The myth of normal, p.17
The Myth of Normal, page 17
“Socialization” may be a kinder approach than treating kids as inanimate putty, yet it still centers something other than their needs: namely, the dictates of the society for which the parents act as the well-meaning but unwitting agents. To see what else might be possible, it is instructive to look at cultures more time-tested and Nature-informed than our own. Such cultures needed no “parenting experts” because the wisdom was passed down generationally, whether by instruction or simple emulation. Contrast Dr. Spock’s counsel with what an elderly Cree woman once told me: “In our clan, children weren’t even allowed to touch the ground until they were two years old. They were in our arms all the time.” Or compare Peterson’s tips for managing “little monsters” with the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s description of traditional parenting practices among Netsilik Inuit in Canada’s Northwest Territories: “The Netsilik mother, even though she lives under the most difficult of conditions, is an unruffled personality who bestows warmth and loving care upon her children. She never chides her infant or interferes with it in any way, except to respond to its need.”[4] Somehow, it seems, these children managed to grow into productive and yes, socialized, members of their communities—even without Dr. Peterson’s stern admonishments.
It turns out that our innate parenting instinct is perfectly calibrated to ensure the provision of the thing many “experts” would have us ignore: the child’s developmental needs.
And here’s a plot twist: we are not talking only about children’s needs. In a real sense, we cannot even speak about the infant’s needs without considering those of the mother. “There is no such thing as a baby,” the British pediatrician D. W. Winnicott once said, explaining, “If you show me a baby, you certainly show me someone else who is caring for the baby . . . One sees a ‘nursing couple’ . . . The unit is not the individual, the unit is the individual-environment set-up.”[5] Or, in Ashley Montagu’s words, “When a baby is born, a mother is born. There is considerable evidence that at this time, and for months thereafter, her needs for contact exceed those of the infant.”[6] Good thing, too: Were there not built-in physiological and emotional incentives for the ones doing the caregiving, parenthood would be even more of a slog than it already is. Fewer babies would have their survival needs met if fulfilling those needs were not rewarding for parents. With its usual brilliance, our interpersonal-biological makeup dictates that our requirements be mutual. (One of the unfortunate impacts of our culture’s way of doing things is that stress tends to whittle down these innate rewards, making parenting more frustrating and daunting than it rightly ought to be.)
The poet Adrienne Rich expressed the profound joys of this reciprocal design: “I recall the times when, suckling each of my children, I saw his eyes open full to mine, and realized each of us was fastened to the other, not only by mouth and breast, but through our mutual gaze: the depth, calm, passion, of that dark blue, maturely focused look. I recall the physical pleasure of having my full breast suckled at a time when I had no other physical pleasure in the world except the guilt-ridden pleasure of addictive eating.”[7] Neurobiologically, Rich was right on target. On imaging studies, a baby’s smile will light up the same reward areas in the mom’s brain activated by junk foods or addictive drugs, releasing the same pleasure chemicals and triggering the same high.[8] Nature, that unscrupulous drug-pusher.[*]
Like all complex brain structures, mammalian bonding systems—whether of whales or chimps or rats or humans—are experience-dependent for their development and activation. For the brain circuits of nurturing to function—to “come on line,” as it were—the environment must evoke and then sustain them. Both men and women have latent child-nurturing circuits in their brains, “waiting for the right environment to amplify their potentials,” in the words of neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp—he of the PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY, and CARE nomenclature. Dr. Panksepp identified and mapped the specific brain centers, circuits, connections, and associated neurochemicals that choreograph what he called “the enchanting ballet of emotions between a mother and her infant.” These include chemical messengers such as vasopressin, oxytocin, and endorphins—the body’s natural opiates—all of which awaken in parents nurturing habits that are essential to the survival of the young. Recall, these are the chemicals that, blended, form a “love cocktail” released by natural labor. Skin-to-skin contact and suckling also elicit their flow in the mother. The physiology of infant and parent is thus co-regulated by their interactions, and the effect of these interactions—or their absence—can be imprinted in the young human for a lifetime. Likewise, in the dearth of such interactions, parenting instincts may become muted, with long-term consequences for the parent-child relationship.[9] In this, as in other crucial ways, our culture has become contact-starved.
Let’s remind ourselves that civilization, beginning with the Neolithic revolution and the advent of agriculture, is but a blip in the course of our species’ existence, no more than twelve thousand years out of the millions that hominins have trod the earth and the estimated two hundred thousand years or less since our own species arrived on the scene. Until then, and in many places until much more recently—even up to today, in a few isolated locations—people lived in small-band hunter-gatherer groups. “The common early experiences of our ancestors (and cousins, the small-band hunter-gatherers) provided a social commons for the development of human nature—the essence of being human,” writes Dr. Darcia Narvaez. (Italics hers.) The research she has surveyed identified seven early childrearing practices shared by hunter-gatherer groups, practices that constitute what she calls the “evolved nest.” As you read this list, I invite you to compare the experiences it includes with those of the average baby or toddler of our own time.
