cold — becomes a serious threat. Toxic stress is only toxic if children lack the means to combat it, just as a disease is only dangerous if a person lacks the necessary antibodies. Except with toxic stress, the antibodies are not internal. They come from outside of the child, delivered by the affection of parents, aunts, grandfathers, teachers, neighbours, and friends.
Parents are the conduits through which toxic stress must pass. This idea is both liberating and terrifying. On the one hand, it is comforting to know that a parent’s loving presence can supersede most any external hardship their children may encounter. Poverty, violence, mourning, disaster: all can be endured if the affected child has the support of his or her caregiver. But such responsibility puts a tremendous amount of pressure on parents. In the midst of a crisis, a hectored mom can add yet another worry to what is likely already a long and daunting list: don’t let stress trickle down to the children.
Still, Perry’s assertion isn’t something to fear. Good parenting doesn’t require a degree or tons of cash or a rigid adherence to any set rules. To quote Lennon and McCartney, all you need is love (though effort and a bit of common sense don’t hurt either). Happily, love is something that just about every parent has in abundant supply.
Bonding
In the grand sweep of human history, there is perhaps no force more powerful than the bond between parent and child. If you’re a parent, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand. The need to protect, nurture, and guide one’s offspring is deep, profound, and overwhelming, capable of circumventing even the most primal urges of self-preservation. Stories abound of mothers and fathers temporarily endowed with almost superhuman strength, speed, and endurance when their children are in peril, allowing them to lift up the back ends of cars with their bare hands and fight off violent criminals twice their size. Apocryphal and exaggerated many of these claims may be, but there is a grain of truth buried within them. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not hard to envision why this would be. Any sexually reproducing organism that made no effort to protect its offspring would be far less likely to extend its lineage to subsequent generations than one who defends its children tirelessly, even if doing so costs the organism its life. Though our genetic imperative is to survive, an even greater imperative is to preserve our genetic lineage, and our children are the vessels in which this lineage resides. As far as our genes are concerned, child trumps parent every time.
The parent-child bond and the forces that forge it form the crux of attachment theory, which we discussed in a previous chapter. We often think of the parent-infant bond as something originating from the minds of mothers, but proponents of attachment theory argue that the infant has a part to play as well. Mothers may set the tone, but their children respond accordingly. As a result, we have the three major classes of attachment behaviour (or four, if you subscribe to the Main and Solomon school of attachment theory),[36] each of which corresponds to a different type of parenting behaviour. Type B children are called securely attached, comfortable with short separations from their parents but eager to see them return. Their parents are consistent, supportive, and attentive to their children’s needs. Type A children are called avoidant, and true to their name, they tend to ignore their parents even when feeling insecure. Their parents are often inattentive, having never paid much heed to their cries, causing children to seek comfort in themselves rather than waste energy calling for their caregivers in vain. Type C children are called reactive/ambivalent, and they display a consistent yet curiously contradictory pattern of behaviour: though extremely agitated by short separations from their caregivers, they derive no comfort from them upon their return. Type C children cling to their parents while thrashing and crying, seemingly unsure whether they want to be comforted or left alone. This paradoxical reaction is the result of inconsistent caregiving; parents of Type C children may come running at their child’s first whimper in one instance only to let them cry unattended for hours in the next.
When attachment theory was first created, its conclusions were drawn solely from observation. Dr. Bowlby, the theory’s founder, knew maternal behaviour altered child attachment strategy because he’d seen it do so, but he didn’t know why. At the time, the question seemed almost irrelevant. The important thing was to observe the cause and effect relationship between parent and child; the engine driving it was a mysterious biochemical transaction, relied upon but not understood. Gradually, this has begun to change. Researchers have started mapping the neuroendocrine responses of new mothers to pregnancy, lactation, and childbirth, and have already found a vast network of hormonal signals responsible for “priming” mothers for motherhood. The epigenetic changes dutifully observed by Meaney and company do not flow unidirectionally from mother to child through mom’s nursing behaviour, as was once assumed. The child, simply by being born, triggers a number of profound changes in a mother’s brain, not the least of which being a surge of oxytocin production.
Oxytocin is a hormone responsible for our sense of camaraderie, our capacity for empathy, and our ability to bond with other humans. Not surprisingly, it is released in copious amounts during and immediately after childbirth. One can hardly blame mothers for providing themselves with a little chemical compensation, given the gruelling nature of childbirth (it’s called “going into labour” for a reason), but after the birth is over and the new baby has been swaddled and handed squalling to mom, oxytocin’s work is only just beginning. It floats through the mother’s bloodstream at elevated levels for months, its ebb and flow intimately tied to lactation. Each time a baby feeds, mom gets a fresh dose, a Pavlovian encouragement to keep it up. Oxytocin is the reason why a new mother will often report a profound sense of kinship with her children when breastfeeding; her brain is bribing her with tiny hits of bliss. It’s a cynical way of looking at things, perhaps, but such crude tactics are hardly limited to childbirth. Just about everything we do is the result of biochemical bribery or threat. We keep our bodies nourished, hydrated, and rested, and our brains reward us with dollops of dopamine. We procreate, and our thankful genes reward us with an even bigger burst of the stuff. We come across a fire or a steep ledge or a predator and our brain reprimands us before we do something foolish. “Don’t touch it,” our cerebellum warns, “or you’ll be sorry.” Should the memory of past pain not suffice and we prove ourselves in need of another lesson — by touching the fire or tottering gleefully over the ledge or prodding the large and irascible predator with a stick — the brain is all too willing to deliver. Pain is a warning, alerting us to a potential problem we must attend to (“Hey! You’re bleeding!”), but it’s also a threat. “Smarten up,” it growls, “or you’ll get another.”
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when we engage in something as evolutionarily beneficial as motherhood our brains praise our noble behaviour with a burst of mood-enhancing hormones. Oxytocin is one of them. Dopamine is another. Though both are pleasurable chemicals, oxytocin and dopamine have distinct characters, and thus serve different purposes. Oxytocin, as mentioned above, promotes bonding and empathy — feelings that, though pleasant, emphasize the importance of connecting with others. Dopamine is far more self-absorbed. It is the id molecule, hedonism concentrated into a few choice atoms and released in tiny, intoxicating doses. Which is not to say dopamine works solely to selfish ends; mothers get a taste of it simply by looking upon their child’s smiling face. Their varying characters make oxytocin and dopamine great partners in parental motivation. Oxytocin provides the softly harmonious sense of rightness about child-rearing, while dopamine offers ephemeral but potent moments of joy. Together, they comprise the parent-child bond studied by attachment theorists and are thus largely responsible for the continued existence of our species.
But sometimes these bonds loosen or break. The hormonal adhesives binding parent to child weaken, dissolved by competing chemicals that change the way a mother’s brain responds to her infant’s laughs, cries, and gurgles. A lot of things can derail mother-child attachment, but perhaps no force is as destructive and insidious in this regard as addiction.
Neural Solvents
No one would argue that drug addiction makes for better parenting. We’ve all heard horror stories of children living in squalid apartments, playing on a floor littered with syringes
