And Still We Wait
As time went on, and the months and years came and went, he was never without friends. Fern did not come regularly to the barn any more. She was growing up, and was careful to avoid childish things, like sitting on a milk stool near a pigpen. But Charlotte’s children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, year after year, lived in the doorway. Each spring there were new little spiders hatching out to take the place of the old. Most of them sailed away, on their balloons. But always two or three stayed and set up housekeeping in the doorway.
Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web. Life in the barn was very good—night and day, winter and summer, spring and fall, dull days and bright days. It was the best place to be, thought Wilbur, this warm delicious cellar, with the garrulous geese, the changing seasons, the heat of the sun, the passage of swallows, the nearness of rats, the sameness of sheep, the love of spiders, the smell of manure, and the glory of everything.
—E. B. WHITE,
Charlotte’s Web
ALL IS SILENT
Nothing but blackness, cold and silent
Assaulting my senses tonight
Except a single lonely star
So tiny, yet so bright.
Like springtime raindrops, tears fall down
Rolling warm upon my face
They fall, turn to ice, and shatter
A prickly design as intricate as lace.
A scream of vengeance rapes the night
Chilling cries of agony and pain
Blaming me for all that’s happened to him
Time and time again.
Nothing but blackness, cold and silent
Assaulting my senses tonight
Except a single lonely star
So tiny, yet so bright.
Drenched in perspiration
Drowning in my fears
Choking on my words
And wiping at my tears.
“Hello? Come back, don’t leave!
There’s much I need to say!
I’ll never get to say it
If you forever go away.”
I speak back to the night
“Forgive me, I’m sorry I was violent.”
Waiting for his voice again
Yet tonight all is silent.
—JEFFREY, FEBRUARY 1997
I can’t believe he’s there. I try not to think that he’s there. When he calls me, I try to think that he’s at home somewhere or somewhere else. That’s what I try to think because there’s no explanation for him to be there. Because I know how my little brother—that kid would give you the shirt off his back. I remember times walking home from school and it’d be freezing snow, stuff coming down. Just horrible. Stuff nobody would take their coats off in and he’d take his coat off and give it to my little sister. And, if I was cold, he’d take his shirt off and give it to me. You can’t tell me that’s a killer. You can’t tell me. And there is no way that anybody in this world will ever convince me. Ever. And I know my little brother better than anybody else out there. I slept with this kid for fourteen years of my life. I slept with him in the same bed. We talked about things at night. There was nothing that we didn’t talk about. We knew every—each other inside and out. . . . I mean, I don’t think that he really knew what he was doing or that he was even there. It must’ve been like a dream to him. I’ve tried to put myself in his situation. I’ve tried to put myself there. ’Cause he’s told me the story of what happened, and I’m putting myself in his shoes, where he’s going, and he couldn’t have been there.
—JOHN, AUGUST 1996
From the waters of the womb, to the arms of the caregivers, to the walls of the family home, when the shelters in which we harbor our children are inadequate or destructive, the final shelter our society provides will often be the cement walls of a prison cell. The course of this journey begins with the brain, which is shaping itself in response to the environment from long before birth. Graphic-imaging techniques for exploring the frontier encased in our skulls have provided incontrovertible evidence of that which ancient wisdom has told us for centuries: The baby is the father of the man.
This understanding is at the core of a quiet revolution, a revolution as profound as the industrial and technological revolutions that have paved the way. We are now able to turn this advanced technology back on ourselves to further illumine the most complex system of all, that which lies between our ears. The revolution currently taking place is our species’ own understanding of ourselves. The baby emerges as the genesis of this understanding.
The strength and the vulnerability of the human brain lie in its ability to shape itself to enable a particular human being to survive its particular environment. Our experiences, especially our earliest experiences, become biologically rooted in our brain structure and chemistry from the time of our gestation and most profoundly in the first months of life. This knowledge, corroborated by converging lines of research from diverse fields, is nothing short of a revolution in our thinking about brain development, about behavior, and about babies. When we begin to understand that what is happening to us emotionally, socially, and intellectually in our environments is actually being reflected in our physical organism through the brain, we begin to look at many things differently: disease, therapy, education, television, and—most fundamentally—the experiences we allow our children to absorb from the beginning.
Our challenge is to move this information into the cultural mainstream, to create a critical mass of people who know and who care—who will over time enable this information to move from understanding to practice. We are a long way from that goal. Prevention, as opposed to the late-stage treatment of violent behavior, or of any problem, is a difficult concept to sell. In an article called “Treating Violence as an Epidemic,” Jane Stevens reflects:
In fact, resistance to public-health initiatives dates from 1854, when British physician John Snow tried to convince London residents that they could avoid cholera by drinking clean water. During that summer, one of the hottest on record, Snow tramped through the city’s steamy, fetid streets to tally some of the hundreds of daily deaths resulting from the devastating plague, and to take copious notes on the habits, homes and recent travels of the dying. After months of work, he noticed that outbreaks were clustered in areas supplied by a certain water company.
In those days, several companies distributed water in London, some through pipes to homes or to wells from which neighborhoods drew their water. By tracking the water from a well at the Broad Street pump, Snow discovered that people who drank water from it were dying. Still, officials refused to believe his theory that cholera was spread by water. The medical community proposed that bad air or dust spread the disease, but most people believed cholera was something that infected people who were poor and led unkempt lives. More church was the answer.