Amid the stresses generated by our culture, even educated middle-class parents are challenged to provide these needs—if they are even aware of them:
Soothing perinatal experience
Prompt responsiveness to the needs of the infant and prevention of distress
Extensive touch and constant physical presence, including touch with movement (carrying and holding)
Frequent, infant-initiated breastfeeding for two to five years, with four as the average weaning age
A community of multiple, warm, responsive adult caregivers
A climate of positive social support (for mother and infant)
Creative free play in Nature with multi-aged mates.[10]
“The nest,” Dr. Narvaez told me, “includes the mother relaxed and not stressed during pregnancy, gentle birth processes, soothing perinatal experiences, no separation of mom and baby, no infant circumcision,[*] no painful procedures, breastfeeding, and then affectionate touch constantly in the first year and throughout childhood and life, really.” Recall that it was Narvaez whose contention about human beings being species-atypical I quoted in chapter 8—the only beings on Earth who routinely thwart their own species’ inbuilt needs for healthy growth. “In our culture,” she said, “we have pretty much unnested our children. We are missing most of the components of what helps a baby grow into their full potential, their systems to develop properly. That’s the unnestedness.”
Among the Indigenous people who hosted her in the South American jungle, Jean Liedloff once observed an exception to tribal practices that proved a cardinal rule regarding parental discipline of children: “I saw a young father lose patience one day with his year-old son. He shouted and made some violent motion as I watched and may even have struck him. The baby screamed with deafening, unmistakable horror. The father stood chastened by the dreadful sound he had caused; it was clear that he had committed an offense against nature. I saw the family often, as I lived next door to them, but I never saw the man lose respect for his son’s dignity again.”[11]
The word “dignity” stands out: how many of us think of babies this way? And yet that omission may only underscore our blind spots when it comes to children. Think about it: even if you’ve never called an infant “dignified,” odds are you’ve met quite a few indignant ones. The word is not figurative, either. Even babies—perhaps they especially—know when their physical and emotional integrity is being ignored or violated. Liedloff’s anecdote comports with Dr. Narvaez’s findings about small-band hunter-gatherers and what has been generally observed about Indigenous cultures: by and large, these did not normalize hitting their kids, and still don’t. Landing on the shores of the “New World,” the European Christians steeped, or so they believed, in the gentle spirit of Jesus, found it appalling to witness that the “savages” of North America avoided the corporal punishment of children.[12] By contrast, the Puritan ethic was to “engage rod and reproof,” in the words of one seventeenth-century Massachusetts minister.[13]
This ethos may have fallen from favor since then, but not entirely. “To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory,” writes Jordan Peterson (italics his), assumes “that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment.”[14] The good professor’s “another person” is, in this case, a two-year-old, whom elsewhere he charmingly calls “the determined varmint.” For Peterson, steeped in behaviorist ideology, discipline is often a matter of intimidating children, something we can accomplish, he writes, because we are “larger, stronger and more capable than the child” and can, therefore, back up our threats. He proudly boasts, “[When] my daughter was little, I could paralyze her into immobility with an evil glance.” In Britain, two headlines in the Telegraph from 2011 and 2012, respectively, signaled that such attitudes are far from isolated: “The Rod Has Been Spared for Far Too Long: Allowing Teachers Even the Lightest Touch of Physical Force Will Improve Discipline” and “School Discipline: Sparing the Rod Has Spoiled the Children—What Can Be Done to Reverse the Collapse of Discipline Since the Banning of the Cane?”
Back in the world of science, the American Academy of Pediatrics, having reviewed nearly one hundred studies, issued a statement in 2018 that aligns with ancestral wisdom. It called for the end of spanking and of harsh verbal punishment of children and adolescents. Such treatment, the organization of sixty-seven thousand pediatric specialists pointed out, only increases aggression in the long term and undermines the development of self-control and responsibility. By elevating stress hormone levels, it may cause harm to healthy brain development and lead to mental health problems.[15] More recently, a Harvard study showed that the damage wrought by spanking to the child’s nervous system and psyche may be as severe as that caused by more intense violence.[16] The good news is that the tide is turning, with young parents less and less likely to employ corporal disciplining—a welcome instance, perhaps, of the future leading us back to the past.
For another example of the modern disconnection from instinct and body, take breastfeeding. According to massive surveys in North America and internationally, the practice confers physical health benefits on both the child and, in the long term, the mother.[17] As Dr. Lori Feldman-Winter, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the New Yorker, the economist Emily Oster, in devaluing the practice, simply gets the science wrong. “It’s basically as bad as the anti-vaxxers,” the physician said.[*]
Elsewhere, Oster writes that “motherhood can be lonely and isolating.” Too true—but those attributes pertain not to motherhood itself but to motherhood in an alienating culture. Horticulture on the moon would doubtless be a maddening endeavor, but that tells us nothing about gardening, only that certain conditions must be in place if we hope to succeed. At one point, Oster recounts an experience of attending her brother’s wedding, “trying to nurse my screaming daughter in a 100-degree closet.” It is hard to conceive of a more apt metaphor for the abnormally stressful conditions our culture imposes on infants and mothers than that closet: shamed or shunned into isolation, hidden away, claustrophobic, cramped, sweltering. Given how interpersonal neurobiology works, is it any wonder the infant is screaming? In a stressed environment, as I often witnessed in family practice, breastfeeding itself can become an onerous and frustrating chore, a source of maternal misery and infant distress.
