fit our romanticized image of what a perfect mother — that flawless, mythic, Stepfordesque creature — would do, but if a woman invited us up to her apartment and we saw her scold her child for scribbling on the walls, or let out a shriek when she noticed him poking experimentally at an electrical outlet, or tune out his crying while she finished making a cup of tea, we probably wouldn’t feel obligated to call Child Services.
Next, Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg tested the children when they were between 14 and 15 months old. Each child underwent the Strange Situation Procedure, a test developed by Dr. Ainsworth — Mary Main and Patricia Crittenden’s mentor — to gauge infants’ attachment strategy. The test itself is fairly simple. Researchers subject children to a series of mildly stressful events and record their reactions. Before you recoil at the thought of infants as unwilling participants in some traumatic experiment, we should stress the mild aspect of “mildly stressful events,” which include having an adult the child doesn’t know walk into the room, allowing the child to explore the room on his own, and separating the child from his parents for a five-minute period.[23] Trained observers interpreted the children’s responses to the test and placed them in one of the four attachment categories we discussed previously: secure (Type B), avoidant (Type A), reactive/ambivalent (Type C), or disorganized (Type D). Type B children enjoyed exploring the room. They sometimes became unsure of themselves or frightened, but when they did they found comfort in the arms of their parents, were easily consoled, and happily resumed explored shortly after. Type A children enjoyed exploring, but did not seek comfort from their parents, even when frightened; mostly, they acted as if their parents weren’t there. Type C children hated exploring. They clung to their parents, terrified and inconsolable.
Type D children were harder to classify, as disorganized attachment takes many shapes. Children suffering from it run to their parents for comfort, only to fall silent and turn their heads away. They cringe at their mother’s touch, smile, and claw violently at her face, all in the span of a single thought. They wander the room like shiftless ghosts, ignoring cherished toys and seeking comfort from the walls or furniture. They freeze, fuss, fidget, twist their limbs about in a ceaseless, obsessive-compulsive rhythm, or move as if underwater, stepping and flailing in slow motion. Their behaviour is varied and unpredictable, but bespeaks confusion, anxiety, and profound inner turmoil.
Observers watched for such behaviour, and ranked the children who exhibited it based on the severity of their symptoms. Though the Strange Situation Procedure is designed to allocate children to one of the four attachment groups — Types A through D — Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg were only interested in whether or not children were disorganized. Type D (disorganized) children were thus assigned to one group, and Type A, B, and C children were lumped together in another.
After sorting through the data, Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg didn’t seem to have found much of interest, except that older mothers were more likely than younger mothers to raise Type D children. Beyond that, there appeared to be no meaningful correlations between the variables at all. In spite of previous evidence linking maternal frightening behaviour to infant disorganized attachment, the study found no such connection. Disorganized attachment seemed almost random in distribution, as if abiding by rules lying outside the purview of both genes and environment.
The answer lay in the maternal interviews. Unlike the videotapes, which documented specific observable behaviours in mothers (the “frightening behaviours”), the interviews rooted beneath the surface. Through meticulous questioning, Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg psychologically assessed each mother to determine whether or not she had successfully come to terms with her loved one’s passing. This was not to say mothers no longer missed the departed or felt sad at the thought of them, but that they had passed through the five stages of grief and were able to move forward with their lives. These mothers were classified as having a “resolved loss.” Mothers with unresolved losses, on the other hand, had not yet moved forward. Grief held them in thrall, keeping them from discussing the event rationally or without jarring emotional outbursts. Unresolved mothers provided bizarre or contradictory details about their lost loved ones, muddled their tenses (speaking of the deceased in the present tense; i.e., “Mary likes flowers”), or suffered significant lapses in memory. Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg placed resolved mothers in one group and unresolved mothers in another, and compared the prevalence of infant disorganized attachment in each.
The discrepancy was stark, and it hinged, as always, on the DRD4 7-repeat allele. Without the 7-repeat, children showed signs of disorganized attachment at roughly the same rate, regardless of whether or not their mothers’ losses were resolved. Among children with the 7-repeat it was a whole different story. In their case, having a mother with an unresolved loss made them almost three times as likely to exhibit signs of disorganized attachment as 7-repeat children whose mothers’ losses were resolved.
Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg’s findings are surprising. Both logic and past evidence suggested that mothers’ frightening behaviour should be far more influential to their children than their private, inner pain. If anything, frightening behaviours were thought to be how that pain manifested itself — even if unresolved loss was the disease infecting children with disorganized attachment, frightening behaviours were supposed to be the syringe that injected it. But Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg’s study suggests that children see beyond simple cause and effect — Mom shouts, Mom is upset; Mom spanks me, Mom is angry — and pick up on behavioural quirks so subtle that Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg needed to implement psychiatric assessments to unearth them. Perhaps children are more perceptive than we give them credit for. Or perhaps our measurement of parenting behavious and attachment strategies is too imprecise.
These are, of course, only the findings of a single study. But Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg’s experiment underscores the limitations of our understanding. They question the parameters of our knowledge of genetics, psychology, and child development. They prove that the lens through which we watch children grow, as refined as it might be, is not yet fine enough. Above all, they teach us to question our assumptions and look deeper into the ways that our children’s genes and environment interact.
The Broken Filter
For years, the prevailing metaphor for genes was “the blueprints of development,” a master plan on which every facet of an individual is meticulously drafted. The image fit nicely with the predominant theory of genes at the time, called the genetic dogma, which stipulated that the flow of information from DNA to RNA to polypeptide chains to protein is unidirectional and irreversible. According to the genetic dogma, DNA is strictly read-only; RNA cannot rewrite it, nor can a protein be translated back into RNA. However, the latest research shows top-down, dictatorial genetic dominance to be an incorrect, or at least incomplete, characterization of how genes work.
As important as genes are, they are not the only plan from which a person is built. DRD4, 5-HTTLPR, and BDNF are not genes “for” anything more than the products after which they are named (dopamine receptors, serotonin transporters, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor, respectively). These products can, in turn, regulate physiological and mental development, but there’s a lot of give and take between genetic and environmental factors. The environment works in conjunction with genes, and through changes to the epigenome (a process we will discuss in greater detail later), it can actually influence when and how these genes are expressed. Nor are these influences always obvious or simple. Think of the cumulative effects of the 5-HTT and BDNF genes, or the protective properties of a friendly adult outside of the family, or the ability of children to ignore their parents’ dramatic behaviour while latching onto their inner turmoil. Through the course of this chapter, we’ve learned how ineffably complex and muddled and messy child development can be. Beneath the surface, where nature and nurture spiral, clash, and converge, the concept of anything as neat and orderly as a “genetic blueprint” seems trite, or even absurd.
As scientists became aware of this discrepancy, they adopted a new image: the genetic recipe book. As a metaphor, it is more accurate than