Snow knew he was right and watched in frustration as people continued to die. One day, out of sheer desperation, he ripped the handle off the Broad Street pump. The effect was nearly immediate. Fewer people in that part of London came down with cholera. Snow, never credited while alive for his work associating the disease with its risk factors, is generally regarded as the father of epidemiology. Today, in the world of public health, “ripping the handle off the Broad Street pump” has become the metaphor for taking action.1
When it comes to preventing violence in our nation, there are significant barriers to “ripping the handle off the Broad Street pump.” The most profound of these may be deeply personal. In order to wrap one’s mind around the reality of the negative, often appalling conditions affecting increasing numbers of children, we face at least three potential obstacles. The first of these may be grief, anger, or sadness from personal childhood experiences: the feelings evoked of our own pain as children, especially if we have been neglected, abused, or experienced losses very early. It may be hard to put ourselves in a position where we open old wounds and reexperience the pain of early trauma. Many of us will immediately recoil at mention of the topic; others of us, upon further exploration, may choose to distance ourselves or insulate ourselves because it hurts too much to continue.
A second obstacle, related to but not the same as the first, is grief or sadness, not at our own childhood memories, but at those we have created for our own children, most often out of ignorance or lack of opportunity. Steeping oneself in the research summarized in this book holds up a mirror to many of us that produces pain and regret. Who we may have been—or are—for our own children almost always falls short of our hopes and illusions; recognition of ourselves in this material is painful whether as a parent or a child.
A third barrier to acting on this information is to feel overwhelmed by the depth and breadth of the problem. The complexity of underlying factors together with the realization of how many children are affected results in many of us feeling there is too little we can do to make a difference. These feelings are discomforting, and we think that the only way we can protect ourselves from despair is to turn away. For many of us this may work; we read, we become uncomfortable, we choose to distract ourselves and forget. But for those unable to forget, there are other courses of action that may actually help to heal a source of old pain—and that may replace a sense of impotence with great satisfaction.
Researchers and popular advocates are themselves frustrated by the chasm that exists between what they know and what they are able to make happen. However, many are encouraged by the shift of major corporations toward more “family-centered” policies such as flexible time and on-site child care. Nonetheless, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a veteran of federal and state wars waged against the passage of early preventive practices, said there are three major biases that stand in the way of Americans supporting family-centered legislation:
One bias is that families ought to be self-sufficient and, if they’re not, they’d better pay a price for it. Another is that women ought to be home with their kids and, if they are not, why everybody’s going to suffer, and the third bias is that we don’t like failure or lack of success so we’re not really going to back up people who aren’t successful. These biases operate because they’re unconscious. If they are brought up to the surface, then I don’t think people would stand for them.2
Dr. Penelope Leach wrote a courageous book, Children First, which calls for the reformation of social policies to support what we know about children’s developmental needs. She was concerned about our inability to shift our thinking about children from a historical model, which assumes that most children are surrounded by intact families and extended family support, to a recognition that a growing percentage have neither.
We still have a sense that children belong to parents. That what happens to children is only parents’ business. It’s very easy to get people whipped up about intervention—by the authorities, by the state—when a child dies. Certainly by social services or whatever. With much of this I’m in sympathy, don’t get me wrong. But I do think one of the big changes is that parents, particularly women on their own, are more without support than they have ever been in this journey of maternity. And we are counting children as the private business of institutions that in many cases simply don’t exist. In a way, it’s a kind of nostalgia which keeps exercising us, which says that this is the way it ought to be. Only this is the way it isn’t.
We are living at the first time and place in history when having a child is actually a disadvantage. . . . Children don’t just cost parents money. It isn’t just that parents have to work the same hours and earn the same money as everyone else, but they also have to spread that time and money over extra people. It’s also that it costs parents most of the values that this society holds. Children cost us independence. They cost us gender equality, because that begins to crumble when there is a child on the way. It costs us sexual freedom, because who can keep that going while raising a family. Having a child runs contrary to pretty well everything that people value in our society.
What we have to do is make this vital job not so reliant on kids being an emotional payback. It’s our job to nurture them, not the other way around. Parenting is so difficult that children have to bring tremendous emotional rewards for the whole parenting business to balance out. I think that’s one of the difficulties. We have very small families, very often single children. And it’s up to those children to kind of pay their parents back for all these lost opportunities. . . . We really are asking for something that is close to impossible of today’s parents. So no wonder we’re getting some pretty close to impossible children coming out of it.3
Without exception, experts who are leading the charge for policy change speak of the lag between economic changes and our child care practices. Matthew Melmed, executive director of Zero to Three, which links and trains professionals in earliest development, says that it is hard for us to understand this from the perspective of babies:
The whole world has changed around us in terms of workforce requirements, mothers and fathers in the workforce, divorce, and family makeup. The whole sort of social and economic fabric has changed dramatically in the last thirty to forty years. But the needs of babies haven’t.4
According to some, fundamental cultural values may underlie this lag. Dr. Gerald Patterson, the founder of Oregon’s Social Learning Center, had an interesting perspective:
It seems to me that in the last decade or two our society has been shifting in very small steps so that it’s difficult to label a trajectory. Less and less emphasis is on being good parents and a greater and greater emphasis is on being consumers. I don’t mean our society is doing that in any blatant sense. It’s very subtly done and it’s not the outcome of a conspiracy, of course. It’s just economic machinery moving on kind of an international scale in such a way to keep your family going. One person working really isn’t enough. Both parents have to work. Otherwise, you’re going to be downwardly mobile, so you’re not living as well as your parents did.