The same goes for some forms of “sleep training.” The assumption that infants need to be trained to sleep is based on a cultural view that the child should adjust to the parents’ schedule and agenda—which, for working parents or for stressed parents lacking support, may be a legitimate, even unavoidable longing. But we should be clear on what is being lost. As the psychologist Gordon Neufeld points out, being in physical touch is the infant’s only way of connecting with the parent. Her “resistance” to being put down and having the parent follow the Spockian counsel to “say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back” is simply an expression of her essential need. Shutting down our response to a baby’s distress may also weaken our own parenting instincts, with consequences that long outlast the child’s infancy.
In 2006 I wrote a newspaper article titled “Why I No Longer Believe Babies Should Cry Themselves to Sleep,” pointing out that leaving small infants alone stresses their brains, with potential negative effects. It also hurts a mother’s heart. I quoted my late mother-in-law, Monica, who had a painful memory of being a young mom in the late 1940s and early ’50s and following medical counsel to ignore her infants’ cries. “It was torture for me to do it,” she told me. “It went against all my motherly emotions.” Some years later the paper’s website republished the piece, which was quickly shared over eighty thousand times, drawing many responses. One of them was priceless: “This article is nothing more than prefrontal lobe BS. There is no way an infant’s brain patterns are permanently psychologically damaged at such a young age. There is no way that your prefrontal cortex will permanently adopt patterns that will translate into adulthood. No way. If that would be the case, then the last 3 generations to rule this earth (boomers, pre-boomers, Generation X) would have all been emotionally unstable and plagued with psychological issues.” “Well, then,” I thought to myself, “I rest my case.”
Why Parental Stress Matters
Especially in infancy, but throughout childhood, the young human uses the emotional and nervous systems of the caring adults to regulate her own internal states. The interpersonal-biological math is elementary: the more stressed the adult, the more stressed the child.
Extensive research has demonstrated that when stressed, parents are less patient and more punishing and harsher with their young children. Stress impairs their capacity to be calm, responsive, and attuned. As a recent review by leading researchers pointed out, “In more stressful environments for parents, children not only experience less protection from environmental stressors but also are more likely to have stress-inducing relationships with caregivers.”[18] Another study showed that, while elevated stress induced more punitive attitudes in mothers, increased levels of support favorably diminished them. Contemporary science affirms ancient wisdom once more.
Parental stress expresses itself in less overt ways, too, such as distraction and emotional absence. Many parents, though loving, are frequently preoccupied by genuine concerns about relationship issues or economic troubles or personal problems and, as a result, just aren’t as attentive or “present.” This affects development as surely as does parental rage or coldness. “Primate experiments show that infants can undergo severe separation reactions even though their mothers are visually, but not psychologically available,” reports the renowned researcher, psychologist, and theorist Allan Schore.[19] Dr. Schore calls such noncontact “proximate separation”—so close, but yet so far. It’s a dynamic that many children in our society experience, owing to the stresses parents habitually endure. The message the child gets is “You are not worthy of my attention. You must work to earn it.” Whether or not we explicitly recall such experiences, their imprints survive in our unconscious and in our nervous systems.
Making matters more stressful is the alienation imposed by financial hardship. “The relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety,” the New York Times reported in 2018. “For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.”[20] The unintended impact of such fearful, status-driven child-rearing is that the child’s irreducible emotional needs fall secondary to the desperation of parents striving to ensure the academic and financial success of their offspring. Recently I was told, by a close eyewitness, of a middle-class mother yelling at her five-year-old son who balked at doing his homework: “You’re not thinking of your academic future!” the poor mom shouted at the preschooler. If only the youngster could have retorted, “Yeah? Well, you’re not thinking of my psycho-emotional future!”
For some two-parent families of a certain social class, having both parents working may be a choice. “I love my kids! They are amazing,” writes Oster. “But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. It isn’t that I like my job better—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the ‘marginal value’ of time with them declines fast . . . The first hour with my kids is great, but by the fourth, I’m ready for some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this nose-dive in marginal value—the highs are not as high, but the hour-to-hour satisfaction declines much more slowly.”[21] Oster is wise to value the quality of the hours she spends parenting over their mere number, and has every right to claim her choice, as we all do. For far too long women’s self-expression and validation through the fulfillment of meaningful work apart from homemaking were squelched and frustrated.
