Brain Rules for Baby (10 page)

The orphanages soon were stripped of resources as Ceausescu began exporting most of Romania’s food and industry to repay the country’s crippling national debt. The scenes in these orphanages were shocking. Babies were seldom held or given deliberate sensory stimulation. Many were found tied to their beds, left alone for hours or days, with bottles of gruel propped haphazardly into their mouths. Many infants stared blankly into space. Indeed, you could walk into some of these hundred-bed orphanages and not hear a sound. Blankets were covered in urine, feces, and lice. The childhood mortality rate in these institutions was sickening, termed by some Westerners “pediatric Auschwitz.”

Horrible as these conditions were, they created a real opportunity to investigate—and perhaps treat—large groups of severely traumatized children. One remarkable study involved Canadian families who adopted some of these infants and raised them back home. As the adopted children matured, researchers could easily divide them into two groups. One group seemed remarkably stable. Social behavior, stress responses, grades, medical issues—all were indistinguishable from healthy Canadian controls. The other group seemed just as remarkably troubled. They had more eating problems, got sick more often, and exhibited increasingly aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable? The age of adoption.

If the children were adopted before the fourth month of life, they acted like every other happy kid you know. If they were adopted after
the eighth month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly caused immense stress to their systems. And that stress affected these children’s behavior years later. They may have been removed from the orphanages long ago, but they were never really free.

What stress does is kick into action our “fight or flight” responses. They really should just be called “flight,” though. The typical human stress response is devoted to a single goal: getting enough blood into your muscles to get you out of harm’s way. We generally lash out only when cornered. Even then, we usually engage in combat just long enough to escape. When threatened, the brain signals the release of two hormones, epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) and cortisol, from a class of molecules termed glucocorticoids.

These responses are complex enough that it takes time to properly tune every connection. That’s what the first year of life is for. If the infant is marinated in safety—an emotionally stable home—the system will cook up beautifully. If not, normal stress-coping processes fail. The child is transformed into a state of high alert or a state of complete collapse. If the baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his vulnerable little stress responders turn hyper-reactive, a condition known as hypercortosolism. If the baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, the system becomes under-reactive, a condition known as hypocortisolism (hence the blank stares). Life, to quote Bruce Springsteen, can seem like one long emergency.

You don’t have to raise kids under death-camp conditions to see negative changes in baby brain development. All you need are parents who, on a regular basis, wake up wanting to throw emotional punches
at each other. Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development. Though there is some controversy about this, the effects may be long lasting, echoing clear into adulthood. And that’s sad, because the effects are fully reversible. Even infants taken from severely traumatized homes and placed in empathic, nurturing environments, if younger than 8 months, can show improvements in their stress-hormone regulation in as little as 10 weeks. All you have to do is put down the boxing gloves.

What exactly can happen if you don’t?

Every parent knows children become stressed when their kids see them fighting. But the age at which they can react was completely unexpected by researchers. Infants younger than 6 months can usually detect when something is wrong. They can experience physiological changes—such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones—just like adults. Some researchers claim they can assess the amount of fighting in a marriage simply by taking a 24-hour urine sample of the baby.

 

The stress shows up behaviorally, too. Babies in emotionally unstable homes are much less able to positively respond to new stimuli, calm themselves, recover from stress—in short, regulate their own emotions. Even their little legs sometimes won’t develop properly, as stress hormones can interfere with bone mineralization. By the time these children are 4 years old, their stress hormone levels can be almost twice as high as children in emotionally stable homes.

Babies and small children don’t always understand the content of a fight, but they are very aware that something is wrong.

If marital hostility continues, the children are statistically more likely to display antisocial behavior and aggression when they enter school. They continue to have problems regulating their emotions, now made more difficult with the introduction of peer relationships.
They can’t focus their attention very well. They have very few tools for self-soothing. These kids have more health problems, particularly with coughs and colds, and are at greater risk for pediatric depression and anxiety disorders. Such children have IQs almost 8 points lower than children being raised in stable homes. Predictably, they don’t complete high school as often as their peers and attain lower academic achievement when they do.

If we take the end point of this instability—divorce is a convenient target—we observe that kids are still paying for it years later. Children from divorced households are 25 percent more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14. They are more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock. They are twice as likely to get divorced themselves. In school, they get worse grades than children in stable households. And they are much less likely to receive support for college. When marriages stay together, 88 percent of college-bound kids will receive consistent support for their college education. When marriages fall apart, that figure shrinks to 29 percent.

So much for Harvard.

Even in an emotionally stable home, one without regular marital hostility, there will be fights. Fortunately, research shows that the amount of fighting couples do in front of their children is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation the kids observe. Many couples will fight in front of their children but reconcile in private. This skews a child’s perceptions, even at early ages, for the child always sees the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging each other deliberately—and explicitly—after a fight allow their children to model both how to fight fair
and
how to make up.

