Envy or Jealousy Can Start Young

A first-born grandchild holds a place of honor. My nephew Sam is that boy: the Crown Prince of the family. When he was born, the family reeled in amazement. Here was this baby, cute, adorable, holding the promise of the entire clan in his little infant hands.

He was immediately loved and cherished, perhaps even exalted. His parents proudly showed him off, his aunts and uncles gently held him, their arms and hands trembling under the slight baby weight of their new nephew.

Having a baby was new territory for all of us. Sam was the focus of every Christmas. His birthday was like a regal coronation event, surrounded by presents and dignitaries, family friends who may not have been as overtly impressed as we were.

One uncle, in particular, became his loyal admirer, taking his little nephew to parks and museums, to the beach or bowling, eager to relive his own childhood and dazzle his nephew with all the magic the world has to offer. A kind of friendly competition grew among the aunts and uncles for Sam’s affection, but there was always a clear winner. Sam was the center of the family.

And then came my first-born. A girl. Sam was 5 years old.

At first, the entrance of a new baby was easily overlooked. In part, this was due to geography. Sam lived in Massachusetts while Sophie, my eldest, was born in Cincinnati. Visits back home were uneventful as Sophie, although totally charming in her own right, was confined to a crib or attached to me or her mom. All the milestones of crawling, walking, and talking happened away from the family nucleus of the grandparent’s home and away from Sam.

But things were about to change.

I was to start my internship in psychiatry at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut in July. But my wife Carol and I did not have a place to live in that area until September. Her parents generously offered to have Carol and our now two kids live with them for the summer while I worked in Connecticut. By this time, Sophie was 2 and a remarkably verbal and intelligent little girl.

Sophie would play with her grandmother and grandpa. And while her mother recovered from a difficult delivery, her uncle, Sam’s uncle, took her swimming in the family pool every day. The aunts and uncles became enamored of her sweetness, her curiosity, and her quick and sharp mind.

She would sing nursery rhymes, recite little poems, and was starting to make up jokes. One time, she took a sip of tea and then pretended to wipe her mouth on the sleeve of my shirt. “Tea shirt, daddy!” she said. The family laughed hard at her joke and creativity.

Not Sam. Sam, the Crown Prince, tolerated this new and all-too-mobile little human, but was not quick to concede his alpha position.

Sophie's second birthday was about to be celebrated, and the family had gathered with presents and cake and balloons and streamers and party hats and had decorated her little chair with all of the same. We were all busy getting the party ready when we heard the blistering, sharp cry of a toddler in distress.

Mobilizing instantly, a half dozen adults oriented to the danger and moved as one to find Sophie sitting on the ground by her chair, crying. Her toddler's brain had spatially misjudged the distance between her little bum and the welcoming seat of her decorated chair. She sat in front of it, balloons around her, streamers of red and blue and yellow now slightly torn by the featherweight of her 2-year-old body. Sophie in tears, startled, astonished, perhaps even a little embarrassed, her back a-lean against the front part of the chair.

We picked her up and hugged her, comforting her, drying her tears, and progressed with the birthday. Rapidly responding to the warmth and comfort, she settled and took her place like a Queen on the Royal Throne of the Birthday Girl.

Seventeen years later, the family had gathered to go camping. Around the campfire, the flames creating a mischief of shadows on our faces, Sam spoke. He spoke of the torment he had been feeling for almost two decades. He looked over at Sophie, his voice soft and sincere. With a deep sigh, he revealed his secret and apologized.

Sam had been at Sophie’s 2-year-old birthday, a proud and usurped now-7-year-old. Aflow with the jealousy that comes when a prince has been dethroned, he had waited for his moment. And then it came. Sophie was going to the birthday chair.

He spoke in a somber cadence of how he had seen her move, had timed his approach with stealth and grim intent, had waited for her back to make him invisible to her, her body bending as it went to sit, and how, in one glorious and incredibly well-timed, seamless motion, he pulled it out and just kept walking. How he delighted in hearing the thud of his rival on the floor, of her wails and cries, and his triumph as she sat on the ground bereft.

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Sam apologized.

The brain on envy

By the age of 4 months, a baby begins to compare bits of information. The infant cries when she sees a stranger’s face because it’s different than the mother’s. When it comes to envy, the same mechanism is at play. We compare bits of information about others to ourselves, and when we feel that we do not compare well, it makes us unhappy and often angry.

It is only in this comparison that we can experience envy. This is an important observation. We feel at a disadvantage, which leads us to feel threatened, and then we have to either run away for safety or attack in anger.

But what is remarkable is that we are actually more in control of envy than we give ourselves credit for. Sometimes we spend so much time being envious of what other people have that we overlook what we actually do have. This tendency to compare has always been with us, but it can be exacerbated by the use of social media. Young people, in particular, spend hours putting up photos of themselves having fun with friends, honing their pages so that they appear cooler, often hiding real feelings and events going on in their lives. Less-secure kids then compare themselves to the mostly fictional pages and wind up feeling badly about themselves and spiteful towards others.

While humans have cooperated to the extent that the species has more than survived, we still—on a deep, limbic brain level—are at risk of rarely feeling satisfied or full up. This is a brutal reality about how we have evolved as human beings. Perhaps one of the obvious reasons why envy developed stems from our ancestors’ early days when the acquisition of resources—mainly food—may have meant the difference between life or death. One would have noticed when another had more of something.

If you had something I wanted or needed that put you at a survival advantage over me, I might try to take it from you. But if you are already at an advantage, I probably wouldn’t be able to just step in and take it. You might be stronger, smarter, perhaps more overtly resourceful. I would have to be covertly resourceful and plan my actions for the future.

This planning is a PFC (pre-frontal cortex) function. Envy filtered through the PFC meant being able to assess a situation and plan a response, which in turn enhanced our survival potential. It is a lot more effective than being impulsive.

As kids, we are taught to look both ways before crossing a street: an exercise in assessing the relative danger of our surroundings, making a plan based on that assessment, and anticipating the outcome. Only then do we actually take the action of crossing the street. Kids need to be taught these basic survival tools because the child and the adolescent brain is an impulsive brain, with a relatively immature PFC compared to the limbic system, which is the brain base location of impulsivity. Even as this limbic system may harbor the emotion of envy, it depends on the PFC to elaborate and execute the plan to level the playing field or, better, to switch the level completely so you are now the one being envied.

The two types of envy, benign and malicious, both push a person to either strive for personal success in a healthy competition or strive to bring the other person down in unhealthy aggression that can lead to war. From an evolutionary perspective, envy is yet another means for survival, to get more resources, relationships, or residence, and therefore not only have more, but at the same time deprive the other of those same attributes.

Sam was old enough to feel that envy towards his cousin and planned his response. But as he grew older and reflected, he recognized how his anger, his envy, had done harm. There is nothing wrong with anger: It's what you do with it that matters.

We have evolved a part of our brain, our PFC, to harness those impulses and think it through: What will happen next if I do this now? Sam's young brain was only beginning to develop that ability. But his older brain did not want a future of more guilt.