And the effect of both parents working is that there’s more and more large chunks of time for adolescents in our society when they’re not under adult supervision. The supervision or the mechanisms that are running those situations are driven by other kids. A lot of the contacts that kids are having as adolescents include contacts with adolescents who are mildly out of control. And some of them not so mildly. The new studies in sociology are showing that the amount of unsupervised time correlates very nicely with how delinquent our kids are. What I’m saying is that economic forces of our society have been moving for some time now so that parents are giving up more and more of their investment in supervising their own kids.5
Dr. Charles Golden, a psychologist at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, agrees with Patterson:
We let children free. It used to be that if you were a child or an adolescent, you were watched by other people. There were others around either in the community or in the home or extended family that watched the child so that the child had chances to do things, but not make really big mistakes. But as our society has become more mobile, as we’ve moved away from the extended family—my mother, for instance, lives in California three thousand miles away. She can’t look at my children. She can’t be there to help them. Thirty percent of the people who live here move out every year. So you don’t know who’s around.6
Children left “free” to their own supervision as adolescents too often began as babies whose lives started the same way. Dr. Kathryn Barnard, founder and director of the University of Washington Center on Infant Mental Health and Development, points to the fact that this “freedom” characterizes many young lives long before they begin:
We have to look at the staggering statistics. I think something like 40 percent of babies in our country are unintended, and a great many of these are unwanted. And if you look at a high-risk group like poverty, it jumps to 60 percent to 70 percent of the babies being unintended. As Americans, our society was founded on principles of religious freedom. And we are very much aligned with the idea that freedom and independence are important. But we carry this to the extent that we feel strongly about families and parents having the right to treat or parent their child any way they wish.
I think we have reached the limit of how free and independent we can be. To be responsible citizens we have to understand that how people raise their children is not just a matter for that family but for all of society—and we have to accept some responsibility as a society for how children are raised. We have to deal with this resistance that we have, that children are only the responsibility of their parents, period. And we have to ask communities and individuals in communities to accept the collective need that exists to support parents in their caregiving.7
In sizing up the effects of our current cultural attitudes concerning our youngest citizens, Dr. Craig Ramey, founder of the Abecedarian project, says:
We are seeing the developing realization accompanied by hard data from multiple sources of the power of early experience to shape brain and behavioral development and the apparent inability to totally rectify long-term early exposure to really poor-quality experiences. I don’t want to convey that it’s impossible to do it, but the task is much, much, much more difficult and expensive than insuring that we get it right the first time.
I am generally optimistic by nature. But what we have available is a solid, well-established knowledge base from a variety of sources to suggest that we ought to be betting on these early experiences as having measurable and lasting effects. It’s a moral issue for our society—that we don’t feel compelled to act upon it. It’s quite damning for the U.S. by contrast to other developed countries like Japan.
We are de facto writing off children neglected, abused, and exposed to devastating environments. It’s very peculiar. Our constitution does not say all people, except children, have rights. Why is it that we feel we can tolerate these gross injustices to children who have no ability to fend for themselves? It’s every bit as significant a debate as Roe vs. Wade.8
In spite of major technological advances, which have resulted in improvements in children’s overall mortality, there are few child-focused professionals who believe that the overall quality of children’s mental health is improving. It appears quite the opposite—that more children are angry, unmotivated, bored, without purpose and direction than ever before in world history.
The Center for Family Policy and Research lists the United States as first in defense spending but last—the worst of all industrialized nations—in relative child poverty. We are first in military technology and military exports but thirty-first in mathematics achievement and twenty-third in science achievement. While we are the top producers of health technology, we are twenty-ninth in infant mortality and twenty-second in the percentage of our babies born at low birth weights. Our rates of incarceration and child abuse are unparalleled in the Western world.
Several experts believe that unless these trends are reversed, our future as a nation is in peril. In his treatment of severely abused children, Bruce Perry sees daily evidence of the unraveling of our nation’s social fabric. He views the increase in murderous violence by children as a direct result of the diminishment of these children’s higher cortical capacities through abuse and neglect. Testimony to the process he calls “devolution,” Perry warns that as more and more children are exposed to neglect and abuse, not only are individuals being limited, but society is also cumulatively affected over time by this loss.
In looking at the social implications of our widespread failure to tend adequately to our babies, Ramey says:
We have outlived the cowboy myth. . . . Civilizations in fact do rise and fall. The American experience doesn’t share that cycle yet. We still haven’t experienced our Nazism, our Bosnia, or whatever point of reference you might pick. I am struck by how quickly civilizations now come apart. In the early 1980s no one would have predicted that the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia would have come apart so quickly. . . . The idea that the veneer of civilization in very old societies is pretty damn thin has certainly been borne out in the last decade. The degree to which people can become cruel, almost inhuman, is breathtaking.9
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
Efforts to prevent violence typically consist of generating lists of effective programs and disseminating information on them in an effort to rally public support program by program, a strategy that has proved to be ineffective in the political arena. Even the best of these programs and the sponsors of the most enlightened policies will admit that they are always fighting for their lives. Primary prevention programs all struggle for adequate funds to continue each year. Dr. Lisbeth Schorr, author of Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage, said in a policy speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the spring of 1993 that just five years after the book was published, over 50 percent of the model programs she had put forward were defunct, primarily due to lack of funding.10 Policies appear to be similarly vulnerable. Political promises come and go. The Children’s Defense Fund has a series of posters that succinctly sums up the fate of babies in the political process. One poster features a photograph of a baby crawling away from the camera. A large target is painted across its diapered bottom. The copy reads: “When it comes to cutting budgets they always go for the easiest target first.” Garnering the committed political support necessary to turn the tide for even one generation of our children continues to elude us.
