Wombat hung his head, and hoped he wouldn’t cry.
Mem Fox, Wombat Divine, 1995.3
In Part One we focused on your state of mind regarding your own attachments and how very important it is that you are able to reflect usefully upon the big, deep relationships in your life. Those reflections, the support you have and the world around you create the frame in which your child develops. The focus was on you, the parent. From Part Two onwards we will focus on what happens within that frame, starting with the very small baby.
The work of attachment in these early weeks is largely invisible — the way it sinks through to our subconscious, alters our biochemistry and even the rhythms of our heart — but we see the impact most clearly in our baby’s self-regulation skills. Empathy, impulse control and the other self-regulation skills are things baby begins learning from the very beginning. And he learns all of them through his relationship with you.
Impulse control is the ability to stop yourself doing something. To return to the analogy in ‘About this book’, in the small aircraft you are learning to fly, it is impulse control that allows you to stop your automatic tendency to drive the plane as you would a car. It is an ability that is central to success in all kinds of ways.
Impulse control is what allows us to wrest our attention from one train of thought to another, to correct an action before it has even happened, to stop ourselves saying something that we should not. Life in many ways is a long series of decisions about whether to do something or not do something — impulse control is what gives us some measure of ability to stop an impulse, to think and, having thought, to choose a course of action.
The ability to ‘delay gratification’ fits neatly in here too. It is the ability to wait for something you want: impulse control by another name. Like the ability to ‘stop and think’, the ability to ‘delay gratification’ is a big player in success in adult life. But impulse control is not just important for your child in the future: the child with better impulse control is a happier child throughout childhood.
Do you want your child to divert his attention to something else after an emotional upset so he can calm down? It is impulse control that gives us the chance to put something out of our mind — so it makes a big contribution to emotional wellbeing and self-management. The child with poor impulse control becomes an attractive mark for bullies because he is easy to upset and slow to soothe, which is a big boost for the ego of the bully.
Impulse control also is central to problem solving. It is what stops us ‘jumping to conclusions’ or getting distracted by unprofitable bypaths. It is strong impulse control that helps keep a child fixed upon his goals.4
Both the attachment and neurological research agree that good impulse control in children correlates with a secure, organised attachment.5 To understand how that happens, we need to understand just how babies learn.
A newborn baby can do some extraordinary things. Even though his eyes aren’t yet working terribly well, a 12-hour-old baby can pick out which of two dummies he’s sucked just by looking at it.6 How is this possible? How can a baby link up information coming in from one sense with information coming in from another with such a very minute amount of life experience? It is scarcely credible — unless, of course, our brains have some kind of ‘touchstone’ that they can use to interpret the just-met world, and some kind of ‘language’ by which different parts of the brain communicate their findings.
I guess the underlying question is this: How do babies start making sense of the world around them so fast?
In fact, we are born with just such a ‘touchstone’ and language. The touchstone that we are born with is called the amygdala. And the language that the brain/body of the newborn speaks to itself is with us for life — it is the language of emotions.
Of baby’s senses, balance and hearing are very developed; and touch (including pain), smell and taste are mostly developed.7 All of that information is routed through the amygdala. And what the amygdala does then is transform it into emotion, and that emotion is transported around his body and brain by hormones or ‘neurotransmitters’. In the case of the dummy, one is spiky and the other is smooth: one looks and feels ‘pleasant’ and the other does not.
But it’s rather a rough-and-ready system at this stage. In your brain the ‘black and white’ or ‘all or nothing’ thinking that afflicts adults when we’re stressed comes straight from the amygdala. But we have higher brain regions that work to refine and gentle those impulses. Even so, when we are very emotional we sometimes need to talk to a friend and borrow their ‘higher brain centres’ to help ourselves calm down enough to be able to reach our own.
Your baby doesn’t have those higher regions available yet. He just has you. He cannot refine and gentle the impulses from his amygdala himself. That is your job for quite some months to come, and it is a vitally important one. The first thing your baby needs to learn is that you can settle him.
So if baby is feeling uncomfortable because of a dirty nappy, or lonely and frightened, or hungry, the amygdala uses that emotion to unleash a wave of response. Baby cries for help. Adrenalin and cortisol flood the little body. Baby’s heart rate becomes more reactive, his breathing uneven. His tummy will feel yucky as his gut is stilled. The world suddenly seems bright and sharper and more intrusive. It is easy for us to empathise because this is how stress affects adults too and we know it as the flight-or-fight response.8
And, just like us, babies can’t separate out the emotion from what is happening in their bodies: they are simultaneous and felt together. And, what’s worse, emotion and sensation compound each other in a positive feedback loop, like the ever-increasing screeeech that comes from the speaker when the microphone is too close. The experience of the emotions increases the unpleasant sensations, which increase the unpleasant emotion … and so on.
