Brain Rules for Baby (25 page)

The gene 5-HTT, a serotonin transporter gene, may partially explain the difference. As the name suggests, the protein encoded by this gene acts like a semi-truck, transporting the neurotransmitter serotonin to various regions of the brain. It comes in two forms, which I’ll term “long” and “short” variants.

If you have the long form of this gene, you are in good shape. Your stress reactions, depending upon the severity and duration of the trauma, are in the “typical” range. (Your risk for suicide is low and your chance at recovery high.) If you have the short form of this gene, your risk for negative reactions (depression, longer recovery times) in the face of trauma is high. Interestingly, patients with this short variation also have difficulty regulating their emotions and don’t socialize very well. Though the link has not been established, this sounds like Baby 19.

There really do appear to be children who are born stress-sensitive and children who are born stress-resistant. That we can in part tie this to a DNA sequence means that we can responsibly say it has a genetic basis. Which means that you could no more change this influence on your child’s behavior than you could change her eye color.

Take this genetic discussion with a boulder of salt. Some of these DNA-based findings require much more research to tie up important loose ends before we can label them as true. Some need to be
replicated a few more times to be convincing. All show associations, not causations. Remember: Tendency is NOT destiny. Nurturing environments cast a large shadow over all of these chromosomes, a subject we will take up in the next chapter. Yet DNA deserves a place at the behavioral table, even if it’s not always at the head. The implications for moms and dads are staggering.

In the brave new world of medicine, genetic screens for these behaviors will probably become available to parents. Would it be valuable to know if your new baby is high- or low-reactive? A child who is vulnerable to stress would obviously need to be parented differently from one who is not. One day your pediatrician may be able to give you this information based on something as simple as a blood test. Such a test is far off in the future. For now, understanding your child’s seeds of happiness will have to come from getting to know your child.

“Not CARROT!
shrieked 2-year-old Tyler as his mother, Rachel, tried to provide a sensible alternative to his growing interests in sweets. “COOKIE! Tyler wants COOKIE!” Tyler collapsed into a screaming heap, fists pounding the floor. “COOKIE! COOKIE! COOKIE!” he raged. When Tyler found out about chocolate-chip cookies, his sole goal in life became to stuff as many as he could into his mouth.

Rachel, a hyper-organized marketing executive turned stay-at-home mom, had been someone who rarely lost her temper. Or her to-do list. But these battalion-strength temper tantrums were too much. And they were inescapable. If Rachel left the room, Tyler became a cruise missile. He would stop crying while he sought her out and then, maternal target acquired, would throw himself back on the floor and resume his explosive grand mals. Most days, Rachel would become furious, then hide, sometimes locking herself in the bathroom and putting her fingers in her ears. She told herself that any feeling—joy, fear, anger—was good to express, whether hers or her
son’s. Tyler would eventually work things out by himself, she hoped, if she left him to his own devices. Instead, Tyler’s behavior steadily worsened. So did Rachel’s. Familial clouds regularly gathered in the morning for a day’s worth of behavioral storms. Rachel became increasingly anxious and uncomposed as the day progressed, rather like her son. Nothing in her life—professional or personal—had prepared her for anything like this. She wanted to take parenting one day at a time, but when Tyler acted like this, she felt as if several days assaulted her simultaneously.

Regardless of the temperamental dictates we discussed in the previous chapter, parents can do some concrete things to increase the probability of raising a happy child. I start with Tyler’s tantrum because of a startling fact: How Rachel responds to Tyler’s intense emotions
profoundly
matters to his future happiness. In fact, her response is one of the greatest predictors of how he will turn out as a young man. It affects his ability to regularly empathize with people and thus maintain friendships—big factors in human happiness. It will even affect his grade-point average. Starting with the process of bonding with baby, parents who pay close attention to the emotional lives of their children, in a very particular manner, have the best shot at making them happy. The point of this chapter is to explain what “very particular manner” means.

One excellent person to start off our discussion is a researcher who has studied the emotional lives of children—and how parents interact with them—for decades. He sports a name right out of a 1950s science-fiction movie, Ed Tronick.

