[...]... took a special interest in me and in my second-oldest sister, Brenda She took me in when my parents split—but Brenda had lived with her since she was a toddler At that time, my mom couldn’t handle raising so many young children so close together in age Beverly was born just ten months after Brenda, leaving MH with a two-and-a-half-year-old, a ten-month-old, and a newborn What began as a temporary arrangement... and Betty Hart compared the number of words heard by children of professional, working-class, and welfare families, focusing specifically on the way parents talked to their kids It was painstaking research: the researchers followed babies in forty-two families from age seven months to three years The families were drawn from three socioeconomic classes: middle-class professionals, working-class people,... Though most of my primary and secondary educational experiences were dismal, one seventh-grade teacher took an interest in me She was about twenty-five, with long straight hair, caramel-colored skin, and full lips—one of the few black teachers at Henry D Perry Middle School and a woman who could get any twelve-year-old boy’s attention New to teaching, she was on a mission to inspire the black students,... they were together, the fighting was terrifying, but we lived in a nice neighborhood of young working-class families It now reminds me of the idealized suburb of TV’s The Wonder Years , only with black people The homes were neat, with manicured lawns and flat one-story houses of the psychedelic-faded-to-pastel colors people seem to favor near beaches Ours was a particularly lurid aqua The smell of freshly... ungrounded, but well-learned behaviors are difficult to change, whether they involve drug use or any other sort of emotional coping tool And when I look now at six-year-olds, I can’t help seeing how young and vulnerable children are at that age I realize now that I must have been quietly devastated—but I thought then that I had to be hard It was the only way I knew how to cope MH and Carl at a family... most rural areas of the South My grandmother and grandfather had packed up their family and moved to Florida in 1957, just before my mom turned seventeen That was five years after Willie-Lee, my mother’s then-fifteen-year-old brother, was kicked to death by a mule My grandmother just couldn’t take farm life anymore Still, she’d spent virtually all of her life before that working the fields and facing... the living room into the yard Patricia, then nine years old, stayed behind She often tried to play peacemaker like her big sister Jackie The terrifying screams and crashes continued Ten-year-old Beverly and seven-year-old Joyce tried to get me out as quickly as possible but I still saw my father hit my mother with a hammer The glass coffee table that was usually in front of the couch was shattered Shards... for example, was never used by more than 5 percent of teenagers, the group at highest risk of becoming addicted Risk for addiction is far greater when drug use is initiated in early adolescence versus adulthood Daily use of crack—the pattern showing the highest risk for addiction —never affected more than 0.2 percent of high school seniors A 3,500 percent increase in spending to fight drugs between... streets of South Florida Indeed, I’d recently received what I thought was an absurd letter from a Florida court claiming that I was the father of a sixteen-year-old boy The pounding became more insistent When I opened the door, I was met by a thick-necked white guy wearing an undersized suit and displaying a badge He handed me some official paperwork and instructed me to appear before a judge As it... 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 .