Brain Rules for Baby (21 page)

The brain appears to go through
some
commonly experienced developmental stages. But few in the brain science community completely agree on what they are. Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (who worked for a time with Alfred Binet, the IQ guy) came up with four phases of cognitive development in kids, which he called sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. Widely influential then, the concept of developmental stages is a contentious idea now. Researchers began to question the notion in the late 20th century when they showed that children acquire skills and concepts at much earlier stages than Piaget posited. Follow-up work revealed that, even within a given category, children go through developmental stages at their own pace. Many don’t follow the order Piaget conceived; they sometimes skip a step or two or repeat the same stage several times in a row. Some go through no definable stages at all.

There is nothing wrong with our children’s brains. There is just something wrong with our theories.

But some parents think brain development is like running an Olympic race. They want their child to win at every step, whatever the cost. You can still see the effect of this mindset when these parents children get into college. Though I mostly teach graduate students, I occasionally instruct undergraduates who want to get into medical school, and they care about little else. Many describe being hot-housed by pushy parents who seem to see their kids more as merit badges than as people.

This is called hyper-parenting, and it has been studied. Developmental psychologist David Elkind, now professor emeritus of child development at Tufts University, has divided overachieving moms and dads into categories. Four of them are:

Regardless of category, hyper-parents often pursue their child’s intellectual success at the expense of their child’s happiness. Though real numbers are hard to come by, a cautionary tale may exist with high-school students in South Korea, for whom parental pressure to perform well on standardized tests can be enormous. After traffic accidents, suicide is the leading cause of death for 15- to- 19-year-olds.

I understand where parents are coming from. In a competitive world whose winners increasingly are the smartest among us, it is reflexive for loving parents to be concerned about their child’s intelligence.
The dirty little secret, however, is that extreme intellectual pressure is usually counterproductive. Hyper-parenting can actually hurt your child’s intellectual development at these stages.

Children are extraordinarily reactive to parental expectations, aching to please and fulfill when little; aching to resist and rebel when older. If little kids sense a parent wants them to accomplish some intellectual feat for which their brains are not yet ready, they are inexorably forced into a corner. This coerces the brain to revert to “lower-level” thinking strategies, creating counterfeit habits that may have to be unlearned later.

I saw this in action at a social gathering one evening. A proud parent announced to me that his 2-year-old understood multiplication. He had the little guy perform by reciting the times tables. It became obvious, with some gentle probing, that the boy had no understanding of multiplication and was merely parroting back a few memorized facts. Lower thinking skills had substituted for higher processing features. Elkind disparagingly calls these types of displays “pony tricks” and believes no child should be subjected to them. I agree.

Children are natural explorers. But if parents supply only rigid educational expectations, interest will be transformed into appeasement. Children will stop asking potent questions like “Am I curious about this?” and start asking, “What will satisfy the powers that be?” Exploratory behavior is not rewarded, so it is soon disregarded. Remember, the brain is a
survival
organ, and nothing is more important to a child than the safety (approval, in this case) parents can provide.

There’s another harm when parents press their children to do tasks their little brains aren’t yet capable of executing. Pushy parents
often become disappointed, displeased, or angry when their kids don’t perform—reactions children can detect at an astonishingly young age and want desperately to avoid.

This loss of control is toxic. It can create a psychological state called learned helplessness, which can physically damage a child’s brain. The child learns he can’t control the negative stimuli (the parent’s anger or disappointment) coming at him or the situations that cause it. Think of a third-grade boy who has to come home from school every night to a drunken dad, who then beats him up. The little guy has to have a home, but it is awful to have a home. He will get the message that there is no way out, and eventually he will not try to escape, even if a way later presents itself. That’s why it is called
learned
helplessness. And you don’t need a physically abusive situation to create it.

Learned helplessness is a gateway to depression, even in childhood. I knew the parents of a graduate student who killed himself; they were archetypically pushy, demanding, and, frankly, obnoxious. Though depression is a complex subject, the student’s suicide note intimated his drastic actions were partially a response to his perceived failure to live up to his parents expectations. This is a powerful demonstration that the brain is not interested in learning; it is interested in surviving.

Write this across your heart before your child comes into the world: Parenting is a not a race. Kids are not proxies for adult success. Competition can be inspiring, but brands of it can wire your child’s brain in a toxic way. Comparing your kids with your friends kids will not get them, or you, where you want to go.

There are wonderful ways to maximize your child’s brain power. Focus on open-ended play, lots of verbal interaction, and praising effort—fertilizers statistically guaranteed to boost your child’s intellect from almost any starting point. These things aren’t fancy. After all, the brain’s intellectual performance envelope was forged in a world that was not only pre-Internet but pre-Ice Age.

The only thing you did to this sweet, calm little baby girl is to put a new toy in her crib. But she reacts as if you had just taken her favorite one away. Her eyes dart up at you and her face begins to contort, stress building up in her heart like a looming squall. She lets loose a Category 4 wail, flailing her legs and arching her back in nearly catastrophic distress. But it isn’t just you. This happens to the poor thing whenever a new experience comes her way: an unfamiliar voice, a strange smell, a loud noise. She is
so
sensitive. This infant simply falls apart whenever “normal” is disrupted.

A girl with long brown hair, about 15, is being asked about school and her extracurricular activities. As she starts to answer, you can tell something is wrong. She has the same troubled look on her face as the baby! She fidgets nonstop. She shakes her knee, twirls her hair, plays with her ear. Her answers come out in halting, constipated chunks. The girl doesn’t have very many activities outside of school, she says, though she plays the violin and writes a little. When the researcher
asks her what is on her list of worries, she hesitates and then lets the storm out. Holding back tears, she says, “I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they’re doing. I’m always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way?” She pauses, then cries, “How am I going to deal with the world when I’m grown? Or if I’m going to do anything that really means anything?” The emotion subsides, and she shrinks, defeated. “I can’t stop thinking about that,” she finishes, her voice trailing to a troubled whisper. The temperament is unmistakable. She’s that baby, 15 years later.

And she is clearly one unhappy child.

Researchers call her Baby 19, and she is famous in the world of developmental psychology. Through his work with her and others like her, psychologist Jerome Kagan discovered many of the things we know about temperament and the powerful role it plays in determining how happy a child ultimately becomes.

This chapter is all about why some kids, like Baby 19, are so unhappy—and other kids are not. (Indeed, most kids are just the opposite. Baby 19 is so named because babies 1 through 18 in Kagan’s study were comparatively pretty jolly.) We will discuss the biological basis of happy children, your chances of getting an anxious baby, whether happiness could be genetic, and the secret to a happy life. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about how you can create an environment conducive to your child’s happiness.

Parents often tell me their highest goal is to raise a happy child. When I ask what they mean, exactly, I get varying responses. Some parents mean happiness as an emotion: They want their children to regularly experience a positive subjective state. Some parents mean it more like a steady state of being: They want their children to be content, emotionally stable. Others seem to mean security or morality, praying
their child will land a good job and marry well, or be “upstanding.” Past a few quick examples, however, most parents find the notion hard to pin down.

Scientists do, too. One researcher who has spent many years trying to get at the answer is a delightful elf of a psychologist named Daniel Gilbert, at Harvard. Other definitions of happiness exist, of course, but Gilbert proposes these three: