innate part of human behaviour, which is where he and Hobbes differ. Hobbes could not have known about genes, having died almost 200 years before Gregor Mendel had so much as planted his garden, but had he the ability to learn of DNA, he would almost certainly believe violence to be tangled up in there somewhere. Perry, however, rejects this fatalist notion. To him, violence is a learned behaviour, a tragic legacy passed down through a thousand generations. It may be our birthright, however much we may begrudge those who gave it to us, but it is not innate.
Earlier this chapter, we discussed how the infant brain develops: a fecund flourishing of dendritic foliage thick as a jungle canopy, pruned and harvested and organized by our earliest experiences into something more orderly and productive, a kind of intellectual agriculture. We select the dendrites we use most and tend to them closely, watering them and weeding them and fertilizing their soil. The dendrites we don’t use we yank free in order to provide greater resources to our more desirable neurological crops. But managing such an immense and complex garden takes work, and work takes energy. The body accounts for this under normal conditions — infants don’t have much to do with their energy besides learn and grow. But when we are besieged by ever-present toxic levels of stress, our stores are gradually depleted. Tending to our intellectual nourishment is put on hold in favour of our more immediate survival, and gradually our garden begins to wither. The soil becomes parched, its dendrites weak and wilted. Weeds choke the life from our desired neurons, filling our heads with bitter, spiny synapses from which we in no way benefit. Dr. Perry is fascinated with this unfortunate process, though intellectual stimulation is not his chief concern. He is far more interested in the effects of emotional stimulation on a child’s life, studying how a supportive adult presence filters the toxins from otherwise toxic stress, and how that same parent’s absence allows those toxins to flow unimpeded.
Perry is no stranger to trauma. A senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy, he has served as an expert witness on many high-profile cases in which children and adolescents were traumatized, including the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, the Columbine High School massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing. He stood on the front lines of mental health support during Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, assisting children and adults who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other emotional fallout. His research has informed our modern understanding of how young minds respond to violence, and the profound effect parents have on moderating, or exacerbating, this response.
Certainly, neglectful parenting has an adverse effect on children’s development. Our neural gardens need more than fresh soil to truly flourish. They need pruning and weeding and watering. An untended garden may grow thick and green if the sun is shining and rain comes often enough, but it will be a wild, chaotic patch of earth, fruitful perhaps, but also cluttered and choked with weeds. The same goes with young minds. Infants need more than food and warmth and safety; they need stimulation and interaction and play, and the more of it they get, the better they’ll be at thinking and reasoning and, above all, feeling. Emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence (what we generally mean when we just say “intelligence”) are closely connected attributes, but they are not identical. Perry gives a chilling example of this point in his 1997 paper on the cycle of violence.
Six o’clock in the evening in inner-city Baltimore. A 15-year-old boy named William sees a classmate shooting hoops on the neighbourhood basketball court. It’s twilight and the city feels deserted. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no cars on the streets, no conversations drifting though open windows. The classmate dribbles his way up the court, the thwack of his ball on the pavement echoing off the nearby tenements. William’s eyes drift from the basketball to his classmate’s shoes. Air Jordans, their vamps and laces an immaculate white, the fresh rubber of their soles squeaking against the tarmac with each step. William approaches his classmate, who eyes him nervously.
“Hey,” the classmate says.
“Gimme your shoes,” says William.
“What? No way.”
William lifts up his jersey and pulls a handgun from the waistband of his pants. He’d been wearing the gun for no particular reason except that it felt good against his stomach. It feels even better in his hand, he notes. The classmate’s eyes go wide. He raises his hands, backing up slowly.
“The shoes,” says William.
“Y-yeah, okay, sure,” the classmate stammers. Very slowly, he bends down and unties his laces. He takes off the shoes and hands them to William, who takes them with an approving smile. He holds them up to his face and looks them over, the gun still trained on his classmate.
“Cool. Thanks,” he says, and pulls the trigger. The classmate collapses. Blood speckles William head to toe, staining the leather of his new shoes a splotchy red. He puts them on anyway, not bothering to wipe them clean. On his walk home, he tosses his old shoes over a fence.
The stains are what undo him. Them and the gun, which confirms the story his bloody shoes had already told. The police take William into custody, where a stone-faced officer questions him for an hour. Most of his questions concern what happened and why, but near the end of their interview he asks the boy something different.
“Son, if you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?”
William thinks about it for some time. Finally, he responds.
“I would have cleaned my shoes.”
Consider William’s reply. There is regret imbedded in his statement, but it is of a purely intellectual sort. He regrets his actions because they led to him being caught, not because they caused the death of an innocent human being. In that respect, the boy couldn’t care less. He is capable of regret, an intellectual response, but not remorse, an emotional one. Perry’s story highlights this distinction. We are all familiar with the concept of mental retardation, but children can also suffer from emotional retardation, in which their capacity for empathy is stunted or missing entirely. And while mental retardation is often the result of genetic conditions, emotional retardation is almost exclusively learned. Just as a child raised by wolves never learns how to speak, a child raised without love never learns to form the emotional bonds necessary to empathize with other people.
Over the past few decades, we have blamed this problem on a large and shifting cast of bogeymen. Poverty, single parenthood, television, heavy metal music, video games: each has at some point faced the ignominious spotlight cast by the media as a rogue and a villain, the blood of uncountable children on its hands. And in truth, it’s unlikely that any of these factors serve to decrease problem behaviour in children. Being poor means more financial stress in the home, fewer opportunities for children to go to good schools or participate in extracurricular programs, and greater odds of living in a violent neighbourhood bereft of strong role models. Single parenthood doubles the burden placed on the mother (or father) and reduces the amount of time children can interact with them — somebody’s got to pay the bills, after all, and it’s a rare parent who can work productively and attend to their kid’s needs at the same time. And there is evidence that an overexposure to violent media can to a certain extent inoculate children to its horrors, making them, if not more violent, then at least less repulsed by the concept of violence. Yet all of these factors pale in comparison to the true root cause of emotional malnourishment: relational poverty. Not to be confused with poverty of the socioeconomic sort, relational poverty refers to a lack of supportive adults in a child’s life. Though a family may be well-off financially, their children can still suffer from emotional impoverishment if they have limited contact with parents, grandparents, and other friendly faces.
Children have in them a great capacity for resilience, but it is predicated upon the attention and support they receive from the adults around them. Parents act as a kind of psychological immune system, allowing children to deal with modest threats without suffering any long-term harm. Strip
