at this point than we had been in previous years, particularly given the situation nationally and even in our region with regards to very, very high vacancies for school systems around the country,” Arlington Superintendent Francisco Durán said at a recent school board meeting, adding that classrooms were 97.5 percent staffed with licensed teachers.
Fairfax County Public Schools, which has the largest public school enrollment in Virginia, lost 726 teachers last school year, a decline from 896 in 2021-2022.
Meanwhile, D.C.’s public school system reported 360 resignations last school year — an average of roughly 37 resignations per month, according to district officials. Between January and June 2022, 372 teachers quit their jobs, The Post previously reported, about 62 departures per month.
The trends in the D.C. area follow patterns in other parts of the country, with some districts faring better than others — producing a “mixed picture” of the teacher shortage crisis that has troubled schools in recent years, said Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers.
“We still have a huge shortage. We’re still hovering around 300,000 people leaving a year and not having enough people who want to come into the profession. We have retention problems. We have recruitment problems. We have respect issues all over the place,” Weingarten said.
But there are bright spots. “Places that have done contracts that focused on not just wages, as important as that is, but also [those focused on] working conditions and on the freedom for teachers to teach and have some input … those places are better,” Weingarten said.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
D.C. is one of the districts that reached a long-awaited labor contract with its educators this past year — an agreement that provided the city’s 5,000 traditional public school teachers with a 12 percent raise over four years, retention bonuses and other benefits.
“Teachers are so invested in the work they’re doing and they want to be teaching, they want to stay in the classroom,” said Scott Goldstein, a former teacher and the executive director of EmpowerEd, an advocacy group. “A lot of them just need a little bit of hope that things are going to improve.”
The D.C. Council also passed a budget this year that includes a provision for a flexible schedule pilot program, aimed to give teachers more freedom throughout the school day. And the city’s new “Grow Your Own” initiative is being designed to develop high school students and paraprofessionals into licensed teachers.
But there is still room for improvement, Goldstein said, from retaining more Black male teachers to providing educators with more mental health support. And citywide — across D.C.’s traditional school district and its charter campuses — teacher retention fell from 74 percent between the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years to 70 percent between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 — a figure that had not been seen in the city since before the coronavirus pandemic.
D.C. is also keeping a smaller share of its teachers in both sectors overall — 20 percent either left their jobs or changed roles between 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, compared with 15 percent the year prior and 13 percent after the pandemic started.
To fight teacher shortages, states send people to college for free
A former elementary teacher at a high-poverty elementary school in the city’s Ward 7 said students’ behavioral issues are, in part, driving teachers out of schools.
The former teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she still has friends in D.C. Public Schools and is worried about them facing possible scrutiny, said she was once bitten so hard by a student that she bled. When she sought help, however, she said leaders blamed her classroom management skills and offered little support.
“I do think kids have picked up on the fact that nothing is going to happen,” said the teacher, who now works in construction as a project manager. She noted that her new job has an environment of “support and teamwork.”
Jacqueline Pogue Lyons, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said she is concerned about the staffing gaps.
“I get nervous when I see large numbers of teachers leaving, in particular in Ward 7 and Ward 8 or in underserved schools and underserved communities,” she said. “It’s hardest to replace those leaders.”
School leaders elsewhere in the country are also struggling to fully staff their campuses. One Louisiana parish is short 200 teachers, a local news station reported. From Maine to California, officials are getting creative in the final days of summer to fill outstanding gaps.
At one Delaware elementary school, teachers have left in droves, said Christina Betts, who has been an educator for more than a decade. “People wouldn’t believe what happens in my classroom,” Betts said, referring to unchecked behavioral issues that teachers often have neither the time nor resources to adequately address.
Her school is also in need of bilingual educators. Many of her students speak Spanish, but she does not. “I just use a lot of pictures,” she said. “We’re just expected to do what every other teacher in the district is expected to do, which is kind of ridiculous.”
Other districts have fared better. Weingarten, of the national teacher’s union, pointed to Cincinnati Public Schools, where leaders have reduced the number of open positions by more than half, the local outlet Fox 19 reported.
The southwest Ohio school district holds recruitment events where educators can get hired on the spot and offer a starting salary for first-year teachers that is $15,000 more than what the state recommends.
“We’re still in a teacher shortage crisis, but it’s not the 10-alarm fire that it was last year or the year before,” Weingarten said, with the exception of political hot spots, such as Florida. If schools “work on pay, conditions and [giving teachers] some autonomy to address real student needs, they’re seeing both an increase in the number of certified people who are applying for jobs and they’re seeing people stay.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/08/09/dc-area-schools-teacher-resignations/
Feeling safe and supported and able to discuss even difficult subjects will help your kid to flourish, experts say.