Albert Einstein noted, “The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level at which we created them.” We know that things are getting worse for our children. Overwhelmed, we still wait for top-down solutions—decisions from the president, or other elected officials, or the heads of agencies like the surgeon general—which we hope will make a difference. But the problems affecting our children, including violence, are getting worse. Top-down solutions from government will not soon be forthcoming. A trite but true fact is that babies don’t vote. Until we have an informed public that insists on change and empowers politicians accordingly, our children will continue to suffer. Change will come from the bottom up, from everyday people who understand that violence and the entire menu of serious issues affecting us all—hunger, war, deforestation, overpopulation, to name but a few—rely, for their management and solutions, on raising healthy children who will as adults care and be able to think through complex problems. The hand that rocks the cradle shapes these outcomes. The voice of greatest urgency regarding the issue of violence and children is perhaps that of Dr. Bruce Perry:
No set of intervention strategies will solve these transgenerational problems. In order to solve the problem of violence, we need to transform our culture. We need to change our child-rearing practices, we need to change the malignant and destructive view that children are the property of their biological parents. Human beings evolved not as individuals, but as communities. Despite Western conceptualizations, the smallest functional biological unit of humankind is not the individual—it is the clan. No individual, no single parent-child dyad, no nuclear family could survive alone. We survived and evolved as clans, interdependent—socially, emotionally, and biologically. . . . It is in the nature of humankind to be violent, but it may not be the nature of human kind. Without major transformation of our culture, without putting action behind our “love” of children, we may never learn the truth.11
The key to the cultural transformation Dr. Perry calls for may in fact be hiding not in the file drawers of policy makers or even in the reports of well-evaluated programs. The core lies much closer to our hearts and hands than we may have believed. As is true with our search for the roots of violence, the understanding we need is found in the nursery. The baby, the unpretentious, naked beginning of human development, embodies processes essential to our continuing evolution.
When asked about the larger social implications of his work, Dr. Ed Tronick, who studies maternal depression and its effects on children’s development, speaks of the profound importance of the lifelong lessons we each learn in the nursery:
Humans are designed for communication and sharing meanings. All processes, be they cognitive or emotional processes, are a joint creation of two people and are dependent on social exchange. So the infant comes into the world designed to participate and to appropriate the meaning systems of adults from the caregiver’s constant contact. Without this kind of exchange, development goes awry. The emotional exchanges between infants and caregivers function for the brain the way we think of nutrients functioning for the body. Emotional input is the nutrient for structuring the brain, for structuring the child. This emotional communication is the defining characteristic of our species.12
HUSH, LITTLE BABY
Imagine for a moment being little—smaller than you can consciously remember being. Imagine you are very new to life, say about three months old. You’ve been asleep and you are just waking up, lying on a mattress in a crib. You open your eyes and see your short little arms and legs, new little fingers and toes that still seem to have a mind of their own. You have a big heavy head and a short neck, a big round tummy that’s feeling very empty. As you come awake, you feel that wet thing around your middle that is beginning to feel heavy and cold. Agitated, you begin to wiggle, move your arms, kick your feet, and you make a few soft sounds. Your eyes feel itchy, and you are getting this feeling in your tummy that you don’t like. You begin to rub your eyes and make a few more sounds. To your surprise you hear a loud cry coming out of your mouth and your face is wet and your eyes begin to feel worse. Now you are crying and kicking and breathing hard. But no one comes. You look to see, but no one comes. And you are crying harder and your middle is hurting now with the air you’ve swallowed and you are hot and wet and screaming. Still no one comes. And the room is still and there’s nothing there but the sheet and the slats of your crib. You are scared and your stomach hurts and you are alone. Finally, you hear footsteps. A cold nipple is stuck in your mouth and you see the blurred back of someone leaving and you are sucking and turning to see who is walking away, and the bottle falls over. And your mouth is empty, your eyes are hot and wet, your stomach still hurts. You are screaming for someone to help. You hear footsteps and see the arms sweep down and the hand you hope is reaching for you sticks the nipple in again, but hard so that it hurts and you choke. The footsteps go away and you cry out. Your mouth loses the nipple and your arms are beating and your feet kick the mattress. You are hungry and angry and scared. You are screaming to an empty room.
Your need for food and attention followed by this response or a variation of it happens over and over again several times a day, at least thirty times in the course of a week. Sometimes the wet thing around your middle comes off. Sometimes you are picked up. But the faces are not happy when they see you and the voices are often loud and angry. You spend a lot of time here alone playing with your hands and the sheet, kicking your legs, feeling your body, memorizing the pattern of the crib bars, the blinds, and the wallpaper.
If you are this baby, you will—like all babies—continue to eat, sleep, and, with relatively rare exceptions, grow. Some handling, essential formula, warmth, and basic diaper changing is enough for survival. But in the recesses of your brain, connections you were born primed to make are left to wither before you are able to sit up. You cannot seem to make things happen when you need something. No matter what you do no one comes to comfort you and tell you softly that everything is okay. The focused loving attention of the powerful beings in your world is not what you know. You have no reason to believe that comfort and safety will come when you signal distress. The circuitry in your brain that is receptive to these interactions may be impaired or never built at all. And this circuitry connects with all the rest of your body.
