Why did I agree to let a team of scientists assess my connection to my child? To some moms, it would be anathema to have your parent-child relationship clinically judged.
One reason was that signing up for the assessment was the easiest way to get a glimpse inside Tottenham’s lab without jumping through hurdles to protect patient confidentiality. It’s what she suggested when I asked to observe the study; she herself, she told me, had participated in the study with her two similarly aged girls. And I was eager to understand her work because I had a growing conviction that the adult-child connection is the single most important pillar of effective discipline.
Connection can transform a fierce conflict—like the stand-off between Maddie and me on that New York City sidewalk—or a child’s meltdown. As discussed in Chapter 3, these are the moments when your child’s amygdala is flooding their body with stress hormones, when holding hands can help them self-regulate. If you connect with your child, you stand a chance of helping them calm to the point where they can access the problem-solving parts of their brain. Indeed, the moment when your child seems most unlovable is exactly when they need connection the most.
Even when you can’t interrupt your child’s dysregulation, you can model how to stay calm and regulated in the midst of conflict. For sure, you want to avoid yelling or getting amped up, which your child is likely to mimic, whether consciously or because of the biological forces that Tottenham and other researchers are decoding.
One caveat: putting the relationship first doesn’t give you an excuse to back down from enforcing an agreed-upon family rule. It gives children a sense of security to know that the boundaries are solid, even if they respond by raging against them. Your job is not to make your kids happy all the time. You can connect with a touch and an empathetic word even when you’re saying no or upholding a rule. This is key in the Apprenticeship Model.
The day began with us filling out paperwork in the lab, whose rooms looked like a nondescript doctor’s office. Ava leaned forward in a low armchair, listening to the explanation of the day ahead. She wore a baggy T-shirt and sweats, her long brown hair pulled into her typical messy ponytail.
“In this lab, we’re very interested in emotion and brain development,” explained Bridget Callaghan, a postdoctoral scholar with a perky Australian accent. “We’re really interested in how kids learn about particular things, how they respond emotionally, and also how their parents help them to change how they think and feel.”
This first day, Ava and I would be playing computer games and taking psychological, language, and math assessments, often while our heartbeats, sweat production, and hormone levels were being measured. The next day we’d go to Columbia’s medical center for mother-daughter fMRI scans, Callaghan explained.
“Have you ever been in an MRI machine before?” she asked Ava.
“I’ve seen pictures of one,” she responded.
“An MRI machine is pretty cool,” Callaghan said. “It uses magnets which turn on and off really quickly to take photographs of your brain. It’s very special because it’s able to see beneath your skin to show you what your brain looks like.”
Lab manager Kaitlin O’Sullivan gave Ava a piece of gum and asked her to chew it until it was “juicy” and her mouth filled with enough spit to be soaked up by a wad of cotton. That would give a baseline measurement of Ava’s cortisol level, an approximate measure of stress, to compare to another spit test in ninety minutes.
Next, we answered a battery of questions to screen for metal that might be in our bodies, which could be dislodged by the powerful magnets in the MRI machine. Ava had never worked as a machinist. She had no cochlear implants, shrapnel, or bullets in her body. Callaghan reassured Ava that nothing painful would happen to her. “You’re volunteering your time, and we’re really happy you are,” she said. “It’s really important that if you feel uncomfortable or there’s anything you feel you can’t do, just let us know.”
Callaghan took a photo of me that they would show to Ava later in the study. She and O’Sullivan hooked us up to EKG electrodes to measure our heart rates, one stuck to each shoulder blade and one on the belly. Thin wires clipped to the electrodes snaked out of our clothes and around our bodies. Then they left us alone in a tiny exam room with nothing but a couple of kids’ magazines: National Geographic Kids for me and Highlights for Ava. As we read silently, a line tracking our heartbeats rolled across the nearby computer screen for the scientists to review later and determine whether and how our body rhythms were synchronizing.
I felt very aware of the wires enmeshing me and didn’t want to move my body or disturb the web of cords. Ava seemed perfectly comfortable and relaxed. She came across some knock-knock jokes—her favorite. She read them to me, just as if we were sitting on the couch at home. It was an odd but sweet experience to share with her this glimpse into the minute detail involved in data-gathering for neurobiological research. After a few minutes, Callaghan returned to unhook us.
Then we separated. Callaghan hooked me up to new wires to measure my sweat response, while O’Sullivan took Ava to perform computerized tests in another room. I sat in front of a computer with earphones on so that I could hear an annoying sound that periodically played while I watched different-colored shapes appear on the computer screen. A camera videotaped my reaction—a scrunched-up face and slight startle when I heard the noise—to play back for Ava while she was inside the fMRI machine. The goal: to see if she could learn about threats more effectively from watching her mother’s experience rather than a stranger’s.
As Callaghan connected the wires and set up the experiment, I asked what had brought her to Columbia. She had originally worked with rodents, and she found that when baby rats were separated from their mothers, they experienced accelerated neural development. That’s the kind of brain change that leads to overly anxious, reactive adults. At the time, Tottenham’s lab was beginning to publish similar findings in humans. It seemed a natural fit.
Scientists can look at the brains of children—whether rats or humans—when they’re separated from their mother and see reactivity in the amygdala, which controls the fight-or-flight response. When the mom comes back, the scientists have observed, the children’s brains return to normal.
It’s not just brain activity. The mother’s presence helps regulate infants’ body temperatures, heart rates, sleep, and elimination habits.
A Columbia psychiatrist named Myron Hofer discovered this by accident when he arrived at his lab to find that a mother rat had chewed through her cage and escaped. Her rat pups were shivering in the nest, their body temperatures having dropped to less than half of normal. They were unable to snuggle next to her warm body. Thinking that the pups simply needed to be warmed, Hofer tried doing so with a man-made heat source—but the pups still showed sluggish heart rates. He tried stimulating the babies with a cloth that smelled like their mother, and he tried grooming them; each of these efforts helped, but the pups’ overall metabolic activity remained subdued. Hofer’s research led to a whole body of work on early infant separation in humans and mice and helped support developments in attachment theory that traced emotional and behavioral problems in adulthood back to infancy.
In further experiments in the 1970s, Hofer showed that pups’ fear response could be switched on by the mom’s behavior. Remarkably, rat pups responded even when scientists piped the scent from their fearful rat mother into the cage. Similarly, human babies look to their mothers for cues as to whether a new situation or object is safe. This is one reason, researchers believe, that conditions such as anxiety, depression, and mood disorders are so often passed down from parent to child, not just genetically but owing to environmental factors as well. When a parent can’t effectively regulate their own emotions or their sense of fear, the children don’t learn to do so.
Although behavioral scientists have observed the intergenerational transmission of mental illness, researchers like Tottenham are just beginning to understand the biologi
cal mechanisms that underpin mental health and dysregulation. The key is to figure out the impact of the parent-child interactions you can observe with your eyes on the cellular changes that require microscopes and MRI machines to document.
Remember from Chapter 3 that as a child’s brain is developing, it’s healthy to experience an arousal response—whether fear, anger, or another strong emotion—followed by regulation. That toning is like a workout for your brain because it creates neural pathways that help you manage stress and anxiety. Scientists believe that it’s advantageous for a developing brain to stay plastic and flexible as long as possible—to allow this regulation pattern to take hold, among other reasons.
Researchers are trying to incorporate into this framework the findings that when children are neglected or raised without a reliable parent, their brains mature prematurely into a less-flexible state. On the one hand, this helps the children to manage situations—without the help of an adult—that other children their age couldn’t cope with. On the other hand, it seems also to bake into the brain a tendency to overreact to threats and be less able to differentiate true danger.
Something about the way the child’s regulatory system learns about threats in the environment during development has enduring effects into maturity. Just as rats or monkeys isolated from their mothers early in their development become fearful and aggressive, young children who grow up without a secure attachment to a stable adult are more likely to be anxious or risk-taking adults. As part of understanding how this works at the level of the brain, neuropsychologists like those in Tottenham’s lab are looking closely at all the mechanisms in securely attached, typically developing kids and their parents.
Once I completed the annoying noise video, Callaghan turned off the videocamera recording me and gave me a final task on the computer. As pictures of animals flashed across the screens, either scary or cute, I realized that I was taking the implicit bias test. I’d taken the test before, when I was writing about unconscious racial bias. The test was designed by Project Implicit at Harvard University, based on social science research about unconscious racial bias. Because US society treats white people more favorably than black people, many people—including me—internalize that bias. As a result, even if I do my best not to act in racist ways, my first, split-second response to a black face is likely to be negative—either fearful or rejecting. Sure enough, the animal images gave way to black and white faces, to which I had to react quickly.
When I finished the implicit bias test, she set me to work filling out a long questionnaire about my child-rearing practices, demographics, general health, and Ava’s health and development, as well as psychological assessments to evaluate Ava for anxiety, grit, depression, and behavioral disorders.
Finally, I regrouped with Tottenham to talk about how her interest in biology, emotional development, and parent-child relationships had come together over time. She was chic in black pants, tank top, and shirt, a trim woman with a neat, dark chignon and the energy of someone whose to-do list exceeds the time in the day. As we talked, she periodically glanced at the time on her Fitbit to be sure she wasn’t late for her next appointment. Like me, Tottenham has an Asian mother (Korean) and white father (Irish-English).
“Studying children who have an extreme disruption in caregiving makes it clear that parents are important,” she explained. Her inflection was low and controlled, the habit of a petite woman determined to be heard and taken seriously.
“We certainly knew that from decades of work, but we don’t know why parents are important. What are parents actually doing on a moment-to-moment basis to sculpt our emotional biology? We have these micro-interactions with our kids all day long—that’s really what parenting is—so what effect does that have in childhood?”