The faster you get to him the better. In those times when the brain is swamped by stress there is no neural growth. Leave him long enough and neural connections made will be burnt away by catecholamines, one of the neurotransmitters that rides under the black banner with cortisol.9 A newborn who is only very rarely comforted (and the latest research is showing that neglect is every bit as damaging as abuse) will find it very hard to grow those higher brain connections, which give him access not just to the upper regions of his own mind but to the minds of others, from where life gains much of its meaning and wealth.
But there is a value to those dark times for your newborn, if they are kept as brief as possible. He calls for help and you are there directly. Perhaps he has only made a fussing noise, but you are there. And because you have come he is able to move on from his state of despair. He has communicated his distress and you are closing the loop by doing something about it.
Parents’ sleep versus baby’s needs
In reading this you may well be thinking, ‘So what about “controlled crying”? Does leaving baby to cry at night do damage?’ In fact, once you start thinking about sleeping decisions you then come to a great many other interconnected issues, such as temperament, other siblings, baby’s health, breastfeeding, dummies, birth, parents’ mental health, work and life balance … So complex and individual are these links that only a parent can trace out and balance the full implications of a decision made in one sphere for another. Well-informed parents can be the only arbiter of such decisions for their baby.
In making this decision, though, you need to bear in mind a baby’s need for consistency. Once babies are about seven months old they begin to worry that you will go and never come back. This is separation anxiety, and it must be the nastiest feeling in the world. That beloved face and smell and feel that makes him feel better than anything else can do: knowing where it is and when he will see it again is his whole sense of security. When your child resists being ‘put down’ to sleep anytime from seven months on, do start wondering if he is worried that you won’t come back.
A kind and consistent set of rules so baby can predict just where you are and when you will come is required. It is the hardest thing in the world, to be consistent, but so important. Inconsistent parenting creates an insecure attachment — a baby who must ‘up’ his signals of neediness so that you come. It is not a path you want to take.
Does it matter if you can’t stop your baby fussing or crying straightaway? What if you change his nappy and he still cries? Then you check to see if he wants a top-up feed, but he doesn’t. And then you think that he might like to be rocked on your shoulder, but that’s not it either. Do the many attempts you’ve made before solving the problem somehow damage your baby? No. In fact, mothers get it wrong 60 per cent of the time.
Don’t be distressed by this. ‘Getting it wrong’ some of the time is just as valuable to your baby as when you get it right first time around. From being on the other end of your care your baby is learning that people won’t always understand you straightaway. You have to keep trying to ‘repair’ the misunderstanding and eventually you will be able to ‘reconnect’ with the other person. In our relationships as adults we see this same pattern of rupture, reconnection and repair.
And because you come as soon as he calls, he’ll soon learn to anticipate your arrival. He will be able to call, and wait, knowing that you will come. He has put a moment between the urgency of his feeling and his behaviour. This is the beginning of impulse control. Your baby is growing that moment in which he can say to himself, ‘Wait a moment.’ This waited moment grows into ‘impulse control’. Research from both the temperament and the attachment research shows that impulse control is positively correlated with warm, sensitive parenting.5 Studies also show a clear link between time spent ‘delighting’ in your baby and your baby’s ability to delay gratification as a toddler.10 The researchers have not traced out exactly why, but it seems likely that being taught to wait — which lies at the heart of delayed gratification — is something we teach by ‘waiting’ for a response from our baby to our own actions. It is the give and take of ‘delighting in’ that sows the seeds of waiting. When you play with your baby — perhaps making a funny noise that always amuses him and looking hopefully for the pay-off of his belly-deep ‘ha ha’ — you are demonstrating waiting.
In baby’s brain various circuits are being switched ‘on’ or ‘off’ depending on his experiences. When he experiences the joy of reconnecting with you after his despair, the resulting surges in the ‘good’ neurotransmitters in his brain switch on the circuits that will help him stay calm in times of difficulty for the rest of his life.11
If that sounds to you like baby should be getting easier and easier to manage the more he is responded to, you’d be right. But not in the first six weeks. Those weeks are simply not easy at all, because during this time babies all around the world hit a crying peak at six weeks. Afterwards baby will cry less, and just how much less depends partly on temperament and partly on parenting style. In general, western culture babies cry for longer than those from other cultures, not more frequently, but for a longer time once they have started.12 The reason for the shorter duration of crying in other cultures is that the first response mothers make to their crying baby is to offer the breast.