Now imagine being another baby waking up, like the first, from a long nap on a mattress in a crib. You open your eyes and feel your body and make a few soft sounds as you begin to look around the room. Familiar faces of colorful smiling nursery characters capture your attention for a few minutes as you focus on the sound of your own voice. Within a few minutes, you hear rhythmic footsteps and a voice you know that sounds happy and soothing. Arms reach down and scoop you up over the shoulder that feels and smells just right. You rub your nose and eyes against a soft neck and feel the pats and cuddles that go with that familiar voice. Soon you are lying down looking into eyes that see only you. That wet thing around your middle goes away and is replaced with something warm and dry. And now you are lying back in those arms with a warm nipple in your mouth, and there is the best face of all singing a sound you love to listen to. You are rocking and your tummy is relaxing with warm milk and you are right with the world.
The experiences of each baby are reflected in the matter being built in their brains and ultimately in the rest of their bodies. But after months of these very different introductions to life, these babies—like their individual experiences—will have little resemblance to each other. In addition to structural differences, the biochemistry in one organism is being set for fear, for sadness, for anger—being overrun by strong negative feelings experienced with little or no ability to modulate their effects. The second infant is learning trust, connection, pleasure, and contentment; the ability to regulate emotions is being learned interactively with another person, and the normal curiosity of the child to learn about the world is emerging inside expectations of confidence in self and others. Here is the foundation for stemming increasing violence and for our future on the planet.
Beyond our understanding of violence, babyhood is central to our understanding of our own needs at their most essential. This is the place we all came from—naked, vulnerable, innocent, hopeful, curious, and dependent for our lives on our ability to connect with another. In spite of elaborate defenses we have wrapped around ourselves to appear otherwise, we still each carry this essence.
While none of us would advocate for endlessly maintaining the dependency and vulnerability of babyhood, there are processes key to our first stages of life that remain essential to our survival, not just as individuals but as a society. This has been an unpopular concept in Western thinking, particularly in America, which began as an adolescent colony breaking from its European parents. From its first battles to establish separation, America has valued self-reliance, independence, and toughness.
But now our preeminence as a world power may in fact be dependent on new ideals and new myths. While our idealization of the rugged individualist and the rags-to-riches success stories may have served us while we established autonomy in our nation’s first two centuries, these ideals without balance may actually be our undoing. It appears that while we have put great effort toward protecting ourselves from external dangers, the greater threat is from internal deterioration of the soft tissue at our nation’s core.
BABY FACE
At the 1995 annual meeting of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, Dr. David Chamberlain in a keynote address pointed out that babies—if we are paying attention—show us very graphically what is happening to them. As a culture Americans don’t want this information, at least not on a personal level. We insulate ourselves from this knowledge. What our babies need—rich and poor babies—is costly and frequently inconvenient in terms of our time and pleasure, to say nothing of money. Babies want one person close all the time. They want to eat around the clock. They want us there with them when they wake up, including numerous times in the night. They want to be the center of our world.
Speaking in San Diego on February 14, 1997, to an audience of psychotherapists, Dr. James McKenna, a world expert on sudden infant death syndrome, said that we Americans “have a tendency to treat babies as what we want them to become as opposed to who they actually are.” He noted that the caregiving patterns favored by cultures change much more quickly than babies’ biology. His talk, entitled “The Society Which Mistook Its Children for Bats,” began by showing a slide that illustrated the number of years humans have lived on the planet. He directed his laser pointer to a green line representing 3.6 million years. He said:
This is the time when man became upright-walking humanoids, culture-bearing, tool-using homo sapiens and/or homo erectus. During this period, our emotional substraits, our parenting systems, our sexual behavior, our psychological dispositions were formulated and were designed and sculpted by natural selection.
He then directed his pointer to a tiny red dot that looked like a period at the end of the green line and said:
This little red dot represents the industrial revolution, at which time many things changed historically—our conceptions of what behavior is appropriate. Even going back to the agricultural revolution, which is about ten thousand years ago in terms of significant evolutionary change, there hasn’t been any at all. We’re basically giving birth to stone age babies who are trying to live in the space age world. And there’s enormous discrepancy in those two types of worlds. The question I ask is: Is there both a physiological and a psychological consequence when we get too far from the context within which the baby’s body was designed and the types of expectations which that baby actually has?
McKenna makes an extraordinarily clear case for rethinking basic child care practices that many of us take for granted, particularly the unquestioned practice of isolating infants in their own beds for sleep. By comparison to other primates, the human baby has a much longer period of dependency on the mother. For the most essential physiological processes the baby’s central nervous system remains immature for several months, relying on closeness to the mother’s body to set its basic rhythms, including eating, states of sleep, and alertness. This makes constant access to a caregiver and the quality of that access key to the early programming of the baby. “Selecting a pattern of social care for a baby is essentially selecting a pattern of physiological regulation for the baby. They’re one and the same thing. There is no distinction.” Understanding this fundamental biological programming in infants is crucial to reducing sudden infant death, which McKenna sees as a by-product of the Western world’s unique cultural experiment of isolating sleeping infants.
McKenna’s videotaped segments of mothers and infants sleeping together show that when the mother moves in her sleep, the baby also moves, their patterns of arousal remaining reciprocal even while asleep. Movements and sounds by one generate movements and sounds by the other. These sequential exchanges, he says, account for the maintenance of the baby in relatively lighter states of sleep that prevent the infant’s descent into what he calls stage-five sleep, which can be lethal (SIDS).
