Brain Rules for Baby (27 page)

Earlier I mentioned parents paying close attention to the emotional lives of their children
in a particular manner.
You could see it with the mom and baby playing peekaboo in Tronick’s laboratory:

The mom was extraordinarily attuned to her child’s emotional cues. She knew that her baby’s turning away probably meant he needed a break from the sensory flood he was receiving. Mom withdrew, waited patiently, and did not resume until baby signaled he was no longer flooding. He could then be delighted when mom returned, smiling, rather than staying overstimulated by her persistence and
probably crying. The total elapsed time was less than 5 seconds, but, stretched over years, this emotional sensitivity can make all the difference between a productive kid and a juvenile delinquent.

Parents with the happiest kids started this habit early in their parenting careers and then continued it over the years. They kept track of their children’s emotions the way some people keep track of their stock portfolios or favorite baseball team. They did not pay attention in a controlling, insecure style but in a loving, unobtrusive way, like a caring family physician. They knew when their kids were happy, sad, fearful, or joyful, often without asking. They could read and interpret with astonishing accuracy their child’s verbal and nonverbal cues.

 

Why does this work? We know only a couple parts of the story. The first is that parents who possess
emotional
information gain the great power of behavioral prediction. Moms and dads become so acquainted with their children’s psychological interiors, they become pros at forecasting probable reactions to almost any situation. This results in an instinctive feel about what is most likely to be helpful, hurtful, or neutral to their child, and in a wide variety of circumstances. That’s about as valuable a parenting skill as you can have.

The second is that parents who continue paying attention over the years are not caught off-guard by their children’s ever-changing emotional development. That’s important, given the tectonic shifts that occur in the brain’s development during childhood. As kids brains change, their behavior changes, which results in more brain changes. These parents experience fewer surprises as their children grow up.

Emotional surveillance comes with a caveat, however, for it is possible to give too much of a good thing. In the late 1980s, researchers were somewhat startled to find that when parents paid too much attention to their kids cues—responding to every gurgle, burp, and cough—the kids actually became
less
securely attached. Children
(like anybody) didn’t take too well to being smothered. The stifling seemed to interfere with emotional self-regulation, messing with a natural need for space and independence.

In that game of peekaboo, note how many times the mother backed off in response to the baby’s cues. Most parents initially have a tough time understanding when their children are feeling loved and when they are feeling crowded. Some never get it. One probable reason is that the ratio is different from one kid to the next—and maybe from one day to the next. Nonetheless, you need a balance (go ahead and insert our entire Goldilocks discussion right here). Parents who resisted giving in to their inner helicopter helped create the most secure attachments.

“I don’t like it, the 3-year-old muttered to herself as the guests left. Miserable throughout her older sister’s birthday party, she was now growing angry. “I want
Ally’s
doll, not
this
one!” Her parents had bought her a consolation present, but the strategy went down like a bomb. The girl threw her doll to the floor. “Ally’s doll! Ally’s doll!” She began to cry. You can imagine a parent making any of several choices in the face of this bubbling brew.

“You seem sad. Are you sad? is what the girl’s dad said. The little girl nodded, still angry, too. The dad continued. “I think I know why. You’re sad because Ally’s gotten all the presents. You only got one!” The little girl nodded again. “You want the same number and you can’t have it, and that’s unfair and that makes you sad.” The dad seemed to be pouring it on. “Whenever somebody gets something I want and I don’t, I get sad, too.” Silence.

Then the dad said the line most characteristic of a verbalizing parent. “We have a word for that feeling, honey”, he said. “Do you want to know what that word is?” She whimpered, “OK.” He held her in his arms. “We call it being jealous. You wanted Ally’s presents, and you couldn’t have them. You were jealous.” She cried softly but was
beginning to calm down. “Jealous”, she whispered. “Yep”, Dad replied, “and it’s an icky feeling.” “I been jealous all day”, she replied, nestling into her daddy’s big strong arms.

This big-hearted father is good at a) labeling his feelings and b) teaching his daughter to label hers. He knows what sadness in his own heart feels like and announces it easily. He knows what sadness in his child’s heart looks like, and he is teaching her to announce it, too. He is also good at teaching joy, anger, disgust, concern, fear—the entire spectrum of his little girl’s experience.

Research shows that this labeling habit is a dominant behavior for all parents who raise happy children. Kids who are exposed to this parenting behavior on a regular basis become better at self-soothing, are more able to focus on tasks, and have more successful peer relationships. Sometimes knowing what to do is tougher than knowing what to say. But sometimes saying is all that’s needed.

 

Notice in the story that as the dad addressed his daughter’s feelings directly, the little girl began to calm down. This is a common finding; you can measure it in the laboratory. Verbalizing has a soothing effect on the nervous system of children. (Adults, too.) Thus, the Brain Rule: Labeling emotions calms big feelings.

