Brain Rules for Baby (22 page)

Where does this happiness, regardless of type, come from? The main source of happiness was discovered by the oldest ongoing experiment in the history of modern American science.

The psychologist presiding over this research project is named George Vaillant. And he deserves it. Since 1937, researchers for the Harvard Study of Adult Development have exhaustively collected intimate data on several hundred people. The project usually goes by the moniker the Grant Study, named for the department store magnate W.T. Grant, who funded the initial work. The question they are investigating: Is there a formula for “the good life”? What, in other words, makes people happy?

Vaillant has been the project’s caretaker for more than four decades, the latest in a long line of scientific shepherds of the Grant Study. His interest is more than just professional. Vaillant himself is a self-described “disconnected” parent. Married four times (twice to the same woman), he has five children, one of whom is autistic and none of whom speak to him very often. His own father committed suicide when he was 10, leaving him with few happy examples to follow. So he’s a good man to lead the search for happiness.

The project’s scientific godfathers, all of whom are now dead, recruited 268 Harvard undergraduates to the study. They were all white males, seemingly well-adjusted, several with bright futures ahead of them (including longtime
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee and President John F. Kennedy). Their lives were to be stretched out like a rack for years so that teams of professionals, including psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, even physiologists, could keep track of everything that happened to them. And that’s what they did.

With an initial thoroughness the Department of Homeland Security might envy, these men have endured exhaustive medical checkups every five years, patiently taken batteries of psychological tests, tolerated in-person interviews every 15 years, and returned questionnaires every other year, for nearly three quarters of a century. Though supervised unevenly over the decades by what best might be
called a tag team of researchers, the Grant Study is probably the most thorough research of its type ever attempted.

And what did they come up with after all these years? What in the end constitutes the good life? Consistently makes us happy? I’ll let Vaillant, in an interview with the Atlantic, speak for the group:

After nearly 75 years, the only consistent finding comes right out of
It’s a Wonderful Life.
Successful friendships, the messy bridges that connect friends and family, are what predict people’s happiness as they hurtle through life. Friendships are a better predictor than any other single variable. By the time a person reaches middle age, they are the
only
predictor. Says Jonathan Haidt, a researcher who has extensively studied the link between socialization and happiness: “Human beings are in some ways like bees. We have evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.”

The more intimate the relationship, the better. A colleague of Vaillant’s showed that people don’t gain entrance to the top 10 percent of the happiness pile unless they are involved in a romantic relationship of some kind. Marriage is a big factor. About 40 percent of married adults describe themselves as “very happy”, whereas 23 percent of the never-marrieds do.

More research has since confirmed and extended these simple findings. In addition to satisfying relationships, other behaviors that predict happiness include:

If those things sound obvious—the usual suspects in self-help magazines—this one may be a surprise: Money doesn’t make the cut. People who make more than $5 million a year are not appreciably happier than those who make $100,000 a year,
The Journal of Happiness Studies
found. Money increases happiness only when it lifts people out of poverty to about the mid-five figures. Past $50,000 per year in income, wealth and happiness part ways. This suggests something practical and relieving: Help your children get into a profession that can at least make mid-five figures. They don’t have to be millionaires to be thrilled with the life you prepare them for. After their basic needs are met, they just need lots of close friends and relatives.

And sometimes even siblings, as the following story attests.

 

My two sons, ages 3 and 5, were running around a playground one cloudy Seattle morning. Josh and Noah were happily playing on swings, rolling on the ground, and shouting with other boys, everyone acting like the lion cubs-in-training they were. Suddenly, Noah was pulled to the ground by a couple of local bullies, large 4-year-olds. Josh bolted to his younger brother’s aid like a shot of Red Bull. Jumping between brother and bully, fists raised, Joshua growled through clenched teeth: “Nobody messes with my brother!” The shocked gang quickly scattered.

Noah was not only relieved but
ecstatic.
He hugged his older brother and ran around in circles, flooded with festive, excess energy. He inexplicably shot off lasers with make-believe sticks, shouting at the top of his lungs to anybody in earshot, “My brother is JOSH!” His good deed done, Joshua returned to his swing, grinning from
ear to ear. It was an impressively joyous one-act show, applauded at length by our nanny, who was watching them.

The essence of this story is the presence of happiness—generated by a close, intense relationship. Noah was clearly thrilled; Josh clearly satisfied. Sibling rivalry being what it is, such altruism is not the only behavior in which they regularly engage. But for the moment, these kids were well-adjusted and
happy
, observable in nearly cinematic fashion.

These findings about the importance of human relationships—in all their messy glory—greatly simplify our question about how to raise happy kids. You will need to teach your children how to socialize effectively—how to make friends, how to keep friends—if you want them to be happy.

As you might suspect, many ingredients go into creating socially smart children, too many to put into some behavioral Tupperware bowl. I’ve selected the two that have the strongest backing in the hard neurosciences. They are also two of the most predictive for social competency:

We’ll start with the first.