Isolating infants for sleep is a very expensive consequence of prioritizing parents’ independence and autonomy over the basic biological expectations of the infant. The baby’s physiology is unprepared for this cultural reversal. One consequence of this and other practices that confuse “parental best interest” with that of the baby is that the United States has one of the highest rates of mortality for children under age one year of all industrialized nations in the world.14
Besides being a strong voice for breast-feeding and for babies sleeping with their parents, McKenna is an advocate for child care practices that are based on an informed understanding of infant biological and emotional needs. “The bottom line is that we have to at least begin to understand these things in terms of the infant and then see what we can do about it in terms of the culture.”
Like Dr. David Chamberlain, McKenna implores us to begin with babies and the people who nurture them, parents. And if he is right in his assertion that babies’ biological and emotional needs haven’t changed in the short time since the industrial revolution—then it would be reasonable to conclude that adult biological and emotional needs haven’t changed, either. But our culture, fueled by huge changes in technology and economics, drives us forward at such speed that we adults can hardly keep pace—and some crucial needs of babies and their caregivers may have unwittingly been left alongside the road.
The current economic pressures of our culture are often in direct conflict with essential needs for adults—as well as for babies. Time to “smell the roses,” including quiet time with the people we love, is essential to emotional renewal for all of us—and it is often lost in competing pressures for time. The reality is that in spite of great technological advances and appreciable gains in science, health, and communications, most of us still hunger for missing elements of stable human emotional connections and the belief that sanity and rationality will prevail in our communities. Many are choosing to simplify their lives by cutting back on material expectations and sacrificing the “rat race” for time at home with young children—difficult decisions and seldom without stressors of their own.
Perhaps we need a little child to lead us. Perhaps our real challenge is to hold the face and the needs of the baby like a template over all of the decisions we make. If we superimposed the face and the needs of the baby over our daily decisions, what would we have to do differently? What would it mean for our families—immediate family or extended family? What would it mean for our relationships with families around us, in the neighborhood, in church, or at the next farm down the road? What would our schools or our stores or banks or religious institutions have to do differently? What would it mean for day care centers, for government, for social services or health care? If every time we voted or considered a political candidate, we held the face and needs of a baby at the forefront of our expectations, might we see a shift in policies? What if we shopped only where stores were thoughtfully organized and adequate facilities were provided for people with babies? What if we demanded that babies’ emotional, as well as physical, needs be honored in designing day care, in developing employee benefits, in creating flexible work schedules? What if public education systems saw each baby at birth as a prospective student and worked with parents to prepare them for school by providing a strong emotional and cognitive foundation? Building communities around babies rather than fitting babies in around the edges of communities—even if they got only the consideration that puppies receive in Portland, Oregon—would go a long way toward the prevention of violence.
Tomorrow’s violent criminals still lie in their cribs today. To prevent 1 in 20 of today’s babies from exchanging the slats of their cribs for prison bars in their adult lives, babies must be in the forefront of our concern, the focus of political, social, religious, and educational policies and practices. For those who insist that babies are the private responsibility of their own families—that we are each responsible only for our own—remind them of what Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, said, “The future which we hold in trust for our own children will be directly shaped by our fairness to other people’s children.” The myth of self-reliance—as any baby clearly demonstrates—is just that. A value on self-reliance and independence carried to the point of infant mortality, child abuse, school failure, juvenile delinquency, and adult incarceration is actually a fast course toward self-destruction.
The baby—the image of vulnerability and guilelessness—does in fact bring us back to the best in ourselves. If we were really to focus on the baby as a central concern in our culture, we might recognize that the death of the spirit of the baby in an adult threatens rather than strengthens our society.
NURTURING THE NURTURERS
In spite of our preoccupation with independence, autonomy, and self-reliance, we are born dependent on others, and we continue to need others emotionally at every stage of development. The capacity to maintain our baby desire to communicate who we are emotionally and to read this in other people is essential for healthy adult functioning with families, at school, at work, and at play. Emotional connections between individuals are the linchpin of any community’s ability to maintain prosocial behavior, and the growing absence of those connections is reflected in social incompetence, estrangement, mental illness, and violence.
Ironically, this understanding of the emotional foundation for learning, playing, and socializing currently takes a backseat to cognitive approaches to preparing young children for school and life. There is tremendous anxiety among many parents about educating their babies. With the growing understanding of baby brain development have come flash cards and music, math, and reading programs that are being promoted as keys to a baby’s success. And while this may be beneficial if certain other pieces are in place, such efforts may also miss the intended mark. The story of David Helfgott portrayed in the award-winning movie Shine illustrates the cost of attending lopsidedly to cognitive stimulation without consideration of the emotional foundation. As the movie tells the tale, David’s well-meaning but rigidly perfectionistic and domineering father was determined that David would be a successful pianist. Beginning when David was a toddler, his father’s efforts were targeted only at David’s relationship with the piano. Even though David’s musical skills eventually brought him national recognition, his early emotional experiences reverberated throughout his life and led to his nervous breakdown and ongoing mental problems. His skills, without an adequate sense of self and how to relate to others, were built on sand. Not only his career but his entire life was affected by the lack of sensitive attention to the baby needs in David. Watching him perform at the piano is to witness the ghost of the baby he once was.
With very different circumstances shaping his life, and behind bars rather than at a piano, is the ghost of the baby who was Jeffrey. His crime, for which he should be held responsible, was nevertheless committed by a person whose emotional competence, judgment, and behavior were substantially and directly affected by his earliest experiences. This offers no excuse for his behavior. However, our prisons are overflowing with the ghosts of babies lost to unseen and often unintended crimes in their cradles. The “feeling” circuitry responsible for trusting, connecting, and empathizing in most violent criminals has been damaged. The “thinking” circuitry responsible for focused attention and complex problem solving has also typically been impaired. Many, if not most, of these brain-reflected and experience-caused problems may at least be partially reparable through intensive therapy and education. But the cost—to the offenders, their victims, and society—is enormous. With few or none of these services in place, prisons remain a top growth industry in our nation. This is our present reality. The Titanic is on its course.
But accompanying the new information on the brain and its development comes a new opportunity to alter this course. If healthy emotional and cognitive development—or its antithesis—is substantially rooted in our experiences during the first months of life, then the adults who guide these experiences merit society’s attention. The unfolding research on the brain is unequivocal testimony to the fact that the future of any community rests on the laps of those who nurture its youngest members.
It is this group—the nurturers of our children, be they parents, extended family, friends, or paid caregivers—who are the key to preventing violence. As they shape our future, they need the tools: the skills, information, and social valuing to adequately do the job. When those caring for children are themselves healthy, have adequate financial and emotional support, and are equipped with guidance around what to expect of children, how to discipline constructively, and how to manage anger and stress, the children in their care are the beneficiaries, but when such needs are poorly met, it is the children who inevitably absorb the consequences. The adult brain influences the development of the baby’s brain, one tiny interaction at a time.
If Rachel Carson’s image of a spring without songbirds produced enough concern in the 1960s to generate widespread efforts to reduce the poisoning of the natural environment, then perhaps there is hope in the future for preventing the poisoning of the cradle of human community. It is the sweetness and the vulnerability, the curiosity and the playfulness, the hopefulness and the innocence, the trust and the arms outreached purely to embrace or to help that is at stake in our times. We face not only the possibility of a spring without songbirds, but a future without people who care or notice the difference.
POSTSCRIPT
Imagine that our culture truly understood the impact of early trauma on brain development and applied it in our communities.
Imagine that high school juniors and seniors are required to participate in at least a year of pre-parenting training; not a babysitting class or a home economics course, but a mental health course that provides a forum for teens to focus on friendship and partnering, on their hopes and fantasies and beliefs. Here is an opportunity to learn constructive communication within intimate relationships, particularly how to constructively handle and share strong negative emotions like fear, anger, and jealousy.
Imagine that this course includes a practicum that places adolescents in our communities in child care centers to observe and help with the reality of babies and toddlers—a powerful deterrent to early pregnancy and a great opportunity to realize the sacrifices involved!
Imagine that all pregnant women are screened regularly for depression—and that communities recognize the prevalence and the impact of parental (particularly maternal) depression on the developing brain—so that it is treated at the earliest possible opportunity. Imagine that prenatal care is available to all parents and that the professionals providing it are trained in trauma-informed practices, so moms most at risk of pre- or postpartum depression can receive effective mental health scaffolding and emotional support.
And what if every pregnancy triggered—without stigma—the availability of a trained nurse or trained paraprofessional home visitor who is available to help the family protect their babies from risks (like cycles of parents’ own traumatic backgrounds) and increase parents’ nurturing skills from the beginning of life. Books and toys offered from the arms of a warm visitor can provide a sense of community that has a great impact on a developing brain.
If nonfamilial child care is needed, imagine that this care is of highest quality, affordable, and available to all who need it. Imagine that the staff is emotionally attuned to babies and their parents, that they are recognized as a child’s first educators and paid accordingly by our educational systems.
We have the seeds of each part of this continuum—though they are only rarely available to the number of families who need them. A handful of programs are in place that have been longitudinally evaluated to demonstrate their effectiveness in preventing aggression, school failure, juvenile crime, and adult incarceration—outcomes for which we pay so dearly. And we could provide the full range of benefits of these blue-ribbon programs to all who need them at a fraction of what we are currently paying for incarceration and for an extensive and expanding continuum of late-stage services that do little to change the course. Each of these carefully selected opportunities is listed in appendixes E and F.
Finally, a model called the Parenting Institute, piloted in Memphis, Tennessee, by Porter-Leath (a 156-year-old non-profit leader), Baptist Memorial Health Care Systems, and a grassroots community organization, Knowledge Quest, is currently creating a dramatic change from anything previously available in any community. Based on the best of what we have learned in the last two decades about neurobiology, the role of trauma in early development, epigenetics, and child abuse prevention, the goal of the Parenting Institute is to shift the expectations of parents and of communities from a focus on fixing emotionally damaged children (after the diagnosis of pathology) to a focus on building healthy children from the beginning of life.
Despite expectations to the contrary, the reality is that most families face serious challenges in their role as parents. The school shootings across the country are a clear testament to the struggle of many middle-class parents to provide adequate supervision, to limit access to violent media and games, and to manage angry boys who have aggressive temperaments. Parents across all classes, races, and religions often separate and divorce, find new partners, remarry, move, become addicted to drugs or alcohol, and/or face their own mental health issues. And children, regardless of their backgrounds, may contend with ADD, ADHD, sensory motor processing problems, Asperger’s syndrome, aggressive or hypersensitive temperaments, learning disabilities, depression, drug abuse, and suicide. The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize the crucial importance of the emotional and relational foundation for children’s health. In spite of this awareness, and regardless of income, parents struggle without apparent options for dealing with unprecedented rates of behavioral and emotional challenges among children.
