High Price Read Online Free PDF Page A

They’d scraped and saved and had bought a nice home together. Their parenting skills were limited by their upbringing and their education. My father, for example, had lost his dad to cancer by the time he was seventeen and had had only limited male guidance throughout his youth. Despite this, both of my parents were extremely hardworking and did what they thought was best for us. For years, my mom worked the graveyard shift as a nurse’s aide, doing as much as she could to support her kids. Unfortunately, the jobs for which she was considered didn’t typically pay a living wage.
    In contrast, when I reached that age I had only one child that I knew about and was on the verge of receiving my PhD: I had resources at my disposal that they couldn’t even dream of. It would be easy to say that my parents made poor choices; the reality is that it is impossible to understand their experience and my early life without fully appreciating its context.
    And so, putting aside any thoughts of missing my mom, I focused on wanting to be with my father when my parents first split. As a boy, my behavior was continually shaped by my family’s notion of masculinity, virtually from birth. For example, when I helped my father mow the lawn or fix the car, I’d get patted on the head or be given other types of encouragement. In behavioral psychology, this process is called reinforcement. The more immediate the reward or reinforcement * following the behavior, the more robust and frequent that behavior becomes in similar situations. And so I quickly learned that emulating my father was what I should do.
    In contrast, I was encouraged to play with my sisters when I was very young, but this behavior was no longer reinforced as I got older. It wasn’t seen as an appropriately masculine activity for a growing boy. I gradually stopped doing it because this behavior wasn’t rewarded. This process is known as extinction. Behavior that was once reinforced but no longer produces praise or reward will eventually be discontinued and that’s what happened to my engagement in my sisters’ activities.
    Similarly, while my sisters would be comforted and soothed by adults if they cried or expressed sadness as young children, my brothers and I were quickly shown by example or experience that displaying such vulnerability was not appropriate male behavior. If my sisters were emotionally expressive, that behavior was reinforced. But the boys in my family were actually punished for engaging in such behavior, which decreased the likelihood of us crying in similar situations. Like reinforcement, punishment that has a high probability of occurring immediately after the behavior is more effective. Punishment, of course, is the use of aversive experiences—like reprimands, spanking, or other ways of inflicting pain—to decrease behavior.
    I didn’t know it then but I was being conditioned by the consequences of my behavior. Through the work of B. F. Skinner and others, I would later learn how those subtle and not-so-subtle reinforcements and punishments profoundly influence our actions. At the time, though, I just knew that what I had to do, what I wanted to do, was become a man. And the best way to do that was to watch and copy my namesake, Carl. I wanted to spend as much time with my father as I could, to get those rewards and avoid being punished, to try to become who I was meant to be. He treated me like I was the center of his world. He taught me how to mow a lawn, how to wash and repair a car, and when I wanted the much-coveted Daisy BB gun, he bought it. With a child’s unconditional love, I didn’t see any contradictions in idolizing the man who hit my mother and drove her away.
    Also, I didn’t like some of the alternatives that faced me if my parents split up and I could not stay with my father. My aunt Louise—whom we called Weezy—could not have been happy being saddled with one or more of her sister’s children. When we did stay there—and I