We will revisit impulse control later in the book — how to build it in older children, and also in regards to attention deficit disorders, where a lack of impulse control is a core deficit. But now we are going to turn our attention to the baby who doesn’t easily calm down when comforted: the colicky or fussy baby.
I became particularly interested in researching colic when my friend Katie was struggling to deal with a difficult-to-soothe baby. Alexis was Katie’s seventh baby, and, while she looked exactly like her beautiful siblings, on the inside she was evidently quite different. She fitted exactly into the description of the typical colicky baby. A colicky baby is, generally speaking, growing well and larger than the average baby but all of a sudden begins to cry as per the ‘rule of three’: three hours of crying, about three times a week, for more than three weeks.
What is so horrible for parents is that the colicky baby cries inconsolably. There you are, trying to ‘close the loop’ with your warm and responsive parenting, but your love and care just do not seem to get through during a bout of colic. As a parent of such a baby you may find yourself wondering at how such traits have remained in the human genome to the present day. ‘Whose little bundle of joy are you meant to be?’ remarked my exhausted father to me at two o’clock one morning. (Perhaps I was also so interested in colic because I was a very colicky baby too.)
Doctors exclude for such things as an allergy to milk protein, constipation, infection, reflux or a sore neck, and, lacking all of those, a baby is diagnosed with colic. So what is colic? And did Alexis have it?
Current research seems to be going in circles. After years of researchers saying ‘it’s not gas’, a 2005 study found an association between colic and later problems with allergies and gastrointestinal issues.13 After initially repudiating the psychosocial status of mothers as part of the cause, one very large study showed that a demanding work situation predisposes women to having babies with colic.14 Another study suggested that maternal depression may cause colic.15 There is also an indication in research that looks at the interface between environments and temperament that a hard to soothe temperament develops in babies when their mothers have an iron deficiency.16
I found one 2007 article drawing together all the different strands of medical thinking on colic. Despite the medical standpoint of colic being a ‘diagnosis of exclusion’ (in other words, there is no detectable medical cause) you’ll notice that this article still has a focus on treatment. Here is the list from the article:
colicky babies are often hungrier than other babies
colicky babies also show ‘disorganised’ feeding behaviours, and this is linked to difficulties self-regulating later on
stick to breastfeeding baby rather than putting him on formula, but do drop all dairy products yourself. You might also like to remove eggs, wheat and nuts
probiotics for baby and Mum seem to help colicky breastfed babies, which indicates there is indeed a problem with ‘wind’ caused by an imbalance of gut flora
there are both medications and herbs that can help, but some medications and herbs can also be dangerous
gripe water has been shown to be of no assistance
some studies have shown that relationship problems between parent and child are part of the picture, and other studies have shown that they are not.17
This didn’t help Katie much as Alexis was breastfed, on probiotics and Katie herself had given up dairy. So things were better, but not easy. Katie certainly related to the iron deficiency, the demanding work situation and the hungrier baby — but none of this was knowledge that was particularly useful to her right then.
Katie was much more interested in the research which places colicky babies on one end of the temperament spectrum. The children who find it hardest to self-soothe initially are the babies who are described as ‘high reactives’. They are not exactly the same as the ‘difficult’ child, typically described as slow to adapt to changes, easily and often distressed, intensely emotional and also unpredictable in terms of biological rhythms. But there is a great deal of crossover there: easily upset and intensely emotional are features of the highly reactive child.
Plus there is a neurological basis for that emotionality and reactivity. Highly reactive children have a more responsive amygdala.18 Because of the extra responsivity in their amygdala they startle more frequently and grow up to be more sensitive to the world around them.19 Highly reactive babies are frequently ‘colicky’, with a pattern of early starting colic, within the first two weeks.
Being more upset by sensory stimuli is also the central diagnostic of the ‘sensorily defensive’ child (see Appendix IV), and it is likely that these children are one and the same group. The ‘highly sensitive’ child identified by Elaine Aron in her work on sensitive people is perhaps also the same group again.20 Sensory defensiveness and intense emotionality are features of her diagnostic criteria also. In addition, children with autism spectrum disorders display some of these behaviours; as do some, but not all, gifted and creative children. This same group has been renamed just recently after a new characteristic was identified. These highly reactive or highly sensitive children have been followed in long-term studies and a new pattern has emerged.
When these children are parented well (that is, with a secure and organised attachment) they outperform their other well-parented peers, but when they are poorly parented (a disorganised or insecure attachment) they perform less well than their poorly parented peers.21,22 These children are now called ‘highly susceptible’ because they are the children for whom parenting makes the most difference. They are currently one of the ‘hot spots’ in child development research. Perhaps the very susceptible children are so fascinating to researchers because they amplify what happens between mother and child?