Why will you fight? I mentioned four consistent sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood. Left to their own devices, all can profoundly influence the course of your marriage, and that makes
them capable of affecting your child’s developing brain. I’ll call them the Four Grapes of Wrath. They are:

If you have a child, you are statistically likely to tramp on at least a few of these when your baby comes home. The battle begins in bed ... and no, it’s not about sex.

If you know new parents, ask them if this complaint from “Emily” sounds familiar:

We’ll address the marital disparity in this behavioral snapshot, but first let’s examine how little sleep Emily is getting and what it is doing to her marriage.

It is hard to overestimate the effect that sleep loss exerts over couples in the transition to parenthood. Most parents-to-be have a notion that something will change at night. Most don’t realize how big it is going to be.

Write this across your heart:
Babies have no sleep schedule when they are born.
The fact that
you
do does not occur to them. Sleep and eating times have no fixed pattern in the newborn brain; the behaviors
are randomly distributed throughout a 24-hour period. There’s that social contract again. They take. You give.

This can persist for months. A predictable schedule may not make itself visible for half a year, maybe longer. Between 25 percent and 40 percent of infants experience sleep problems in that time frame, a statistic observable around the world. Babies eventually acquire a sleep schedule; we actually think it is burned into their DNA. But there are many frequent disturbances in the dry, uncomfortable post-uterine world—some internal, some external—capable of keeping infants up at night. It just takes a while for their inexperienced brains to adjust. Even after a year, 50 percent still require some form of nighttime parental intervention. Because most adults require about half an hour to go back to sleep after they attend to an awakened child, moms and dads may go for weeks on end with only half the hours of sleep per night they need. That’s not healthy for their bodies. Not for their marriages, either.

Sleep-deprived people become irritable—far more irritable—than people who are not. Subjects saddled with sleep debt typically suffer a 91 percent loss in their ability to regulate strong emotions compared with controls. The decline in general cognitive skill is equally dramatic (which is why chronically drowsy people don’t perform as well at work, either). Problem-solving abilities typically plummet to 10 percent of their non-drowsy performances, and even motor skills become affected. You have to be moderately sleep-deprived for only a week to start getting these numbers. Mood changes occur first; cognitive changes come next, followed by alterations in physical performance.

If you don’t have a lot of energy, and you are called upon to give to your youngest several times a minute (preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, a behavioral psychologist has noted), you quickly exhaust your reservoir of good will toward your spouse. Sleep loss alone can predict most of the increases in hostile interactions between new parents.

This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby, finish giving your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends? the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?”

The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business. Social isolation can lead to clinical depression in the parents. Depression can affect the parents physical health, contributing to a rise in infectious diseases and heart attacks. Social isolation is the lonely result of the energy crisis that faces most new parents. Studies show it is the main complaint of most marriages in the transition to parenthood. One mom wrote:

Loneliness, painful and ubiquitous, is experienced by as many as 80 percent of new parents. After the birth of a child, couples have only about one-third as much time alone together as they had when they were childless. The thrill of having a child wears off, but the incessant job of parenting does not. Being a mom or dad becomes a duty, then a chore. Night after sleepless night depletes the family energy supply; increasing spousal conflicts exhaust the reserves.

These losses cause a couple’s social activities to run out of gas. Mom and dad have trouble maintaining friendships with each other, let alone with acquaintances. Friends stop coming over. Parents
find little energy to make new ones. Outside of their spouses, typical new parents have less than 90 minutes per day of contact time with another adult. A whopping 34 percent spend their entire days in isolation. Not surprisingly, many new parents feel trapped. Said one stay-at-home mother, “Some days, I just want to shut myself in my bedroom and talk on the phone with my best friend all day instead of dealing with my children. I love them, but being a stay-at-home mom is not all I dreamt it would be. Another simply said of the loneliness: “I cry in my car. A lot”.

Belonging to multiple social groups is a critical buffer. But those relationships are most likely to collapse in the transition to parenthood. Women experience a disproportionate amount of this isolation, and there are biological reasons why it may be particularly toxic for them. Here’s the theory:

Birth—before the advent of modern medicine—often resulted in the mother’s death. Though no one knows the true figure, estimates run as high as 1 in 8. Tribes with females who could quickly relate to and trust nearby females were more likely to survive. Older females, with the wisdom of their prior birthing experiences, could care for new mothers. Women with kids could provide precious milk to a new baby if the birth mother died. Sharing and its accompanying social interactions thus provided a survival advantage, says anthropologist Sarah Hrdy (no, there’s no “a in her last name). She calls it “alloparenting.” Consistent with this notion is the finding that we are the only primates who regularly let others take care of our children.