Here’s what we think is going on in the brain. Verbal and nonverbal communication are like two interlocking neurological systems. Infants brains haven’t yet connected these systems very well. Their bodies can feel fear, disgust, and joy way before their brains can talk about them. This means that
children will experience the physiological characteristics of emotional responses before they know what those responses are
. That’s why large feelings are often scary for little people (tantrums often self-feed because of this fear). That’s not a sustainable gap. Kids will need to find out what’s going on with their big feelings, however scary they seem at first. They need to connect these two neurological systems. Researchers believe that learning to
label emotions provides the linkage. The earlier this bridge gets constructed, the more likely you are to see self-soothing behaviors, along with a large raft of other benefits. Researcher Carroll Izard has shown that in households that do not provide such instruction, these nonverbal and verbal systems remain somewhat disconnected or integrate in unhealthy ways. Without labels to describe the feelings they have, a child’s emotional life can remain a confusing cacophony of physiological experiences.

I’ve seen the power of labeling firsthand. One of my sons could easily conjure up Richter-scale tantrums. I knew from the research literature that occasional tantrums are normal for kids in the first couple of years (mostly because their sense of independence plays a game of chicken with their emotional maturity). But my heart would sometimes break for him. He seemed so unhappy and sometimes quite scared. I would always move as close as I physically could to him when this occurred, just to reassure him that someone who will always love him was nearby (everyone can learn from Bruce Paltrow).

One day, as he was subsiding from a particularly fierce temblor, I looked at him squarely and said, “You know, son. We have a word for this feeling. I would like to tell you that word. Is that OK? He nodded, still crying. “It is called being ‘frustrated.’ You are feeling frustrated. Can you say ‘frustrated’?” He suddenly looked at me as if he had been hit by a train. “Frustrated! I am FRUSTRATED!!” Still sobbing, he grabbed my leg, holding on for dear life. “Frustrated! Frustrated! Frustrated!” he kept repeating, as if the words were some kind of harness tossed to him from a first responder. He quickly calmed down.

There they were, just as the research literature said: the powerful calming neurological effects of learning to verbalize one’s feelings. Now it was my turn to become misty-eyed.

 

You may need to practice labeling your
own
emotions out loud. When you experience happiness, disgust, anger, joy, just say so.
To your spouse, to the air, to God and a host of angels. This can be tougher than you think, especially if you are not used to delving into your psychological interiors and declaring what you find. But do it for your kids. Remember, adult behaviors influence child behaviors in two ways: by example and through direct intervention. Establish a habit of labeling emotions now. Then, by the time your little bundle of joy goes verbal, she will have a heaping dose of examples to follow while you raise her. The benefit will last the rest of her life.

Just one note: The point of this training is to increase your awareness. You can be aware of your emotions without being highly emotive. You are not obligated to perform an emotional striptease to just anybody simply because you are aware of what you are feeling. What’s key is that:

There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all the while eavesdropping on the musician’s brainstem (the most ancient part of the brain) to see what happened.

Kids without rigorous musical training didn’t show much discrimination at all. They didn’t pick up on the fine-grained information embedded in the signal and were, so to speak, more emotionally
tone deaf. Dana Strait, first author of the study, wrote: “That their brains respond more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians is something we’d expect to translate into the perception of emotion in other settings.”

This finding is remarkably clear, beautifully practical, and a bit unexpected. It suggests that if you want happy kids later in life, get them started on a musical journey early in life. Then make sure they stick with it until they are old enough to start filling out their applications to Harvard, probably humming all the way.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare—your child caught in a life-threatening situation, clinging for dear life by the slimmest of margins, you impotent to help.

In February 1996, 15-year-old Marglyn Paseka and a friend were playing in Mantanzas Creek when they were suddenly swept up in a central California flash flood. Her companion managed to scramble up the bank, running to safety. Not Marglyn. She was left clinging to a branch, water racing around her like rush-hour traffic, for 45 minutes. By the time the first responders arrived, she did not have much strength left. Onlookers, including her mom, were screaming.

Fireman Don Lopez did not scream or hesitate. He immediately lowered himself into the raging, frigid waters and began trying to attach a safety harness to the young girl. He failed, once, twice… several times. The girl’s strength was nearly exhausted when Lopez, at the last second, finally got her attached. Photojournalist Annie Wells was on the scene working for the Santa Rosa
Press Democrat,
and she captured that moment (and a Pulitzer Prize). It is an incredible photo to see, the weakened teenager nearly letting go of the branch, the muscular fireman saving her life. Like first responders everywhere, when everyone else was either screaming, sitting on the sidelines, or running away, Lopez ran toward trouble.

Parents who raise kids like my friend Doug, the valedictorian,
have this type of courage in spades. They are fearless in the face of raging floods of emotions from their child. They don’t try to shoot down emotions, ignore them, or let them have free reign over the welfare of the family. Instead, these parents get involved in their kids strong feelings. They have four attitudes toward emotions (yes, their meta-emotions):

Many families actively discourage the expression of tough emotions like fear and anger. Happiness and tranquility, meanwhile, make it to the top of the list of “approved” emotions. To parents of Dougs all over the world, there is no such thing as a bad emotion. There is no such thing as a good emotion. An emotion is either there—or it is not. These parents seem to know that emotions don’t make people weak and they don’t make people strong. They only make people human. The result is a savvy let-the-children-be-who-they-are attitude.