By Perri Klass, MDAugust 5, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. EDT
In the pediatric world, we’ve worried a great deal about what we call ACEs, or adverse childhood experiences, which can disrupt children’s lives and get in the way of the safe and stable nurturing relationships they need. Research has shown us the long shadows that early adversity can cast over health and mental health.L
But more recently, the relatively newer science of PCEs, orpositive childhood experiences,has reframed the discussion, and helped balance out our understanding of how children grow, and the power of parents and caregivers to help them, even in tough times.
A study published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics in 2019 examined the effect of these PCEs. In addition to asking about ACEs, the researchers asked 6,188 adults seven additional questions about their childhoods.
Had they been able to talk to their families about their feelings? Had they felt their families stood by them during difficult times? Had they enjoyed participating in community traditions? Did they feel a sense of belonging in high school? Were they supported by friends? Were there at least two non-parent adults who took an interest in them? Had they felt safe and protected by an adult in their home?
The risk of depression or mental health struggles dropped by 72 percent among adults who reported six or seven of the positive experiences listed above, and by 50 percent for those reporting three to five.
Christina Bethell, the lead author, is a professor of child health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where she directs the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative. And those positive experiences, Bethell said in an email, affect the nervous system of the developing child and help bolster a sense of worth and identity all through life.
“High adversity does not mean you’re doomed,” Bethell told me, pointing out that every person in a child’s life has the opportunity to help that child feel connected, safe and well. And those nurturing relationships are what help children overcome what life throws at them. “The absence of the positive is the problem,” she said.
As a pediatrician, my cause has been encouraging a very particular positive, reading aloud with young children, using checkups to encourage and support families so they start as early as possible. This program, Reach Out and Read, now reaches 4.2 million children a year, offering guidance, encouragement, modeling and books.
When I see an infant or a toddler, happy in a parent’s lap, going back and forth over a book with babble or gestures or words — well, something in me feels that child is going to be okay. It’s language and early literacy, but most of all it’s being held and attended to, because for young children, learning and development happen through relationships and interactions.
I was excited to see a study, published in June, that looked at more than 10,000 young adolescents in the United States and found those whose parents reported that they had started reading for pleasure at an early age had better cognitive performance, increased brain cortical areas and better mental health in adolescence than children who had started reading for pleasure later — or never started. The study, conducted by researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Warwick in Britain and Fudan University in China, involved brain scans, cognitive test scores and measures of academic performance, as well as mental health symptoms and behavioral problems.
One of the authors, Barbara Sahakian, a clinical psychologist who is a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge department of psychiatry, said in an email that the size and design of the study allowed them to control for confounding factors, and the types of analysis involved made it possible to suggest a probably causal relationship.
“We found that the effects of reading for pleasure in early childhood were beneficial for adolescents regardless of family socio-economic status, family income and parental education.”
The science of ACEs rocked medicine when the original studies began coming out.
Physicians at Kaiser Permanente in California, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, surveyed patients about 10 kinds of childhood exposures that could interfere with children’s emotional development and the relationships they formed: Had they suffered emotional or physical neglect, emotional, physical or sexual abuse; had they had a household member who was incarcerated, addicted or mentally ill; had they been exposed to divorce or to domestic violence?
The original study was conducted from1995 to 1997, with results published in 1998, showing that higher numbers of adverse experiences in childhood were associated with not only higher rates of mental health problems and substance use disorder in adulthood but also higher rates of heart disease, cancer and chronic lung disease.
The science of teasing out different kinds of early adversity became more sophisticated, taking into account community and social factors such as poverty, racism and deprivation. Research in neurobiology helped draw the causal connections, always emphasizing the importance of early relationships, explaining the ways these early adversities, by disrupting those relationships, affected the body and mind.
The CDC offers an ACE Pyramid, showing the progression from adverse experiences to disrupted neurodevelopment and cognitive impairment, through health risk behaviors and on to disease and early death.
In 2014, a study showed that children with two or more ACEs were more than twice as likely to have a chronic medical condition or mental health problem — and more likely to have school problems and many other difficulties. But the researchers who were looking at adverse events in children were also looking at resilience, because it was clear that there was a lot of variation in children’s trajectories, Bethell said.
“It was true that children who faced ACEs and adversity were more likely to have mental health and behavioral health problems, but most did not,” she said.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare
In that study, resilience was protective — the capacity to stay calm and in control, the ability to communicate and to ask for help.
Researchers needed measures that assessed more than the presence or absence of problems — questions that actually looked at whether children were flourishing.
Flourishing children are interested in learning new things, can manage their emotions and behaviors in challenging situations, and can persist to achieve their goals.