Every test that my daughter and I took would help the lab get at a different question: Could Ava learn to avoid a shape that triggers an annoying noise from watching my emotional reaction? Would she learn faster watching me as compared to a stranger? When we sat together, how quickly did our heartbeats and breathing synchronize? If I was in the room, did she perform better on a computerized task?
“From a neuroscientific vantage point, you want to get to the level of mechanism: if you pull this lever, what happens?” Tottenham said. “The parent’s presence is a powerful buffering effect against a lot of arousal in the emotional brain region.”
The results of all the experiments that Ava and I participated in would help the lab piece together a picture of how a parent’s influence and simple physical presence can help children learn and self-regulate. Eventually scientists will understand how parents can protect children from threats at the neural level—as well as how parents unwittingly pass along anxiety, depression, and other pathologies to their offspring. Unfortunately, Ava and I wouldn’t get our individual results—all the study participants would remain anonymous and be lumped together.
As Tottenham and I finished up our chat, she asked about a casual comment Maddie had made while I was filling out paperwork. It turned out that one of the many questions I answered—which Maddie knew about—disqualified me and Ava from participating in the fMRI study the following day. That’s what had led to Maddie’s bad mood. She thought she’d ruined my book.
IN THE SQUAD ROOM OF Boston Police District B-3 in Mattapan, nearly two dozen police officers lined the walls of the room, wearing pressed blue uniforms. Their insignia sparkled. They folded their arms across their chests or clasped their hands together over their belt buckles. They were listening. It was moments before roll call, when they usually received an update on overnight crime and instructions for the day to come.
Today the professor was in.
Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard University economist, was lecturing about the importance of holding babies and talking to them. He urged the officers to share his words with the young men they encountered on the streets of Mattapan and North Dorchester, one of the most violent districts of the city. That year to date, Mattapan had tallied nineteen shooting victims—more than any other district. Roxbury was coming in second, at fourteen victims.
“Most of you know that the majority of people behind bars are high school dropouts. A lot of the seeds to becoming high school dropouts were planted when they were little bitty kids. We’re trying to nip it in the bud,” said Ferguson, a tall black man with a small, graying goatee.
He explained that Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative had boiled down decades of social science research into “the Boston Basics”: five things that parents should do with babies to build secure attachments and lay the foundation for school and life success. I’d traveled to Boston to see whether public policy wonks and nonprofits could change how new parents across the city nurtured their babies. This initiative seemed poised to build the parent-child connection from infancy.
The first of five steps in the Boston Basics framework was maximize love and manage stress. The security that babies feel from being held and having their needs met builds their ability later in life to “be able to form an intention and follow through on it, which is called executive function skills,” Ferguson said.
The squad room could have been a classroom, with its dull checked linoleum floor, simple tables, and institutional color scheme. The students here were patrol officers who usually only connected with members of the community over negative incidents, like a domestic incident or a noise complaint. The police were trying to change that through community outreach and initiatives like turning the station into a haunted house for Halloween or giving out gifts at Christmas.
Ferguson stood a few steps from Wendell Knox, a Black Philanthropy Fund trustee; an even taller black man, with a sharper suit, Knox had introduced Ferguson. Next to Knox were the Boston police commissioner, William Evans, and Mayor Martin Walsh, both clean-shaven white men. Walsh wore a blue AUTISM SPEAKS puzzle pin on the lapel of his charcoal gray suit.
The second Boston Basics bullet point: talk, sing, and point. From three months befo
re they’re born, babies can hear the sounds around their mothers from within the womb. They’re born preferring their mother’s language to any other. So from the beginning, parents should narrate life to help babies develop verbal skills.
The importance of early language exposure came to light in the mid-1990s when the University of Kansas researchers Betty Hart and Todd Risley tucked voice recorders into babies’ blankets and carriages so they could count how many words the infants heard. They found that babies from low-income families heard roughly 30 million fewer words by age three than children from upper-income families.
Early in his career, Ferguson studied programs aimed at keeping African American and Latino students from falling behind in high school and college, a persistently stubborn problem. While 88 percent of white public school students graduated from high school in 2015, only 75 percent of their black counterparts received their diploma, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Poverty compounds the inequity.
The more time Ferguson spent on this seemingly intractable problem, the more complex the web of historical and institutional factors that kept students of color from pulling even looked to him. It seemed ever more daunting to raise achievement levels while narrowing the disparities.
Ferguson kept coming back to two statistics. In humans, 80 percent of brain growth occurs in the first three years of life. And by age two, the achievement gap already exists. At nine months, there are few discernible differences in a baby’s behavior or learning based on race, family wealth, or parents’ education. But as early as eighteen months, Hispanic and black children—and the kids of less-educated parents—already show lower average scores in vocabulary, listening comprehension, and sorting skills. The best classroom-based efforts to combat the achievement gap—even as early as age three in Head Start—come too late to do the most good. This fact hits home in Boston, one of the most racially segregated cities in the country.
The Good News About Bad Behavior Page 12
