Tracking a generation
By Tom Nugent
In 1977, social scientist Helen Zarsky Reinherz '44 began to ask questions of and about several hundred kindergartners who were attending public schools in Quincy, Mass. More than three decades later, her on going study of their lives is still providing answers that offer a valuable understanding of the links between school adjustment, mental health and family relationships.
Reinherz, the 84-year-old director of one of the large stand longest-running psychological longitudinal studies in the history of American science, is still doing her best to figure out what makes these (now adult) "kids" tick. It all began when Quincy school officials developed a collaboration with Simmons College School of Social Work to study the best ways of ensuring the optimal school experience for kindergartners.
"When I first started working on this study, I thought it would only last until the children reached the third grade,"says Reinherz, a faculty member at Simmons in Boston. "But over the years,I've learned that I'm a rather persistent person who doesn't like to stop working on a project once it's under way. Of course, I also found that my curiosity about the lives of these kids was getting stronger with each passing year.
"If you study a group of children for a while, it's easy to become fascinated by the kinds of questions that begin to emerge from the data. And that's what happened to me. Each time I got ready to wrap up the study, I would realize that I wanted to know more about the continuing lives of our subjects.
"One thing led to another . . . and the study we started way back in 1977 is still going strong. Along the way, it's been absolutely fascinating-as well as a great privilege-to watch so many of these young people gradually turn into successful and thriving adults."
During an award-winning 50-year career as a social work researcher (she won the National Association of Social Workers' coveted Presidential Award for Excellence in 2005), Reinherz has gained a national reputation as a groundbreaking scientist whose extraordinarily wide-ranging study of childhood development became a landmark in her field.
Known as the Simmons Longitudinal Study, or SLS, her 31-year investigation into the connections between family life and the mental health of her subjects (initially 700, now down to 400 due to attrition) has opened a fascinating window on the dynamics of childhood development. At the same time, her often unexpected findings have provided teachers, school counselors, social workers and family psychologists with crucially helpful insights about the ways in which family influences affect (whether positively or negatively) the emotional growth and maturation of children over time.
Following in her mother's footsteps
Born and raised in Malden, Mass., as the daughter of a Jewish immigrant father from war-torn Lithuania, Reinherz grew up in a lower-middle-class world at the height of the Great Depression. "My father[Zachary Zarsky] was a pharmacist," she recalls today, "and he worked in a drugstore in a lower-middle-class neighborhood where people were really struggling to get by. Every day of his life he dealt with people who had to make a choice between buying food and buying medicines-and quite often, he would simply give them the medicines. To this day, I honor his memory for that."
A bright and inquisitive child ("I was trying to read Eugene O'Neill by the age of eight!"), Reinherz was also deeply touched by her mother's stories of her own early career as a social worker on the streets of Boston-where she had struggled to rescue penniless young women from hopeless lives of prostitution. Imbued with her mother's fiery idealism,the youthful Reinherz arrived on the campus of Wheaton College in 1940, just as Hitler was invading Poland and World War II was getting under way. In love with books and ideas, she declared her intention to become an English major.
"In those early days, I remember thinking that I might become a writer, and I even landed a job writing this gossip column fort he student newspaper.... But I guess my mother's influence prevailed, because I wound up getting a minor in sociology and psychology, and by the time I graduated, I'd already decided that I wanted to give social work a try."
Having married her fiancé Sam Reinherz before her senior year at Wheaton (he would soon be fighting in the Philippines with the U.S.Army), Helen quickly nailed down her undergraduate degree and then signed on as a master's degree candidate at the Simmons College School of Social Work.During the next two decades (and while earning her public health doctorate at Harvard in 1965), she would work as a staffer at a mental hospital for children and as a counselor at a mental health agency for dysfunctional families.
"I saw a lot of kids who were severely troubled," she recalls today, "and that really provoked my interest.... By the time I finally joined the social work faculty at Simmons, I was eager to work on research that would provide both prevention and intervention for these struggling children."
