Brain Rules for Baby (9 page)

Most couples don’t imagine such marital turbulence when they get pregnant. Babies, after all, are supposed to bring endless, unremitting joy. That’s the idealistic view many of us have, especially if our parents grew up in the late 1950s—an era steeped in a traditional view of marriages and families. TV programs like
Leave It to Beaver
and
Ozzie and Harriet
depicted working fathers as all-wise; stay-at-home mothers as all-nurturing; children as surprisingly obedient and, when not,
creating small but manageable crises easily resolvable in 23 minutes. The protagonists were mostly middle class, mostly white, and, it turns out, mostly wrong.

A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E.E. LeMasters. In 1957, he published a research paper showing that 83 percent of new parents experienced a moderate to severe crisis in the marriage during the transition to parenthood. These parents became increasingly hostile toward each other in the first year of the baby’s life. The
majority
were having a hard time.

Such results were the sociological equivalent of claiming that Earth was flat. Conflict wasn’t supposed to happen when a couple had their first baby. Joy was supposed to happen. Prior to these studies, many felt that giving birth was such a powerful positive experience it could actually save marriages—and LeMasters’s data suggested the opposite. He was roundly criticized when he published his findings. Some researchers privately suspected him of fabricating them.

He hadn’t. As the years went by, more rigorous methodologies (and several longitudinal studies, which include repeated observations over many years) proved him right. By the late 1980s and ‘90s, investigations in 10 industrialized countries, including the United States, demonstrated that marital satisfaction for most men and women dropped after they had their first child—and continued to fall over the next 15 years. Things didn’t improve for most couples until the kids left home.

We now know that this long-term erosion is a regular experience of married life, starting in the transition to parenthood. Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year. More recent studies, asking different questions, put the figure closer to 90 percent. During those 12 months, scores on hostility indices—measures of marital conflict—skyrocket. The risk for clinical depression,
for both fathers and mothers, goes up. Indeed, one-third to one-half of new parents display as much marital distress as troubled couples already in therapy trying to save their relationship. The dissatisfaction usually starts with the mother, then migrates to the father. To quote an excerpt from a recent research paper published in the
Journal of Family Psychology:
“In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition.”

A British divorce lawyer recalled one illustrative case. Emma’s husband was obsessed with soccer, particularly the Manchester United team (also called the Reds). This condition was made worse with the introduction of a child. Emma actually cited it as grounds for the divorce. Her husband responded, “I have to admit that nine times out of 10, I would rather watch the Reds than have sex, but that’s no disrespect to Emma”.

Given all of these findings, it seems any couple contemplating children should undergo a psychiatric evaluation, then choose voluntary sterilization. What are we going to do?

There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression. We will examine each. Couples who make themselves aware of these can become vigilant about their behavior, and they tend to do better. We also know that not every marriage follows this depressing course of events. Couples going into pregnancy with strong marital bonds withstand the gale forces of baby’s first year better than those who don’t. Those who carefully plan for their children prior to pregnancy do, too. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place. One large study examined couples where both parties wanted kids versus couples where only one did. If both
partners wanted the child, very few divorced, and marital happiness either stayed the same or increased in the baby’s first year of life.
All
conflicted couples where one partner had caved (usually the man) were either separated or divorced by the time the child was 5.

The data behind this come from the
Journal of Family Psychology
study mentioned previously. The full quote gives much more hope: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition—
but planning status and pre-pregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.”

Marriages do not suffer evenly in the transition to parenthood; some not at all. But as LeMasters and later researchers showed, that is not the majority experience. The social consequences were great enough to warrant investigation. Researchers began to ask: “What do couples fight about when a baby comes home? And what does that conflict do to the baby?”

What researchers found is that the emotional ecology into which a baby is born can profoundly influence how his or her nervous system develops. To understand this interaction, we have to address the almost unbelievable sensitivity a baby has to the environment in which he or she is being raised. It is a sensitivity with strong evolutionary roots.

Hints of this vulnerability first came from the lab of Harry Harlow, who was observing monkey baby behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That his findings can apply to human infants illustrates how deep these evolutionary roots can go. Harlow looked like virtually every other scientist of the 1950s, complete with nerdy, Frisbee-sized glasses. By his own admission, he was preoccupied with “love”, though he had a strange way of showing it—both professionally and personally. He married his first wife,
who had been his student, divorced her after two children, married a psychologist, saw her die of cancer, and then, in his final years, remarried his former student.

Harlow also designed a series of groundbreaking experiments with rhesus monkeys that was so brutal, some scholars credit Harlow for inadvertently creating the animal rights movement. These experiments involved isolation chambers and metallic surrogate mothers. Harlow himself would use colorful language to describe his research, calling his chambers “pits of despair and his surrogate mothers “iron maidens”. But he almost single-handedly uncovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. This in turn laid the groundwork for understanding how parental stress influences a baby’s behaviors.