After decades of research burning through millions of dollars, scientists have uncovered this shocker of a fact: We are most likely to maintain deep, long-term relationships with people who are nice. Mom was right. Individuals who are thoughtful, kind, sensitive, outward
focused, accommodating, and forgiving have deeper, more lasting friendships—and lower divorce rates—than people who are moody, impulsive, rude, self-centered, inflexible, and vindictive. A negative balance on this spreadsheet can greatly affect a person’s mental health, too, putting him at greater risk not only for fewer friends but for depression and anxiety disorders. Consistent with the Harvard study, those with emotional debits are some of the unhappiest people in the world.

Moody, rude, and impulsive sound an awful lot like faulty executive control, and that is part of the problem. But the deficit is even larger. These people are not regulating their emotions. To figure out what that means, we first need to answer a basic question:

You can put this little vignette in the “Do as I say, not as I do” file:

Perhaps the son did not want to go to sleep and in defiance threw the pacifier. Mom already told us she was tired and frustrated; you can probably add angry. Lots of emotions on display in these three short sentences. What exactly were they experiencing? You might be surprised by my answer. Scientists don’t actually know.

There is a great deal of argument in the research world about what exactly an emotion is. In part that’s because emotions aren’t at all distinct in the brain.

We often make a distinction between organized hard thinking, like doing a calculus problem, and disorganized, squishy emoting, like experiencing frustration or happiness. When you look at the wiring diagrams that make up the brain, however, the distinctions fade. There are regions that generate and process emotions, and there are regions that generate process analytical cognitions, but they are
incredibly interwoven. Dynamic, complex coalitions of networked neurons crackle off electrical signals to one another in highly integrated and astonishingly adaptive patterns. You can’t tell the difference between emotions and analyses.

For our purposes, a better approach is to ignore what an emotion
is
and instead focus on what an emotion
does.
Understanding that will point us to strategies for regulating emotions—one of our two main players in maintaining healthy friendships.

One of my favorite science fiction movies,
Robocop,
has a great definition of emotions. The 1987 film takes place in a futuristic, crime-infested Detroit, a city deeply then as now in need of a hero. That hero turns out to be the cyborg Robocop, a hybrid human formed from a deceased police officer (played by Peter Weller). Robocop is unleashed onto the criminal underworld of the unsuspecting city, and he goes to work cleaning the place up. The cool thing is, Robocop can apprehend bad guys while reducing collateral damage to anyone else. In one scene, he scans a landscape filled with criminals and innocent bystanders. You’re inside Robocop’s visor; you can see him digitally tagging only the bad guys for further processing, leaving everyone else alone. Aim, fire: He blows away only the bad guys.

This kind of filtering is exactly what emotions do in the brain. You’re probably used to thinking of emotions as the same thing as feelings, but to the brain, they’re not. In the textbook definition, emotions are simply the activation of neurological circuits that prioritize our perceptual world into two categories: things we should pay attention to and things we can safely ignore. Feelings are the subjective psychological experiences that emerge from this activation.

See the similarity to the software in Robocop’s visor? When we scan our world, we tag certain items for further processing and leave other items alone. Emotions are the tags. Another way to think of emotions is like Post-it notes that cause the brain to pay attention to
something. Onto what do we place our little cognitive stickies? Our brains tag those inputs most immediately concerned with our survival—threats, sex, and patterns (things we think we’ve seen before). Since most people don’t put Post-it notes on everything, emotions help us prioritize our sensory inputs. We might see both the criminal pointing a gun at us and the lawn upon which the criminal stands. We don’t have an emotional reaction to the lawn. We have an emotional reaction to the gun. Emotions provide an important perceptual filtering ability, in the service of survival. They play a role in affixing our attention to things and in helping us make decisions. As you’d expect, a child’s ability to regulate emotions takes a while to develop.

In the first few weeks after we brought our elder son home, all Josh seemed to do was cry, sleep, or emit disgusting things from his body. He’d wake up in the wee hours of the morning, crying. Sometimes I’d hold him, sometimes I’d lay him down; either one would only make him cry more. I had to wonder: Was this all he could do? Then I came home early from work one day. My wife had Josh in a stroller, and as I walked toward them both, Josh saw me and seemed to experience a sudden rush of recognition. He flashed me a megawatt smile that could have powered Las Vegas for an hour, then stared at me intently. I couldn’t believe it! I yelped and stretched out my arms to give him a hug. The noise was too loud, however, the move too sudden. He instantly reverted to crying. Then he pooped his diapers. So much for variety.

My inability to decode Josh in his earliest weeks did not mean he—or any other baby—had a one-track emotion. A great deal of neurological activity occurs in both the cortex and limbic structures
in all babies early weeks. (We’ll take a look at these two brain structures in a few pages.) By 6 months, a typical baby can experience surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. What babies don’t have are a lot of filters. Crying for many months remains the shortest, most efficient means of getting a parent to put a Post-it note on
them
. Parental attention is deep in the survival interests of the otherwise helpless infant, so babies cry when they are frightened, hungry, startled, overstimulated, lonely, or none of the above. That makes for a lot of crying.

 

Babies also can’t talk. Yet. They will—it is one of their first long-term, uniquely human goals—but their nonverbal communication systems won’t be connected to their verbal communication systems for quite some time. The ability to verbally label an emotion, which is a very important strategy for emotional regulation, isn’t there yet.