The Parenting Institute is designed to change this equation, to translate the available neurobiological information and the literature on the emotional foundation for health currently available primarily to professionals so that it is accessible to parents at the earliest possible point in their awareness of developmental problems. Drawing on the best practices from across the country, the Parenting Institute is based on the concept that a child’s emotional and behavioral health deserves the same priority as the child’s physical health. Like physical health, it is best protected by preventive, front-end attention.
In the same way that parents routinely seek the guidance of the pediatrician to shepherd their children’s physical health, parents can routinely check in at the Parenting Institute for guidance in preparing for the next stages of their children’s emotional development, or they may come for immediate help when first troubled by a child’s behavior.
This revolution in thinking and practice can best be compared to the Lamaze movement of half a century ago. Previously, it was common practice for mothers to go into labor with little knowledge or preparation for the process. Fathers were typically excluded altogether. Lamaze and childbirth education created an entirely new expectation: parents who are informed and educated about the process of labor and birth. Parents are expected to be in charge and to make informed decisions about anesthesia, position for labor, and other options in the birthing process. By equipping parents with knowledge and skills tailored to their concerns, negative birth outcomes (including stillbirth and complications in the perinatal period) have been greatly reduced. The professional’s role has shifted from total control of the process to a team effort that begins with shared knowledge and coaching, so parents make their own healthy decisions. This is exactly the purpose of the Parenting Institute: to inform and educate parents about handling challenges to a child’s emotional development from gestation through maturity.
Imagine how all of our lives might be different—in terms of crime, safety, the quality of our schools—if we applied a Lamaze or a pediatric health model to children’s emotional health.
Recall being or observing a parent. Whether it’s sleepless nights, projectile vomit, the color of the poop in that first diaper, or the strange tension that often surfaces between exhausted parents of newborns, the birth of a baby is a very vulnerable time for all involved. And if a mother has postpartum depression or a baby with problems, or if she’s parenting alone or fighting with a partner, these rough conditions often become the beginning of the end of the family. Soon a two-year-old becomes a four-year-old and then a fourteen-year-old—each age carrying challenges and questions and fears for normal parents with normal kids. For those carrying an extra load—separation/single parenting, emotional ill-health, or addiction—daily functioning can be overwhelming.
Parenting is not a social service issue; it’s a basic health issue for everyone in every community. Our model for children’s physical health is preventively oriented. We take our children to the pediatrician or the nurse practitioner for checkups and for immunizations in order to prevent problems down the road. But especially after managed care, pediatricians don’t have the time—and frankly, they don’t have the training—to deal with in-depth concerns about children’s behavioral issues or emotional episodes and to advise how to handle them.
Imagine you’re the mother of a very fussy, hard-to-comfort newborn, or a two-year-old struggling every step of the way as you walk through the mall. Or imagine you’re the father of a thirteen-year-old girl who seemed fine until she suddenly began refusing to come out of her room, saying she’s ugly, doesn’t have any friends, and doesn’t want to go to school. Or imagine you are the parent of a bright four-year-old who has, for the second time, been kicked out of his preschool for bullying. Or the mother of a teenage boy who has suddenly become sullen and shady about where he is going and with whom.
Imagine that as easily as scheduling a haircut, you could stop by an accessible, convenient place somewhere on your beaten path to receive fifty minutes of guidance for any concern about your child. Imagine this place is warm and inviting, a place where everyone goes, looking more like a Starbucks than a clinic. It’s not a social service agency, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist. This is a popular place: nonjudgmental, welcoming, with a reputation for wise counsel. Here, the guidance is based on the best of what is known about families, about trauma, and about healthy brain development. You can meet privately with a mentor who listens to what you want to talk about and tailors the information to your particular child and your specific family. Or you can attend a group session with other parents with similar concerns—especially comforting if you’re feeling isolated or new to the area.
Here, no one-size-fits-all approach applies, no curriculum or preset sequence. Skills shared by the coach are specifically matched to your child’s temperament and your family’s makeup. People come here who want the best for their child—parents, grandparents, professionals in the field. The message is: We all face challenges as children develop. It’s normal. What makes a difference is getting support and advice at the earliest possible time.
Visiting the Parenting Institute is not stigmatizing and does not suggest failure or weakness as a parent. In the same way that attending a gym is associated with physical health, attending the parenting institute is associated with parental health. It means getting the best for your child and for yourself. The focus is not on what’s wrong with children or parents, but what’s right; it’s about identifying the strengths in individuals—and in family systems—that can be used to address the problems or issues that have been identified by parents. Treatment plans are replaced with individual goals set by parents to accomplish what they want to change in their family. The coach’s work begins with facilitating parents’ goals and continues with individually tailored educational and therapeutic strategies designed to achieve the parents’ goals.
Families can come to intervene early in an emotional or behavioral issue or to learn in advance how to handle the next stages of development. Parents can earn high school or college credit, and they can earn tax credits or an addition to their current benefit. Staff is well trained in family therapy, neurobiology, and the effects of trauma on adults and children, and how to best support affected family members. Parents are their specialty, and parenting behaviors are understood to be a reflection of the parents’ own childhood. Here, professionals are chosen not for their degrees, but rather for their emotional intelligence, warmth, passion, and ability to connect to the people they serve.
Parenting is the hardest job most of us will ever have. Without learning otherwise, we all tend to parent as we were parented. Most of us have room for improvement. Why do we punish what we don’t want rather than teach and reward what we do want? Parenting Institute Centers can, over time, advocate for their clients to receive tax credits or college or high school credits or welfare dividends for their participation. We can do this at a fraction of the cost we are currently paying—not only in financial but also in human terms.