Reinherz hit the ground running with her marathon SLS study, and never looked back. "I'm very proud of the fact that we were among the first to study this issue with a longitudinal survey approach, and my great hope is that our findings will continue to improve the lives of children,far down into the future."
Learning from the students
Reinherz has returned to study the lives of the students all over again every few years. Among the most surprising of her findings--based on tens of thousands of pages of data gathered by her team of Simmons investigators-was the discovery that children whose parents divorce "don't seem to end up any worse off psychologically" than kids whose families remain together throughout their childhoods.
"That was certainly an unexpected conclusion,"she says, "and there have been several like it. One of the most exciting things about this kind of long-term study is the way you often come up with unpredictable results, as you examine data that may cover 20 or 25 years of a person's lifetime.
"We also learned from the data that we needed to expand our definition of 'family' a little bit. Over and over again, we found that a loving and supportive uncle, let's say-or even a really dedicated and inspiring schoolteacher-could take the place of immediate family members in situations where developing children faced neglect or verbal abuse or even violence."
While describing several such"outside-the-family" support cases, Reinherz recalled the harrowing experience of "a young girl who was struggling in a family where substance abuse and violence were the daily norm. Yet she coped by absenting herself as much as possible; she would spend entire days at the local library.
"She also benefited greatly from her relationship with a terrific teacher at the school who gave her a lot of emotional support over several years during her late childhood and early adolescence. As a result, she not only survived the family trauma-she went on to become a very successful and mentally healthy adult."
Ask some of the country's most influential experts on childhood development to reflect on the value of the SLS as a scientific research tool, and they will tell you that it would be hard to overestimate the importance of this survey, which has been funded for nearly 30 years by the National Institute of Mental Health.
"I think the SLS is a national treasure. I also think Helen Reinherz has done the country a great service by so carefully studying children," says William Beardslee, M.D., chair of the psychiatry department at Children's Hospital Boston. "This is a set of information that people will be able to learn from for years and years."
Simmons College Professor of Social Work Mary Gilfus, Ph.D., a longtime Reinherz colleague who has published often on topics related to childhood trauma, agrees: "I teach courses to social workers on childhood behavior and growth and development-and I can already draw on her findings as a researcher who's very interested in why some children seem to be so resilient when faced with trauma, and why others can't handle it and seem to turn out badly. What Helen has done is to begin isolating and understanding the psychological and environmental factors that are at work as children struggle to overcome early problems and grow into healthy adults."
Going beyond studying
Although Reinherz describes her SLS working methods as"rigorously scientific," she has always insisted on "helping our subjects, wherever appropriate, along with studying them." In most cases,she says, the "help" was restricted to supplying psychologically struggling study members with the names and contact information for counselors who could help them deal with painful psychological problems resulting from family trauma. "From the very beginning," she explains, "we always insisted on observing the medical principle that says: 'First and above all, you must do no harm.'
"For me, that was an extremely important ethical issue. When we saw people struggling with emotional issues during our interviews, for example, we made sure to let them know that we could help them find the resources they needed to deal with their problems. Not to have done so would have been immoral, in my view, and that would have been absolutely unacceptable.
"We saw our share of tragedies, of course. Let's face it: some of these outcomes were going to end badly, and they did, and that was very painful to watch. On the other hand, I've always been amazed at the high percentage of kids from troubled families who went on to build healthy,successful lives for themselves. For me, these frequent success stories have been a continuing source of hope."
And the stories will continue. Reinherz has no plans to retire anytime soon. She still works five days a week on the study. "I love what I'm doing, and I still want to help kids as much as I ever did," says the investigator, with a cheerful laugh. "Why in the world would I ever want to quit?"
Freelance journalist Tom Nugent writes often about health and medical issues for newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. He is the author of Death at Buffalo Creek (W.W. Norton),a book about the public health impact of coal mining on Appalachia.