Bethell said the research showed — for children facing high levels of adversity — “the tremendous protective power of family resilience and parent-child connection.” But notably, it also showed “how important these are even for children without adversity.”
In a paper published in 2019 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers looked at data from almost 30,000 children from infancy to age 5, collected in the National Survey of Children’s Health. They examined what they called Positive Parenting Practices (PPPs), including reading stories, storytelling, singing, eating meals together andgoing onfamily outings.
Their results showed that while adverse experiences had a negative effect on development, the positive effects of PPPs could mitigate and even overcome those negative effects.
One of the authors, David E. Bard, a psychologist who is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in Oklahoma City, said the most fascinating finding in the project was that there was almost no correlation between the adversity score and the PPP score.
In other words, looking at whether bad things had happened in a family didn’t tell you whether good things were also happening.
“I had expected maybe these were two sides of the same coin,” Bard said. If adverse experiences were happening, wouldn’t that also mean that families were generally dysfunctional, that parents might be too devastated to be nurturing? Instead, they were almost unrelated — lots of parents who were facing problems were also managing to nurture their children. And parents who didn’t necessarily face those negatives were not necessarily engaging in those positive practices.
“The parenting influences were actually stronger than the adverse influences,” Bard said. “It’s a very promising message, we ought to be doing everything we can to help parents create those positive experiences.”
There are many different ways for parents to do that.
“The very first study we did in 2015 really showed me there was no magic bullet,” Bethell said. “It’s more about how you are than what you do.”
That is, she said, parents don’t need to set impossibly high standards for themselves, or create special big moments of connection; instead, they need to invite connection, reflection and interaction in all the small moments.
“What I’m really saying is it’s the quality of their presence and connection with the child that is the magic juice that makes those behaviors really matter even if you’re not doing it perfectly, that is what is lodged in the nervous system of the child,” Bethell said.
It’s about using the moments of your day to be present and caring with your child, she said, and about children being able to talk about their feelings and problems.
Do it when you’re cooking or cleaning or driving or shopping, ask about what they’re experiencing and feeling, and model self-reflection by narrating your own experience, including acknowledging difficult feelings and mistakes.
Children feeling safe and supported and able to discuss even difficult subjects leads to flourishing. And every person in a child’s life has that power to connect and support, she said.
“For a child to feel safe and well and heard, the power is all with us,” Bethell said. “We don’t lift that up enough.”
“We need to make it easier for parents to do what I would call the right thing,” Bard said.
That means policies that support families and reduce stress, and support the mental health and well-being of parents (and child-care workers, and teachers, and maybe even pediatricians). It means policies and programs that reduce the disparities and deprivations that increase risk for many children and many communities.
It also means honoring the everyday interactions and connections and rituals within homes, within extended families and within communities. The moments really matter, and the positives do add up, sometimes in ways we cannot see clearly as we go. Yes, the reading is good for the developing brain — but so is the pleasure.
Perri Klass is a professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and author of “The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/08/05/happy-moment-shape-kids-lives/
Antonia Mufarech,Jan. 25, 2022
People are natural storytellers. We constantly revise and edit the ways in which we talk about the past and future. It’s through storytelling that we make sense of the world, and Dan McAdams, a Northwestern professor that specializes in a concept he calls “narrative identity,” is a practitioner in this craft.
According to McAdams, the theory behind narrative identity is that beginning in adolescence, people start to become historians of the self. People begin to see their past as something that they can make meaning out of, and reconstruct it in a way that helps them understand where they may be going in the future. McAdams shares his research’s findings with NBN.
How do people develop a narrative identity?
McAdams: Everybody does this a little differently, but the general trend is to create stories that integrate our lives and give us a sense of who we are. Once this project develops, it stays with us pretty much for the rest of life. We remain storytellers of the self. These stories can always be changed, modified. There’s nothing fixed about these stories. That said, they often take a decisive form, and people will often make decisions in their lives based on narrative assumptions they have about their own lives.
Knowing that stories can change, how can we shape our stories with more meaning?
McAdams: The whole process of creating a story and editing and revising and so forth, is a social process. It’s something that involves our connections to other people. It’s not like we go off to a remote spot in the universe and ponder our identities and then come back fully formed. There is some introspection for some people, but a lot of it happens in social relationships – with friends, parents, teachers, and so on – where we try out different kinds of narrative and create stories. And then we tell them to other people and we get feedback from that.
What impact can the people around us have on our stories?
McAdams: Certain people, I think, are in a very good position to help us with our stories – people that we are close to being the most important. But sometimes those people can be in positions of authority. And so teachers and parents have a big impact with respect to narrative identity. This impact can be positive in the sense that they encourage us in certain directions and we go in that direction. But it can also be negative, as when an authoritative figure presents a certain kind of identity and we try to resist it. We say, ‘I don’t want to be that way. I’m not going to live a life like my mother. I’m not going to follow this path or that path.’ Either way, we have to confront this menu of different narrative options that are presented to us in everyday life. And we pick and choose, appropriate and reconstruct, based on that menu.