Harlow’s classic attachment experiments involved two of these iron maidens—doll-like structures serving as maternal stand-ins. One was made of harsh wire, the other of soft terrycloth. He took newly born rhesus monkeys, removed them from their biological mothers, and placed them into cages containing both dolls. The cold, wiry doll provided food, delivered from an attached bottle. So did the soft terrycloth doll. Though the monkeys would go to both mothers to feed, they spent much more time climbing onto and clinging to the soft mom. If the babies were placed in an unfamiliar room, they clung tightly to the cloth surrogate until they felt secure enough to explore the cage on their own. If placed in that same room without the cloth mother, the animals froze in terror, then went crying and screaming, running from one object to another, seemingly looking for their lost mother.

The preference was the same no matter how many times the experiment was done or in what variation. These experiments are heartbreaking to watch—I’ve seen old films of this stuff—and the conclusions are unforgettable. It wasn’t the presence of food that telegraphed reassurance to these little ones, a behavioral idea prevalent at the time. It was the presence or absence of a safe harbor.

Human babies, complex as they are, are looking for the same thing.

Babies are highly attuned to these perceptions of safety, though they may not look it. At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up over your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing that babies weren’t thinking about anything at all. Scientists coined the term “tabula rasa”—blank slate—to describe these “empty” creatures. They regarded infants as merely helpless helpings of cute, controllable, human potential.

Modern research reveals a radically different point of view. We now know that a baby’s greatest biological preoccupation involves the organ atop their necks. Infants come preloaded with lots of software in their neural hard drives, most of it having to do with learning. Want some startling examples?

In 1979, University of Washington psychologist Andy Meltzoff stuck out his tongue at a baby 42 minutes old, then sat back to see what happened. After some effort, the baby returned the favor, slowly rolling out his own tongue. Meltzoff stuck his tongue out again. The infant responded in kind. Meltzoff discovered that babies could imitate right from the start of their little lives (or, at least, 42 minutes from the start of their little lives). That’s an extraordinary finding. Imitation involves many sophisticated realizations for babies, from discovering that other people exist in the world to realizing that they have operating body parts, and the same ones as you. That’s not a blank slate. That’s an amazing, fully operational cognitive slate.

Capitalizing on this finding, Meltzoff designed a series of experiments revealing just how much babies are prewired to learn—and how sensitive they are to outside influences in pursuit of that goal. Meltzoff constructed a wooden box, covered by an orange plastic panel, into which he inserted a light. If he touched the panel, the light turned on.

Meltzoff put the box between him and a 1-year-old girl, then performed an unusual stunt. He leaned forward and touched his forehead to the top of the box, which immediately lit up its interior. The baby was not allowed to touch the box. Instead, she and her mother were asked to leave the room. A week later, the baby and mother came back to the lab, and Meltzoff set the box between him and the infant. This time he did nothing but watch. The baby didn’t hesitate. As if on cue, she immediately bent forward and touched the box with her forehead.
The baby had remembered!
She’d had only a single exposure to this event, but she had recalled it perfectly a week later. Babies can do this all over the world.

Those are just two examples illustrating that infants come equipped with an amazing array of cognitive abilities—and are blessed with many intellectual gadgets capable of extending those abilities. They understand that size stays constant even when distance changes the appearance of size. They display velocity prediction. They understand the principle of common fate: The reason the black lines on the basketball move when the ball bounces is because the lines are part of the basketball. Infants can discriminate human faces from nonhuman faces at birth and seem to prefer them. From an evolutionary perspective, this latter behavior represents a powerful safety feature. We will be preoccupied with faces most of our lives.

How did babies acquire all of this knowledge before being exposed to the planet? Nobody knows, but they have it, and they put it to good use with astonishing speed and insight. Babies create hypotheses, test them, and then relentlessly appraise their findings with the vigor of a seasoned scientist. This means infants are extraordinarily delightful, surprisingly aggressive learners. They pick up everything.

There’s a funny example of this. A pediatrician was taking her 3-year-old daughter to day care. The good doctor had left her stethoscope in the back seat and noticed that the little girl began playing with it, even inserting the ear pieces correctly. The pediatrician got
excited: Her daughter was following in her footsteps! The little girl grabbed the bell of the stethoscope, then put it to her mouth and declared in a loud voice: “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order please?”

Yes, your children are constantly observing you. They are profoundly influenced by what they record. And
that
can quickly turn from funny to serious, especially when mommy and daddy start fighting.

If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have.

How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to establish a productive relationship with the local power structures—you, in other words—as soon as possible. We call this attachment. During the attachment process, a baby’s brain intensely monitors the caregiving it receives. It is essentially asking such things as “Am I being touched? Am I being fed? Who is safe?” If the baby’s requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if not, genetic instructions trigger it to develop in another way. It may be a bit disconcerting to realize, but infants have their parents behaviors in their sights virtually from the moment they come into this world. It is in their evolutionary best interests to do so, of course, which is another way of saying that they can’t help it. Babies have nowhere else to turn.

There’s a window of several years during which babies strive to create these bonds and establish perceptions of safety. If it doesn’t happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In extreme cases, they can be scarred for life.

We know this because of a powerful—and heartbreaking—story from Communist Romania, discovered circa 1990 by Western reporters. In 1966, in an effort to boost the country’s low birthrate, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned both contraception and abortion and taxed those who were childless after age 25—whether married, single, or infertile. As the birthrate rose, so did poverty and homeless-ness. Children were often simply abandoned. Ceausescu’s response was to create a gulag of state orphanages, with children warehoused by the thousands.