When the highly susceptible child has a parent with an insecure or disorganised parenting pattern, he becomes ever more challenging and demanding, stressing out a mother who is already not coping. The poor mother, doing her best though she is, parents far worse under these circumstances, and it shows in a child who performs worse than other children who are poorly parented. The mismatch widens over time. It’s a ‘positive’ feedback loop where the worse the parenting, the worse the behaviour, so the worse the parenting.
But put one of these highly reactive children into the hands of a parent with the capacity to create a secure attachment and the very opposite occurs. The sensitive parent responds to the challenge of the very difficult child by providing an environment that is a very good match for his needs. So close is the fit that this baby spends far more time learning than the average child. It’s another positive feedback loop but one where the outcomes are actually positive.
Colic throws a spotlight on the relationship between parent and child. The central question is: How do parents interpret their baby’s cries? If they believe baby is crying to manipulate them, and the crying does not cease despite their efforts, then their parenting becomes less and less sensitive. They believe their baby could help it if he would only try: a thought process that leads straight to anger and perhaps to hurting the baby. Less sensitive parenting leads straight to toddlers and older children who cry more in general. Less sensitive parenting of the susceptible child results in a child with worse outcomes than occurs in their less susceptible peers.
When parents interpret their child’s cries as ‘distress calls’ (as Katie does with Alexis) then the relationship unfolds very differently. When parents believe that baby can’t help it, and that their role is simply to be there and endure it with the baby, they parent far more sensitively. With the highly susceptible child this leads to better outcomes across the board than for other sensitively parented children.
In fact, common wisdom holds both that ‘the colicky baby is brighter than average and will be talking sooner’ and that ‘colic is just the start of the trouble’. The research on highly susceptible children suggests that both of these statements are true, and it is parenting that determines just which pathway a baby will take.
So the message is clear. Even though it feels as if your caring is not getting through to your baby, those longitudinal studies make it very clear that it is. It may take some time to show, but it is likely to be your colicky, difficult baby who gets the most out of your parenting. When you respond fully to those difficult behaviours, and persist in trying to soothe an apparently inconsolable baby, the pay-off down the track will be a child with strong self-regulation skills.
So how is Alexis now? The statement about ‘later problems with allergies and gastrointestinal issues’ seems to have been prophetic in her case. Katie is still working hard to find out the right things for her little girl to eat and continuing to breastfeed Alexis into her second year. And Alexis, outside the times when her tummy hurts her quite dreadfully, is a happy, affectionate little girl and spot-on developmentally. I have watched her sit and play patiently with a nesting toy — quite a test of a baby’s impulse control — and try and try again to fit it back together. This is very typical behaviour of securely attached colicky babies in general. Somehow all that time spent screaming doesn’t delay development when the attachment is secure.
Katie begs readers with colicky babies to trust their mother’s instinct. Even if you are told it is ‘just colic’ and to wait it out — as she was — and you feel that there is something else, then trust that feeling. It can be difficult to get someone to listen, even if this is your seventh child and you can be expected to know what you are talking about, and Katie eventually said to her paediatrician, ‘I’m not leaving your office until you run some tests.’ The tests have now been run and action beyond the ‘wait it out’ advice is now under way.
Tips for sensitively parenting your colicky baby
The most useful writer on colic for parents who wish to sensitively parent their colicky child is Dr Sears. He also suggests that colic sits on the temperament continuum as part of the overall ‘high needs’ and ‘sensorily defensive’ child (in a book that was written before the theory of the highly susceptible child was developed). If you have a baby with colic he offers the following tips:
Evening is often when baby, utterly exhausted by reigning in his unusually emotional temperament, suddenly loses it. So prepare for that time. Have dinner cooked long before dinnertime. Instead of preparing food in the late afternoon, lie down at that time and nurse baby off to sleep.
Keep baby in a sling (not a carrier) much of the time, even when he is not asleep.
Find a movement pattern that helps baby relax. Usually this is a rocking dance accompanied by humming.
Bear in mind that this little person has a much greater chance of becoming a more sensitive person, so get a head start on helping him cope with the world by providing ‘more’ in this very sensitive period: more touch, more help to deal with surprises, more help in transitions like going to bed or having a bath.
‘Putting them down’ to sleep never works with these children, says Dr Sears. The ‘parenting to sleep’ approach is required for these children who have more difficulty self-soothing.23 Waltz around the house with baby in a sling until he is heavily asleep, nestle down next to him, and keep him near you at night.