What are some small changes we can make about how we think through certain situations?
McAdams: Life stories are psychological resources. We use them to help us make decisions and move forward in life. It’s great when those stories affirm positive messages: when they affirm hope for the future, when they tell us that we are good people, when they celebrate our achievements and our triumphs, and when they help us overcome suffering – that’s all good. Yet, the story also has to be true to your lived experience. And so, if you’re going through really horrible things in your life right now, coming up with some sunny reconstruction of it that exudes a kind of strong optimism will not work immediately. It’s not true to who you are. You’re fooling yourself in those kinds of situations. And so I tend to be resistant to offering overall recommendations. That said, there is research on what features of life stories are associated with psychological wellbeing.
What does this research say?
McAdams: There’s pretty clear research actually, which has four points to make. The first is that life stories that feature protagonists or main characters who feel empowered and agentic tend to be associated with psychological wellbeing. When people feel beaten down, when the main character of the story is passive and has no control, those kinds of stories tend to be associated with negative outcomes. Communion is also good. It means having a story in which the main character is connected richly to many other people and finds meaningful interactions, relationships, love, friendship and so forth. The third one is redemption, which refers to stories in which suffering is overcome. Stories in which people find positive meanings in negative events. And finally, stories that are more coherent and easier to follow, tend to be associated with psychological wellbeing. So, it’s good to tell life stories in which the protagonist is agentic, is engaged in warm close relationships, is resilient and forms a coherent narrative. Still, you can’t just make those up. Lived experience needs to resonate with the story.
Could you explain the concept of redemptive stories?
McAdams: In a redemptive story, the main character of the narrative is delivered from their suffering to an enhanced status or state. That comes in many different varieties. For example, somebody might talk about their life in terms of a really terrible love relationship they had that went really bad. And then, they manage to extricate themselves from that relationship and find true love with another person. That’s a classic redemption sequence, where the early suffering is undone or redeemed. The other way that redemption stories play out is when the person, in retrospect, interprets the negative event in a positive way. For instance, I can look back at the divorce of my parents and say, ‘It was really a bad thing. It meant that I never had a father. I felt ashamed because the parents of other kids weren’t divorced,’ you know? So it’s not like it was great. It was bad. But looking back on it, the narrator might say, ‘Maybe I’d rather they never got divorced, but nonetheless, I find some benefit in that. It made me grow up fast, and it gave me a certain perspective on relationships.’ So that’s the kind of interpretation that occurs after the event. Now the flip side of a redemptive story would be a contamination story.
What is a contamination story?
McAdams: These are somewhat rare, but nonetheless not rare enough. And most of us could come up with a few of these in our lives where you have a really wonderful scene in life, and then it goes rather dramatically and suddenly bad. It can be psychologically debilitating if you have a lot of contamination stories, because there is a sort of fatalism that goes with them. For instance, research suggests that that’s a strong predictor of depression, neuroticism and high anxiety.
Is there any advice you would give, specifically to young people, regarding how we can shape our stories?
McAdams: People in their teens and early twenties – or even in their early thirties – are really young, which means that there’s a lot of storytelling to do. One of the satisfying and hopeful features of the idea of narrative identity is that it’s not a psychological quality that gets fixed early. Unlike your traits and even your values, life stories are more fluid and malleable. And so, we get lots of opportunities in life to change them. That’s good news when you’re young and when things seem really difficult. One of the great things about being young is you’ve got a lot of time to work on a life story. There are a lot of different experiences and people that will have an impact. And so one shouldn’t get too discouraged if, at any given point in time, it doesn’t seem to be going well.
How can storytelling bring people together?
McAdams: Stories are always about time. How we make sense of time, how we stay the same over time, how we change. That’s really what stories are fundamentally about: human intention organized in time. And that’s a basic feature of human nature. Human beings, all over the world, know that they are moving forward in time. They’re trying to make sense of what they want over time and how their lives are going to unfold. So, stories, or the way that we do that, are a human universal. And even though every culture has its own unique narrative and cultural customs for storytelling, the idea that life is like a story can be found across the globe.
It’s important to remember, especially when we’re feeling lost or confused, that we can reshape our stories. There will always be different settings and characters to discover, as well as lessons to be learned. Although we can’t control everything that happens to us, we can control the stories that we tell about ourselves.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Thumbnail courtesy of the School of Education and Social Policy.
https://northbynorthwestern.com/the-stories-we-tell-about-ourselves/
