based on whether or not they had continued to follow the techniques prescribed by the program.
Suddenly, the intervention seemed far more promising. Among children with the DRD4 7-repeat allele, those whose parents took the program’s lessons to heart scored 6 points lower on the externalizing behaviour scale (meaning they were calmer, happier, and less prone to anger) than children whose parents chose not to follow the plan, a difference more than twice that between the intervention and control groups. Even among families in the dummy intervention group, those who had adopted a more engaged and interactive parenting style — be it through advice gleaned from a parenting book or the suggestion of a grandparent or simply by learning from their own experiences as parents — saw a precipitous drop in their children’s externalizing behaviour, with children scoring 4 points lower on the externalizing behaviour scale than those of less adaptive parents. The drops were less substantial in children without the DRD4 7-repeat allele, though even they showed a marked improvement.
Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn’s intervention was a rousing success, but not because it was a brilliant or life-altering program. Its power didn’t come from comprehensive lesson plans or advanced technology or extensive funding — in fact, it possessed none of these traits, just half a dozen chats with an informed third party and several pages of accessible parenting literature. Nurses or social workers or perhaps even trained parents could provide programs like this in our communities.
The true success of the program rested on the parents’ desire to better understand and relate to their children. Without that spark, the program meant nothing.[22]
Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., IJzendoorn, M.H.V., Pijlman, F.T., Mesman, J., and Juffer, F. (2008). “Experimental Evidence for Differential Susceptibility: Dopamine D4 Receptor Polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) Moderates Intervention Effects on Toddlers’ Externalizing Behavior in a Randomized Controlled Trial.” Developmental Psychology, 44(1), 293.
In the insular, almost solipsistic world of infant development, small actions have big consequences. Young brains grow at a feverish rate, and their constant, relentless expansion makes them ravenous for stimuli. Everything they see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is gobbled up, pored over, processed, and neatly filed away for future consideration. Much of it will ultimately be discarded, but a surprising amount of it will be absorbed and incorporated into the child’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour. Minds, as mysterious and intangible as they may seem, are rooted in the physical world. They are built experience by experience and neuron by neuron, materials as real — and as crucial — as the bricks and mortar of a house’s foundation. Mislay the bricks or skimp on the mortar and the house stands crooked or crumbles to the ground.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? And you know what, it is scary. Parenting is a hard job. It requires creativity, discipline, intuition, compassion, tenacity, and wisdom. It comes with long hours, tremendous responsibility, and no pay. It forces you to become the parent your child needs you to be, to adapt your responses, emotions, and behaviours to the benefit of your child. It demands the best of you at all times. It is tough. But it is far from impossible. Your parents did it, after all, as did your grandparents before them, and your great-grandparents before them. Trailing behind you to the distant horizon of human history is a chain of parents thousands of generations long. Some of them did a better job than others. Yet every single one of them, in their own way, succeeded at humanity’s most important endeavour. They kept the ball rolling for another generation. If they could do it, surely you can too. Think of all the advantages you have over your ancestors 10 generations back. You have clean water and family doctors and hand sanitizer. You have penicillin and daycare and the polio vaccine. You have freedom from famine and pestilence and war. You have knowledge, more than any generation that came before you.
We also have civilizations and governments that can afford to attend more to the needs of families, encouraging and helping parents to be the sensitive, attentive people their children need them to be. Parenting needs to be recognized as the cornerstone of greater public health and supported in as many constructive ways as possible. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. There is much more evidence still to come that will reveal the true scope of parenting’s influence on individuals, families, and the societies in which they dwell.
Scientific studies, with their complex behavioural scales and near-inscrutable graphs, can seem abstract and sterile. But beneath the tables and jargon and rhetoric lies a rich and ever-deepening pool of knowledge. We are the beneficiaries of a grand and storied tradition of scientific inquiry, but also of practical experience. It is at the crossroads of these two variables that our understanding of early child development is at its most lucid. And perhaps no field of study gets it better than attachment theory.
Chapter 6
The Eyes of a Child
In the wake of the Second World War, thousands upon thousands of children were left without parents. Six years of warfare on an unprecedented scale had caused a dramatic influx of orphans. Most were homeless, friendless, and hopelessly alone, their entire families slaughtered and their villages bombed to rubble. Their shell-shocked faces neatly encapsulated the horrors that had plagued Europe for over half a decade, and the World Health Organization (WHO) was desperate to help them in any way it could. But building and staffing orphanages wasn’t enough. The WHO strove to correct not just the physical and financial hardships faced by orphans, but the psychological ones as well. They wanted to understand the effects of such profound loss on the human mind in order to better help those who suffered through it. For this they turned to the renowned psychiatrist John Bowlby.
Bowlby was the perfect candidate. An award-winning and well-educated scholar, he had experience working with maladapted and delinquent children and an avowed passion for helping disadvantaged young people. The WHO asked him to write a pamphlet on the psychology of orphans, how the loss of both parents affects children’s mental and emotional development. Bowlby accepted, and the task so captivated him that he made studying children the basis of the rest of career. Attachment theory was an extension of his original work, drawing inspiration from psychology, biology, and ethology in an attempt to explain how and why children bond with their early caregivers. Though received with some reluctance by the academic community of the day, attachment theory ultimately became the go-to model for exploring early child development.
Dr. Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby’s star pupil, reinforced his theory, amending to it various tools and strategies designed to measure and categorize the children it sought to study. Ainsworth’s research begat two intelligent and ambitious disciples: Patricia Crittenden and Mary Main. Crittenden and Main both believed strongly in the basic tenets of attachment theory, and both used the new science as a diving bell with which they plumbed the murky and shifting depths of infant psychology. It is what they found down there — or rather, how they chose to interpret it — that caused a rift to form between them.
Severed Bonds
Do you remember Sophie from the beginning of this book? She wasn’t an only child. She had a sister named Sandra and a brother named Darren, both younger than her. Though their traumatic upbringing forged a certain bond between them, the three siblings were never close. They got along fairly well, all things considered, but were all very different people.
For one thing, Sophie and Sandra reacted very differently to their parents’ fighting. Sophie, we know, cowered in her room, drowning out the noise as best she could and doing everything in her power to avoid the situation. Sandra took the opposite approach. She was a heavier sleeper than Sophie, but on nights where the fighting got heated enough to wake her she would scream and cry and beat her fists against the headboard until her parents came running, drawing their attention to her and away from each other. When things calmed down she seemed more or less content, oblivious to the subtler domestic tensions that buzzed discordantly
