Looks Can Be Deceiving

On reminding ourselves — and our kids — of the complexities of people and life.

I didn’t have my kids last weekend, which was a luxury, and I spent a couple of evenings watching the new Netflix show The Perfect Couple. I don’t want to give away plot specifics, but broadly, it’s a show about a wealthy, WASP-y, seemingly perfect family that is anything but: Underneath the family’s shiny, gilded exterior is extreme dysfunction and pain. It’s such a common trope — everything is not what it seems — and yet I’m surprised at how often so many of us (including me!) have to re-learn this lesson over and over again.

Credit: Hilary Bronwyn Gayle / Netflix

When I started telling friends and acquaintances about my separation, for instance, I was met with many shocked reactions. “You two seemed like the perfect couple!!!” is a reply I have heard more than once. And yes, on the surface, we were. We hardly ever fought. We treated each other with respect. We were great co-parents. We threw fun parties. And yet.

I have a friend who recently met a guy on a dating app. They texted for several weeks, having long, deep conversations before meeting up in person. Over text, he was charming, thoughtful and considerate, and she was certain she was going to be smitten with him. But when they met up, she found him to be insufferable. He didn’t clean up after himself, was highly awkward and talked constantly about a past relationship. The disconnect between the version of him she got to know via text and the one who showed up on the date was disconcerting.

“I think what may have been happening there is that in the absence of full information, I connected the dots and wrote the version of him I wanted,” she said.

We all do this, all the time. We get snippets of information about people or situations and we use them to spin full stories based on our hopes, assumptions or past experiences. Social media, in which people can so easily present an engineered and incomplete picture, drives us to do it even more. Although we often eventually discover that people’s stories are more complex than we thought, we fall into the same trap over and over and over again.

Undoubtedly, this is evolutionarily adaptive; we’re social creatures and it behooves us to use subtle cues to make broad social inferences. We infer from the yarns we weave about others how we should act and how we shouldn’t, as well as whom we should trust and whom we shouldn’t. These inclinations may have saved the lives of our ancestors. But they come at a big cost.

In my friend’s case, she painted a picture about her date that was rosier than it should have been. But we so often do the opposite: We make unfair negative judgments about people based on incomplete information. We might see a kid being mean to another kid and make assumptions about his character without considering the complicated circumstances that cause him to him act out. We tell ourselves that a parent who’s always running late doesn’t plan well when, in reality, there may be reasons for their chronic tardiness that have nothing to do with time management skills.

Our kids make these kinds of inferences from a young age, too, often about entire groups of people — and this sows the seeds for stereotyping as well as racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, sizeism, and more. We know from research that kids (and adults, for that matter) often assume that the differences they observe between groups reflect simple innate differences in capability and value. Studies show that kids spin quick, easy stories to explain what they see — men are more successful than women because they’re smarter. White people are wealthier than Black people because they’re more capable and hard-working. Of course, the complete, true stories are much more complex and involve power, laws, policies, and discrimination, and these can be hard for kids to grasp. Still, in my opinion, it’s never too young to start talking to kids about the structural causes of inequality. (I talk a lot about this in my upcoming book — which, by the way, you can now pre-order through that link, even though we don’t have a cover yet!)

Because these tendencies to over-simplify and over-generalize start young, it’s crucial for us as parents to help our kids recognize that the stories behind what they see are often much more complex than they realize — and that we all have the tendency to fill in the blanks with inaccurate assumptions. Instead of judging people’s intent and character based on their personal choices, we can think aloud in front of our kids about the various possible rationales. We can model the value of uncertainty and reflection by saying things like I don’t know when our kids ask us difficult questions. I’ve often heard parents say that they don’t want to talk to their kids about things like racism or homelessness because they don’t have enough expertise. But I think there’s immense value in modeling intellectual humility — saying things like That’s a great question! Let’s look that up to learn more about it.

This is really hard to do, because again, we are all primed to oversimplify. Our brains do it automatically, because otherwise, how would we ever make sense of anything? But we can at least habitually remind ourselves, and our kids, that people and situations are often far more multifaceted than we give them credit for — that behind bad behavior is often pain and heartbreak, that inequality is often a reflection of a broken system, and that the families that seem perfectly put-together almost never are.