Tronick has a ready smile, deep-blue eyes, and a shock of white hair. He likes to attend Boston Red Sox games (though he can practically watch them from his research office, which overlooks the players entrance on Yawkey Way). He was an antiwar activist in the
1960s and one of the first “parenting” researchers to live in other cultures, spending quality time with moms and dads in Peru, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in plenty of other places. But he’s most known for something you can see in a game of peekaboo. It’s the power of two-way communication in cementing relationships between a parent and child. Here’s an example, taken from Tronick’s research files:

Notice two things: 1) the 3-month-old has a rich emotional life, and 2) the mother paid close attention to it. She knew when to interact and when to withdraw. I have seen dozens of delightful research videos showing this choreography between thoughtful parents and their babies, and every one of them looks like a wonderful, messy ping-pong game. The communication is uneven, doled out in fits and starts, mostly led by baby, and always two-way. Tronick calls it “interaction synchrony.” Attentive, patient interactivity actually helps your baby’s neural architecture develop in a positive way, tilting her toward emotional stability. The brain of a baby who doesn’t experience synchronous interaction can develop very differently.

In that game of peekaboo, it is obvious that the baby and his mother have already formed a reciprocating relationship. In the late 1960s, researchers coined a term to describe it: attachment.
Attachment theory springs from the finding that babies come into this world preloaded with lots of emotional and relational abilities. Babies appear to express disgust, distress, interest, and contentment at birth. Within six months, they experience anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and joy. Give them another year, and they will get embarrassed, experience jealousy, feel guilt, maybe even pride. These emotions are like Robocop’s tags (or Post-it notes, if you prefer) telling the brain, “Pay attention to this!” Different kids tag different things. It’s as random as a newborn’s fascination with dad’s beard, an infant’s distress at wearing socks, a toddler’s fear or love of dogs. Knowing what your kids tag (what things they have an emotional reaction to) and then responding to that knowledge in specific ways is not only part of the attachment process, but one of the big secrets to raising happy kids.

Babies are born with the ability to relate for the evolutionary reasons we discussed in the Relationship chapter: It’s an especially handy skill for a helpless infant who needs to quickly establish secure relationships with those who can feed him. Given that most adults are oddly moved by the presence of a baby, the relationship soon becomes an exercise in mutual tagging. As this two-way communication solidifies, the baby is said to become “attached.” Attachment is understood as a reciprocal emotional relationship between an older baby and an adult.

The attachment bond is made stronger and more intimate through a variety of experiences, many involving how attentive a parent is to the baby in the early years (though genetic factors appear to play a strong role, too). If the bonding process runs into turbulence, the baby is said to be insecurely attached. These kids don’t grow up to be as happy. Their scores on social responsiveness tests are almost two-thirds lower than those of securely attached children. As they grow up, they exhibit more than twice as much emotional conflict in their interpersonal lives as do securely
attached infants. They show less empathy and tend to be more irritable. They also get the poorest grades.

Attachment theory has been wildly misinterpreted in the media, at one point couched as if babies were born with a quick-drying relational paste. Immediately after birth, all kinds of things had to be done in hurry—setting the baby on mom’s belly was popular—before the paste dried and the critical attachment period passed. These notions are still out there.

One colleague told me he had just finished a lecture on attachment when a woman named Susan came up to him at the lectern. “I am not sure what to do,” she began. Susan had had her first baby a month prior, and after an extraordinarily difficult labor, she had fallen into an exhausted stupor. “I slept through my attachment! Susan said, tears welling in her eyes. “Will my baby still like me?” Susan was in a panic that her relationship had been permanently damaged. She had heard from a friend that one maternity ward had put up a sign saying, “Please do not remove babies from mothers until after bonding has taken place.” Good grief.

My colleague tried to reassure her that nothing was wrong, that no developmental insult had irreversibly exerted itself, and that she could look forward to many mutually fulfilling hours with her newborn.

Attachment is more like slow-drying cement than quick-setting superglue. Infants start to develop flexible working models of how people relate to each other almost as soon as they are born. They then use this information to figure out how to survive, with parents being the natural first target. The relationships that form from this activity slowly develop over time, perhaps two years or longer. Parents who consistently apply attention—especially in these early years—statistically raise the happiest kids.

Is synchronously playing with your baby on a sustained basis all you need to do? Hardly. It may be necessary (and delightful) to interact with your 3-month-old, but that is not enough to turn him into a happy citizen. Kids have to grow up sometime, a process that naturally changes their behavior and complicates their relationships with just about everybody. As a parent, you will have to adapt to their changes. Parenting is wonderful. But it is not for sissies. How radical can these behavioral changes appear? Listen in on these parents: