Brain Rules for Baby (26 page)

You can feel the transitions occurring in the hearts of these poor mothers. But even though potty-mouthed 3-year-olds and strongwilled preschoolers almost certainly exist in your future, there is also this:

This strange sinner/saint combination of behaviors is often described as the terrible twos (though it is actually threes, fours, and beyond, as these forum posts attest). By the second year of baby-world, moms and dads are evolving, too. They have begun switching from cooing caregivers and glorified playmates to rule-breathing, hair-pulling, count-to-10-before-you-yell
parents
. The transition is natural. So is the frustration. Most people learn a lot from kids at these stages, including how little patience they possess. Soldiering on is a must, of course, but the way you do it matters if your goal is to raise a happy kid.

What kind of kid are we talking about? I think of my friend Doug, who attended my high school in the early 1970s. Doug was as sharp as a whip—really good at math, but he could just as easily have joined the debate team. He held his own in just about every subject to which he applied himself. Doug would eventually become valedictorian, a fact he seemed to take as a given even as a freshman. Doug was also athletic (wide receiver on varsity), comfortably self-confident (with an easy smile), and graced with an almost pharmaceutical-grade optimism. To top it off, Doug was as disarmingly humble as he was socially confident. This made him extremely popular. By all appearances Doug seemed intelligent, gifted, motivated, well-socialized,
happy.
Was it all an act, or was it something in Doug’s physiology?

A fair amount of data suggests that, in fact, kids like Doug are measurably different. Their unconscious ability to regulate their autonomic nervous systems—something we call vagal tone—shows off-the-charts stability. Doug is emblematic of a small but very important cadre of terrific kids who exist all over the world. These children:

That last fact gives them their best shot at being happy. These findings have prompted more than one parent to ask:

Doug’s parents weren’t psychologists. They were owners of a moderately successful grocery store, married for 20 years, apparently happy and well-adjusted. And clearly they were doing something right.

Researchers wanted to know how to get kids like Doug, too. It’s about as important an issue to the success of a culture that exists. In the absence of rigorous, randomized, longitudinal studies, some terrific investigators did the next best thing. They studied families who consistently produced terrific kids, then analyzed what their parents did that was so darned nourishing. They wondered if perhaps these parents had a few things in common. In other words: Did certain parenting skills correlate so strongly with the hoped-for outcomes that they could predict how
any
kid turned out?

Yes, it turns out. Though the data are associative, they are sophisticated. Regardless of race or income, parents who end up with great kids do similar kinds of things over and over again. We can certainly argue about what a happy kid really looks like and the fundamentals
of parenting practice. But if those bullet points look compelling to you, we know how to get you there. The research is statistically complex, but I will recruit a recipe from one of America’s favorite chefs to help us describe those common traits. His name is Bobby Flay, and his recipe is for barbecued chicken.

Bobby Flay has red hair and a New York accent, owns a line of successful restaurants, and has been Celebrity Chef-in-Chief of the United States for years. He is known for creating Southwestern recipes for people who enjoy taking regular trips to the top of the food pyramid, where all the fats and meats dwell. Fortunately for health-conscious consumers, Flay has also created tasty dishes that don’t add girth simply by inhalation of their aromas. One of them is a dry rub for baked chicken. Dry rubs are spices mixed together, then massaged into the meat to season it before cooking.

For our purposes, the chicken is your child’s emotional life. The spices, six of them, are your parenting behaviors. When parents properly spice this chicken on a regular basis, they increase their probability of raising a happy kid.

Parents face many issues on a daily basis in the raising of kids, but not all of them affect how their children turn out. There is one that does. How you deal with the
emotional
lives of your children—your ability to detect, react to, promote, and provide instruction about emotional regulation—has the greatest predictive power over your baby’s future happiness.

Fifty years of research, from Diana Baumrind and Haim Ginott to Lynn Katz and John Gottman, have come to this conclusion. That’s why your child’s emotional life takes the center role, the chicken, in our metaphor. You won’t get any of the other benefits of the recipe unless you have placed the meat of the matter squarely in the center
of your parenting behavior. The critical issue is your behavior when your children’s emotions become intense (Gottman would say “hot”) enough to push you out of your comfort zone. Here are the six spices that go into this parental dry rub:

We know a great deal about what works thanks, in part, to developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind. She was born in New York City in 1927 to lower-middle-class Jewish immigrants. She is spicy as cayenne and known for taking a fellow researcher to task over an ethics violation (the target was Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who duped a group of undergraduates into thinking they were shocking people to death). Baumrind had a second career as a human-rights activist and was investigated for un-American activities by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. She does her science at—where else?—the University of California-Berkeley.

In the mid-1960s, Baumrind published her ideas on parenting, a framework so robust that researchers still use it today. You can think of her ideas as the four styles of child-rearing. Baumrind described two dimensions in parenting, each on a continuum:

Putting these dimensions in the form of a two-by-two grid creates four parenting styles that have been studied. Only one style produces happy children.

Unresponsive plus demanding.
Exerting power over their kids is very important to these parents, and their kids are often afraid of them. They do not try to explain their rules and do not project any warmth.

 

Responsive plus undemanding.
These parents truly love their kids but have little ability to make and enforce rules. They subsequently avoid confrontation and seldom demand compliance with family rules. These parents are often bewildered by the task of raising kids.

 

Unresponsive plus undemanding.
Probably the worst of the lot. These parents care little about their children and are uninvolved in their day-to-day interactions, providing only the most basic care.

 

Responsive plus demanding.
Probably the best of the lot. These parents are demanding, but they care a great deal about their kids. They explain their rules and encourage their children to state their reactions to them. They encourage high levels of independence, yet see that children comply with family values. These parents tend to have terrific communication skills with their children.

 

Neglecting parents tended to produce the worst behaved, most emotionally challenged kids on the block (they got the worst grades, too). Authoritative parents produced Doug.

Baumrind’s insights were confirmed in a massive 1994 study involving thousands of students as they entered adolescence in California and Wisconsin. Based solely on parenting behavior, researchers successfully predicted how the kids would turn out, regardless of ethnicity. Further work has supported and extended Baumrind’s initial ideas. This later generation of researchers asked a simple question: How did the parents come to fall into one of those four parenting styles? The answer is in our next spice.

Imagine your best friend is over for a chat, and her 4-year-old fraternal twins, Brandon and Madison, are playing in the basement. Suddenly, you’re interrupted by shouting. The twins have gotten into an argument: One wants to play “army men” with some figurines; the other wants to play house with them. “Gimme those! you hear Brandon shout, trying to corral the figurines for himself. “No fair!” shouts Madison, grabbing some from Brandon’s stash. “I want
some, too!” Your friend wants you to think she has little angels, not devils, and she marches downstairs. “You brats!” she bellows. “Why can’t you play nice? Can’t you see you’re embarrassing me?” Brandon begins to cry, and Madison sulks, glaring at the floor. “I am raising a bunch of wimps”, she mutters, marching back upstairs.

What would you do in that situation, if you were the twins parent? Believe it or not, psychologists can, with some certainty, predict what you will do. John Gottman calls it your meta-emotion philosophy. A meta-emotion is how you feel about feelings (“meta” literally means ascending, or looking from above).

Some people welcome emotional experiences, considering them an important and enriching part of life’s journey. Others think that emotions make people weak and embarrassed and that emotions should be suppressed. Some people think a few emotions are OK, like joy and happiness, but some should stay on a behavioral no-fly list; anger, sadness, and fear are popular choices. Still others don’t know what to do with their emotions and try to run from them. That’s Rachel at the beginning of this chapter. Whatever you feel about feelings—your own or other people’s—is your meta-emotion philosophy. Can you discern Baumrind’s four parenting styles in these attitudes?

Your meta-emotion philosophy turns out to be very important to your children’s future. It predicts how you will react to their emotional lives, which in turn predicts how (or if) they learn to regulate their own emotions. Because these skills are directly related to a child’s social competency, how you feel about feelings can profoundly influence your child’s future happiness. You have to be comfortable with
your
emotions in order to make your kids comfortable with
theirs.

You can get a snapshot of family life by the way people talk about it. Sometimes an entire relationship spills out of a few sentences. Gwyneth Paltrow, star of stage and screen, grew up in the business,
her mom an actress, her dad a director. Her parents stayed together their entire lives, which, given the gravitational pull of the profession, is something of a miracle. In
Parade
magazine in 1998, Paltrow related the following story:

When she won an Oscar in 1999, in her famously gushing, tearful acceptance speech, Paltrow was full of gratitude that, because of her family, she could know what love is. Bruce Paltrow died four years later. But his loving comment remains an excellent example of what I’ll call “balanced emotional surveillance.”