Recovering from the Pandemic: What's the New Normal for Teens and How Can We Help?

June 27, 2023

Coming of age in the pandemic has been rough on a generation of teens. The pre-existing mental health crisis, intrusive social media, and real existential threats like gun violence and climate change, on top of normal developmental processes, have made for a perfect storm. How are teens faring, and how can they be supported in this new milieu? New guidance is emerging from science, practice, and policies.

WHAT DO WE KNOW?

The pandemic touched every area of life.

The impact of the pandemic affected every important area of young people’s lives across the age spectrum, according to a March 2023 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.[1]

Academic achievement suffered, especially in reading- and math- related subjects. School engagement was often difficult: Enrollment declined, absenteeism increased, and some children lacked access to virtual education. Parents, who under normal circumstances would have supported children’s learning, were themselves deeply stressed, especially those with young children, and some families were overwhelmed by financial hardship, food/housing insecurity, illness and loss. Many educators met the moment with ingenuity and passion, but others suffered high rates of anxiety and burnout, and many left the profession.

Young people’s physical health suffered, too. Though children were less likely to experience severe COVID-19 disease, a meta-analysis confirmed that they had increased risk for multisystem inflammatory symptoms, and 25% of children and teens who were infected with the virus got long COVID—namely prolonged mood disturbances, fatigue and shortness of breath, sleep disorders, loss of smell and taste, and fevers. Infected children’s rates of diabetes increased, and children’s health was more generally undermined by interrupted preventative care: Kids missed routine vaccinations, blood lead screenings, vision screenings, and dental care.

The pandemic’s toll on young people’s psychological wellbeing was uneven, but where it had an impact, it was intense and sometimes devastating. More than 265,000 young people lost a parent or caregiver to Covid-19, with Native American, Black, and Latinx children being two to four times more likely to lose a primary caregiver than white children. On almost any measure, impacts of all kinds were more acute for ethnic minority youth, low-income youth, LGBTQAI+ youth, and special education students, with their symptoms continuing to persist at higher rates.

Psychological impact varied by developmental period.

Stress affects children and teens differently depending on their developmental status and what they need from their environment. Those differences can be seen in the way the pandemic impacted young people:

Babies. Studies of babies born during the pandemic showed that while they didn’t seem to be harmed by exposure to the virus in utero, exposed and unexposed babies alike showed developmental delays by six months, especially in areas of gross motor, fine motor, and social and emotional development. Why? Babies need responsive and attuned attention, with a serve-and-return style of interaction. During the pandemic, rates of anxiety and depression in parents and caregivers nearly quadrupled, making it difficult to provide the normal emotional “nutrition” babies need to develop well. Early intervention can easily recover these lags, but ignoring the impact can have lifelong consequences.

Young children. A report synthesizing the findings of 76 high-quality studies on the pandemic and early childhood showed that preschool enrollment declined, and early learning in pre-literacy, math, and social-emotional skills declined with it. Nearly half of parents of children under five said they were worried about their children’s isolation and restricted social development during lockdown. This is a valid concern, since peer engagement helps children develop social coordination, communication, and peer play. Parents reported higher rates of behavior problems, hyperactivity, and peer problems in their young children, compared to reports from previous years. The problems were more intense in families with more hardships, and on days when school or care was disrupted, highlighting the need for stability and routine.

During the pandemic, anxiety and depression rose in school-age children, along with increased rates of ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tics. Children ages six to 12 were more emotionally dysregulated; they exhibited more “internalizing” issues (e.g., withdrawal, low self-esteem, eating disturbances) and “externalizing” behaviors (e.g., agitation, conduct problems) compared to pre-pandemic rates.

In private conversations, several educators estimated to me that children are about two years behind in in their social skills; among other things, they’re having difficulty managing themselves and their emotions with their peers on the playground. Bay Area therapist Sheri Glucoft Wong reported that families are having a harder time organizing and coordinating themselves and making transitions as schedules fill up once again, a kind of real-world wayfinding problem seen in college students, too.

Teens. The pandemic poured fuel on the fire of the youth mental health crisis that’s been brewing for over a decade. Last fall, medical experts recommended that all children eight and older get screened for anxiety and that all teens get screened for depression. In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report showing that youth mental health was still worsening, particularly for female, LGBTQAI+, and Black students, all of whom are experiencing more violence, distress, and suicidality. Six in ten female-identified students reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless,” and sexual assault rates rose, especially for female students, LGBTQAI+ students, and American Indian and Alaska Native students.

Children and teens worry about real events that are going on their lives, and the content differs by life stage. Young teens report in surveys that they worry most about their immediate experiences—e.g., school and friendships—while older teens worry about their future and the world they will enter. For about a decade, teens’ top worries have been gun violence and climate change. Many young people feel lonely and isolated; they feel that no one notices when they’re worried and that there’s no one to turn to for support.

Emily Frost and Quetzal François facilitate Bay Area mentoring and rites of passage program Love Your Nature for girls ages 10-20, nearly half of whom are BIPOC and/or queer- or nonbinary-identifying. I spoke with them about what they’re seeing in teens.

First, younger teens are worrying about their parents in new ways. “They’ve always been aware of their parents’ yelling or fighting,” Frost told me. “But now they’re overhearing their parents on the phone, late at night, discussing serious life decisions and struggles. Parents are stressed, so they’re less filtered, and teens feel scared about what they’re hearing. They’re also afraid to turn to their parents with their own problems because they don’t want to be an extra burden.”

In normal circumstances, young teens would begin individuating, i.e., seeking greater psychological autonomy while maintaining their connections. In typical individuation, young teens need to take their parents’ availability and stability for granted in order to push out; they might even create more conflict in order to practice gaining a separate mind. But it’s very challenging to individuate from someone you’re worried about, or have to take care of. And in lockdown, not only were young teens stuck in the same physical space as the adults from whom they were individuating; they were also cut off from access to the non-parental people—primarily their peers, but also mentors, teachers, and coaches—they needed in order to individuate.

Older teens in Frost and François’ groups, who are poised to launch into adulthood, express an acute sense that their future is uncertain. In stable situations, adolescents are designed to rush into the future—they’re creative risk-takers who excitedly move with their peers, their generation, toward what’s new and interesting. But these teens have deeply experienced losses of things they’d taken for granted—loved ones dying from COVID-19, school closures and the elimination of their educational and social worlds, and even disappointing college admissions that seem to be increasingly selective. Add to that a sense of impending doom about the climate crisis, gun violence, and health concerns, and teens don’t have access to the embodied feeling of confidence they need in order to launch.

What’s more, these dynamics create chronic stress that burden the nervous system and teens’ development.

“The cellular experience of young people,” Frost said, “is, ‘I’m not safe, this is not safe, and I don’t know what to do about it.’”

A 2022 Stanford University study bears this out: Neuroimaging of brains of 163 young teens before and during the pandemic showed accelerated brain aging due to the pandemic. Areas affected include memory formation, emotion management, and executive function. The changes are similar to those resulting from chronic adversity like violence, neglect, or severe family dysfunction.

Parents’ ability to help regulate kids’ stress decreases at adolescence, creating more vulnerability.

It’s a feature of development that children’s bodies are keenly attuned to signals of stress in their environment, as though they’re “emotional Geiger counters.” Beginning in-utero, signals of stress cross the placenta, causing epigenetic changes that direct a cascade of hormonal, endocrine, and neurological reactions that comprise the body’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) system, also known as the stress regulation system.

I spoke with developmental scientist Megan Gunnar at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, who’s been studying the impact of stress on children—and how the body regulates it—for 45 years. “The stress system is very plastic [modifiable] for the first 18-24 months, and then it’s set for awhile,” she explains. “Then puberty helps to reopen it, and adolescence becomes another period of heightened plasticity—for good or for ill.”

About a year before signs of puberty are visible, the sex steroids begin to remodel the brain in preparation for adulthood. An over-blooming of synaptic connections between neurons allows for creative potential, and synaptic pruning eliminates unused connections. As a result, the influences in teens’ lives at that time carry inordinate importance. Teens also become highly sensitive to others, especially their peers. Their reward circuitry is remodeled, boosting their desire to explore their world—and outpacing their “braking system” which takes longer to develop and will make them more cautious, especially in the presence of peers. Some evidence shows that part of the plasticity taking place may involve some alterations to the stress regulation system.

“Adolescents are interested in new experiences, novelty-seeking, especially with their peers,” Gunnar says. “In normal circumstances it’s a wonderful, fabulous time of emotional development,” Gunnar said. But there’s also a feature of the plasticity that makes them more vulnerable. “In adolescence, the parents get ‘booted out’ of their hypothalamus.”

What does that mean? “In childhood,” she explained, “there’s a very powerful capacity of parents, especially in secure relationships, to buffer the child’s reactivity of the HPA axis. The child produces less cortisol (stress hormone) when they’re in the presence of their secure caregivers. But we find in our research that that goes away about the midpoint in puberty. At that time, the parent’s presence no longer automatically dampens the body’s stress response, and teens begin to regulate more on their own—at least in individualistic cultures. (This effect hasn’t been studied in other cultures.) Gunnar’s research is congruent with other research that shows, for example, that, unlike in earlier childhood, teens’ brains are more activated by unfamiliar voices than by their mothers’ voice, consistent with the biological drive to focus beyond the family.

Along with individuation and a greater peer orientation, the downgrade of parental stress regulation may be part of an evolutionary design that nudges young people away from the nest and drives them to form new communities. “Later, when they form an attachment to an adult romantic partner, that partner is ‘let into’ the nervous system,” Gunnar says, “and they will be able to help buffer stress. But in the meanwhile, adolescents are vulnerable.”

Still, Gunnar says, parents can continue to be a regulatory source, helping their teens figure out how to regulate themselves in other ways. “We see in our research that when parents help with emotion coaching, teens are better able to regulate their cortisol response than kids whose parents don’t.”

Teens are extra sensitive to social evaluation.

Is the teen brain biologically disposed to increased stress? “There is some evidence that there may be a heightened level of cortisol production, overall, in adolescence, but we’re not exactly clear on the mechanisms of that yet,” Gunnar told me. “But work in the Netherlands has shown that there is a heightened level of cortisol production in particular to social evaluative stressors. Adolescents are freaked out by social evaluation, and girls become more sensitive to it before boys.”

In the lockdown, virtual access to others was vital; kids connected with friends and supportive communities across the internet, including on social media and gaming platforms. But some of the interactions may have harmed some of them. In May, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a bracing advisory about the risks of social media to young people’s mental health. It cautioned parents to set limits around social media use, and urged greater regulation and oversight of social media technology companies. One provocative—but nonscientific—global survey suggests that the later a child accesses a smart phone, the better their mental health as adults, especially their self-confidence and social life. Another study shows that lower media use increases teens’ prosocial behavior and self-regulation. Some research blames social media for the mental health crisis, while other research documents individual variation—i.e., some kids feel better using it, and some feel worse.

Regardless, there’s a growing skepticism about smart-phone access and social media use. Therapist Glucoft Wong said she’s seeing more families grappling with recalibrating screen time in their households.

WHAT HELPS?

For parents:

Some kids are fine. The impact of the pandemic was not universally adverse. At scale, the mental health crisis—and shortage of professional help—is alarming. Still, depending on the measure used, statistically one quarter, one third, or half of kids may be alright. Some kids even benefitted. Shy and socially anxious teens, and teens who were experiencing low-grade trauma at school, were relieved by the break. Extra care needs to be taken to reintegrate and support them.

Remember the basics. Sleep, nutrition, exercise and friendships are foundational to all other functioning. One Stanford neuroscientist emphasizes sleep and deep rest above all for wellbeing, and teens are notoriously short on it. Studies show more sleep for teens improves many measures of wellbeing and achievement. Challengesuccess.org offers simple tools to help make conscious choices about time use around the clock.

Focus on psychological wellbeing and emotional skills. All the professionals I spoke with for this article agreed that support for healthy psychological skills is as important as—and perhaps more important than—academic skills. Focus on relationships and emotional health, they advise. This guidance echoes 75 years of research on resilience. Lisa Damour’s book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers is an excellent place to learn more about how to do that.

Frost and François recommend sharing with teens what you’re learning about wellbeing. Leave materials out for them to read, finish the podcast you’re listening to while you get in the car together, etc. Casual and adjacent sharing helps support teens in a way that’s not didactic or face-to-face.

Make yourself prepared and available to have conversations about things that really matter, about topics that are relevant to your teen. “Teens are meaning-making machines,” Frost quips. “They care about how the world works and their place in it and they want to have conversations about important things.”

Have relationships, don’t just worry about them. “Being in the relationship is more important than the status check-ins of ‘How are you doing?’” Frost and François say. Have supportive family routines, a monthly café date, and be in the world together. “You’re planting seeds for their future and for the future of your relationship. It’s not one big thing, really, it’s how all the small actions day-to-day add up. Even if they balk at your suggestion, it’s worth persisting,” Frost says.

Gunnar concurs: “If I were the parent of a teenager right now, I would be working hard to have that child and the whole family have time when we’re just being a family and not in the media, on screens. Dinnertime, playing games, quieter, simpler things that provide that sense of grounding. And I would do a lot of listening and less talking.”

Clarify emotion language. Frost and François observe that since mental-health language has become more prevalent in our culture, more teens are using terms like “anxiety,” “panic attack,” or “dissociation.” It can be startling at first. Sometimes teens “front” with hyperbolic language; they’re trying it on, but it doesn’t always serve them. Have a growth mindset and see it as an opening for more learning, more talking. Ask gentle questions like, “What do you mean by that?” Tone is everything, says Frost.

In The Emotional Life of Teenagers, Damour reminds us that teens have big emotions in the best of times, and we can often help them understand and manage their feelings. It is when emotions become unmanageable or overwhelming that some professional help may be advised.

Help teens connect to something bigger than themselves. “Young people have a deep longing to feel connected to something bigger than themselves,” François said. “This includes nature, civic engagement, social justice, and volunteering. Getting to be part of a meaningful experience is so key.” Frost adds, “The impact on this generation of being the ‘turning point’ in the climate crisis is underestimated. Their relationship to nature is huge on many levels. And there’s a positive impact of spending time there, experiencing the mystery, the universe, and forces much greater than themselves.”

Reclaim exploration as a part of adolescence. In the 1960s, adolescence was seen as a period of exploration necessary to achieve a healthy identity. We seem to have lost that as we pressure teens to foreclose into decisions, identities, and careers, and as we reduce teens’ free time to be bored and mess around which is critical to developing their unique talents. “Allow kids to not know who they are and still feel valid,” Frost and François advise. Teens interpret even well-intentioned queries as pressure to have answers, and they feel they’re disappointing parents by not knowing.

Take care of yourselves. Teens can be encouraged to be kind and considerate, but they should not be their parents’ emotional caregivers. “Find your communities, find your regulation, your check points,” Frost advises parents, “so you don’t put so much on the teen to reassure you or to give you answers. Teens need to be free of their low-level anxiety about how you’re really doing.”

Connecting with other parents can also help set norms among peer groups, e.g., social media use.

Remember that you’re modeling self-care as well as becoming a better partner inside the relationship for your child to experience.

Resume collaboration with teachers. The three-way relationship among kids, parents, and teachers that has long been proven to support students broke down during the pandemic, Glucoft Wong observes. Parents, kids, and teachers missed out on the benefits of collaborative relationships and friendships and the seamless sharing of information that happens when campuses are open and people interact in person. Reach out to teachers—and other parents—to resume that communication and learn how to best support your students.

Set social media guidelines. A young teen’s brain is very different from that of an older adolescent. In The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Damour recommends keeping phones out of bedrooms at night and putting age-appropriate brakes on tech access, for example, starting with a phone that can send and receive texts but not access social media. Common Sense Media also has helpful guidelines. But make this a partnership; one study found that excessive restrictions in the absence of communication made teens more secretive and more relationally aggressive.

For educators:

Set later start times and minimize homework. A later school start time for teens is linked to better mental health, and many teens are pressured for time due to too much homework (which isn’t linked positive outcomes).

Acknowledge emotions wisely. Most educators know the importance of a social and emotional education; the challenge is making time for it and embedding it in the school ecology. When emotions are normalized and the school community becomes more skillful, relationships will be deepened and people more skillfully authentic. For ten years now, meta-analyses [DD1] have consistently demonstrated the widespread positive impact of social and emotional learning on adults and students alike.

Create the culture you want. Create social norms for the culture and climate to encourage desired behaviors that become the norm. There are numerous surveys available to schools that let students give feedback about their school culture and assess school climate. Students can also contribute: Research on InspirEd, student-led social and emotional initiatives, showed improvements in school climate, school pride, student relationships and emotional safety.

Provide resources to students. Normalize conversations about mental health and psychological services. Learn what resources are available for your students and communicate those to them. Students need to know who to talk to, how to disclose, and find care in hard moments, like following a sexual assault, when a friend is in trouble, or when they’re invited to participate in harmful behaviors.

Facilitate safe, supportive student relationships across ages. Mentors come in all ages and locations.

Convey hope and inspiration. Students need more than information about problems; they need models and stories that give them hope about their future and their ability to navigate and shape it, without feeling overwhelmed by their responsibility for it. “Teens need honesty, but hopeful honesty,” Frost and François add. “They need to be held in a process of making meaning of what they’re experiencing. Otherwise, where will they get the perspective to face inevitable adversity?”

Model wellbeing. Model how to be an adult and how to achieve the future you want.

* * * * *

Unfortunately, all of the above advice is given in a particularly challenging context. Currently on overall measures of child well-being, the U.S. ranks 36th among 38 nations with comparable high-income economies.

“The nation is getting riled up about the wrong things,” Gunnar says. “We need to be very riled up about how to keep the world a safe place, about critical things like the climate and gun violence. That’s not for the kids to do. It’s for the adults to do.”

In the meanwhile, we can still all have a role in making things better for teens. Growing up in a stressful and unpredictable world will be part of this generation’s story, but in the safety of our patient gaze, warm regard, and reliable support, they may even develop hidden talents—gifts and abilities that we cannot imagine and that only emerge in difficult circumstances. As the author and artist Chanel Miller writes in Know My Name, “You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do….Wait for the good to come.”

[1] a group convened by the federal government to solve complex national problems and inform public policy

Rifts and Repairs in the Fabric of Family Life

August 12, 2020

Three months into the pandemic, I had the urge to see my 28-year-old daughter and her husband, 2000 miles away. She had weathered an acute health crisis, followed by community protests that propelled them both onto the streets to serve food and clean up neighborhoods. They were coping, but the accumulation of challenges made the mom in me to want to connect with and support them. So, together with my husband, my other daughter, and her husband, our family of six adults and two dogs formed a new pod inside my daughter’s home in the steamy heat of the Minneapolis summer.

As I packed, a wisp of doubt crept in. We six hadn’t lived together under the same roof, ever. Would I blow it? Would I “flap my lips,” as a friend calls it, and accidently say something hurtful? Some time back, in a careless moment of exhaustion, I had insulted my brand-new son-in-law with a thoughtless remark. He was rightfully hurt, and it took a long letter and a phone call to get us back on track.

My own siblings and I were raised inside the intractable rupture that was my parents’ marriage. Their lifelong conflict sowed discord and division in everyone around them. I worked hard to create a different, positive family climate with my husband and our children. My old ghosts were haunting me, though, and I didn’t want to ruin a good thing.

We change each other’s brains and bodies.

The field of developmental science has demonstrated that our connections with one another are paramount, even physically palpable. There is a great deal of research that tells us so.

For example:

Newborns appear helpless, but the abilities they arrive with are the ones that will draw them into human relationships: a preference for human sights and sounds over nonhuman ones; the recognition of their mother’s voice, language, and smell over the voices, languages, and smells of others; and more. In other words, infants are born biased to bond and attach.

Caregivers and babies even change each other’s bodies and brains. There are the obvious changes that pregnancy brings, of course. But the act of caring for a baby also changes both men’s and women’s brains, whether or not the caregivers are biologically related to the baby. Caring activates and grows the areas of the adult brain involved in vigilance, watchfulness, and safety; empathy and perspective taking; and feelings of reward and motivation—all qualities that help us want to care for and keep our babies safe. And dads’ testosterone levels even drop to help men be more sensitive to their babies.

Caregivers change their babies’ bodies, too. In the first few years of life, the quality of care we offer our babies turns on or off their genes that control the development of their stress-regulation system. This sets the child’s baseline for stress sensitivity and management.

We grow the biological foundation of babies’ positive psychology best when we’re within a window of synchrony, or harmony, with them. Ruth Feldman is a developmental neuroscientist at the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya (Israel) who has analyzed babies and parents while they interact. Earlier, she studied jazz, observing how musicians improvise together, playing off of one another in spontaneous but coordinated riffs. That appreciation set her on a career of studying synchrony, or the unscripted coordinated interactions, in human relationships.

Feldman and her colleagues recorded and micro-analyzed babies and adults while they interacted—their gazes, sounds, and emotional expressions, along with their heart rates and hormones. When the interactions were synchronized, or had a coordinated, turn-taking quality, caregiver and infant heartbeats tracked each other within a one-second lag; that is, when one sped up, the other accelerated within a second. The more the pair was in synchrony, the more their levels of oxytocin (the love and bonding hormone) tracked, too. There was no difference between male and female caregivers, nor between male and female babies.

Feldman defines synchrony as the coordinated social interactions between people in which hormonal, physiological, and behavioral cues are exchanged. When interactions are synchronous, both participants’ brains activate the same areas and release the same hormones. In exchanges with minds that are still developing, the capability for positive interactions is transferred to the baby or child, supporting their growing ability to enjoy and thrive in relationships. Longitudinal studies have shown that this early synchrony in caregiver-baby relationships leads to a child having greater empathy, better self-regulation, and improved social skills later in life.

One of the best displays of synchrony can be seen in the still-face experiment. Babies and their mothers or fathers are seated facing each other, and at first, the adults are told to interact normally with their babies. In videos of this phase, we can see the playful give-and-take. Then the adult is asked to hold their face still, motionless and expressionless, like a mask. Instantly, the baby becomes visibly distressed. They turn their face away and back again, and they flail their arms, as if trying to draw the adult back into the connection. Some babies adopt a frozen attention in an attempt to lock in and control their caregiver with their eyes. Eventually, all the babies dissolve into helplessness, frustration, or fear. It isn’t until the adult re-engages and the rupture is repaired that the baby relaxes and comes back into relationship.

Research on older children and adults confirms that we suffer when our relationships are torn. Being rejected, excluded, or ostracized can activate the same neural pathways as physical pain, only social pain may be worse because it is relived, over and over, in a person’s mind. One study of children’s daily stresses, where their stress hormone cortisol was sampled twice a day, provided a peek beneath the surface of a rupture. When one nine-year-old girl was scolded, hit, and threatened by her caregiver for spilling a glass of water, the child’s cortisol levels were elevated for two days; four days later, she was sick with a fever and a cold. Prolonged stress also undermines the immune system.

Children who are bullied at school can develop physical symptoms like abdominal pain; headaches; and chest, back, and joint pain, along with emotional and interpersonal problems that can last a lifetime. Social isolation and loneliness raise health risks at a rate similar to smoking, and they triple mortality risk. One of the most well-documented examples of our physical connection is the “widowhood effect,” the increased likelihood of dying in the first three months after the loss of a beloved partner, especially of a “broken heart.”

Yet disconnections are a fact of life.

But it’s not realistic, or possible, or even healthy to expect that our relationships will be in synchrony all the time. Even babies disconnect, crawling away from their secure base to explore the world. School-age children try out new activities and grow new relationships with friends and teachers. Teens individuate from parents, striving to be psychologically independent while remaining connected to their parents. And adult children have full lives of their own.

Raising a family is about constantly renegotiating our connection amidst an ever-shifting balance of power with children. Life itself is dynamic, not static; we are constantly adapting to fluctuating circumstances. The alternative scenario would be a rigid, frozen, inflexible orientation that would obstruct our ability to get anything done, prevent our growth, and imperil our survival. It is unrealistic to think that our connections with family members and loved ones won’t be disturbed and disrupted. We are constantly navigating the ever-changing waters of closeness and distance, rupture and repair.

In fact, Ed Tronick, who created the Still-Face Experiment, together with colleague Andrew Gianino, calculated how often infants and caregivers are attuned to each other—and they found that it’s surprisingly little. Even in healthy, securely attached relationships, caregivers and babies are in sync only 30% of the time. The other 70%, they’re mismatched, out of synch, or making repairs and coming back together. Cheeringly, even babies work toward repairs with their gazes, smiles, gestures, protests, and calls.

These mismatches and repairs are critical, Tronick explains. They’re important for growing children’s self-regulation, coping, and resilience. It is through these interactional mismatches—in small, manageable doses—that babies, and later children, learn that the world does not track them perfectly. These small exposures to the micro-stress of unpleasant feelings, followed by the pleasant feelings that accompany the repair, are what give them manageable practice in keeping their boat afloat when the waters are choppy. Put another way, if a caregiver met all of their child’s needs perfectly, it would actually get in the way of the child’s development.

Life is a series of mismatches, miscommunications, and misattunements that are quickly repaired, says Tronick, and then again become miscoordinated and stressful, and again are repaired. This occurs thousands of times in a day, and millions of times over a year. Tronick compares the experience to training for a marathon. Runners don’t run marathons to train for a marathon, he writes:

They run a specific amount each day and week and increase the distance over the course of weeks and days. However, it is not until they actually run the marathon that they run the full distance. The earlier training leads to the development of the capacity to extend themselves to the full distance. The daily training in a sense developed their coping capacities such that they had the resilience to go the full distance. Of course, without the training had they tried to go the full—traumatic—distance they would have failed. (Tronick, 2006, p. 84)

As children grow, relationships are threaded with conflicts. Children have more conflicts with their friends than with non-friends, but with friends, they also use more strategies to preserve the relationship, like negotiation, problem-solving, and finding fair-minded solutions. Sibling conflict is legendary but also precarious, because while practice resolving conflicts with siblings can promote development, sibling aggression is also the most common form of family violence—something that needs more attention. Adults’ conflicts escalate when they become parents, but if handled well, the conflicts can serve to strengthen the relationship by finding a new balance and deepening understanding and intimacy after differences emerge.

If relationships are critical, yet interpersonal conflict is unavoidable—and even necessary—then the only way we can maintain important relationships is to get better at re-synchronizing them, and especially at tending to repairs when they rupture.

Repairing ruptures is essential.

“Repairing ruptures is the most essential thing in parenting,” says UCLA neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel, director of the Mindsight Institute and author of several books on interpersonal neurobiology. When the relationship is positive, there is a trust and a belief in the other’s good intentions, and children easily restore from minor ruptures.

But if you “lose it,” as we all do, he says, it’s important to go back to the child, apologize, find out how it felt to them, and assure them you’ll do everything in your power to not repeat it.

This can be tricky for adults. Apologizing to a child might feel beneath us, or we may fear that we’re giving away our power. We shouldn’t have to apologize to a child, because as adults we are always right, right? Of course not. But it’s easy to get stuck in a vertical power relationship to our child that makes backtracking hard. Vertical relationships are those moments in which we exert power over our children: when we direct and socialize them, train and teach them, monitor, set limits, and guide. Of course these are necessary parenting controls, particularly in situations involving safety, but they have to be in balance with more equitable, and even solicitous, power dynamics.

In a small Canadian study of how parents of four- to seven-year-old children strengthen, damage, and repair their relationships with their children, parents reported that it was their overuse of power and authority, and especially stonewalling (shutting children out, giving the silent treatment), that most harmed their relationships with their young children. Their relationships were strengthened, though, in more horizontal power dynamics like playing together, negotiating, sharing, collaborating, taking turns, compromising, having fun, and sharing in psychological intimacy. Parents repaired missteps and restored intimacy by expressing warmth and affection, talking about what happened, and/or apologizing.

The multifaceted nature of family relationships feels to me like a fabric in which the weaving is largely directed by the parents when children are young. But as children grow, parents increasingly yield the pattern to the young adults. Stitches can still be dropped and threads misaligned.

Prior to our visit, my daughter and I had a phone conversation. We shared our excitement about the rare chance to spend so much time together. Then we gingerly expressed our concerns.

“I’m afraid we’ll get on each other’s nerves,” I said.

“I’m afraid I’ll be cooking and cleaning the whole time,” she replied.

So we strategized about preventing these foibles. She made a spreadsheet of chores where everyone signed up for a turn cooking and cleaning, and we discussed the space needs that people would have for working and making phone calls.

Then I drew a breath and took a page from the science. “I think we have to expect that conflicts are going to happen,” I said. “It’s how we work through them that will matter. The love is in the repair.”

On our first night together, my daughter’s husband began dinner with an invitation for gratitude reflections. “The silver lining to this awful time,” he said, “is that we can be together. I’m so grateful for that.” And we went around the table and shared. It set a positive tone.

And yet, we had some bumps. There was a coup against the rigor of the chores spreadsheet. And I did flap my lips and divulged something my daughter thought I shouldn’t have. I was momentarily mortified, but I engaged in a couple rounds of apologies and repairs.

“Thank you,” she said simply. Then she smiled, teasing, “Don’t you know my love language is feisty?”

One hot afternoon, I came upon my son-in-law watering the flowers outside. I’d been on a walk, and my feet were sandy and dirty.

“Wait,” he said, stopping me. Then he showered water from the watering can onto my bare feet, and with his hands, gently rubbed them clean.

I was moved by this humble gesture and felt filled with appreciation for a good repair.

“Relationships shrink to the size of the field of repair,” says Rick Hanson, psychologist and author of several books on the neuroscience of wellbeing. “But a bid for a repair is one of the sweetest and most vulnerable and important kinds of communication that humans offer to each other,” he adds. “It says you value the relationship.”

* * * * *

How can we get better at repairing little and big ruptures in our families?

There are infinite varieties of repairs, and they can vary in a number of ways:

The age of the child. Infants need physical contact and the restoration of love and security. Older children need affection and more words. Teenagers may need more complex conversations.
Temperament and style. What is hurtful to one child may not faze another child. Or one child may need words, while another is not as verbal. Also, your style might not match the child’s, requiring you to stretch further.
Depth of the apology. Some glitches are little and may just need a check-in, but deeper wounds need more attention. A one-time apology may suffice, but some repairs need to be acknowledged frequently over time to really stitch that fabric back together. It’s often helpful to check in later to see if the amends are working. Keep the apology in proportion to the hurt. What’s important is not your judgment of how hurt someone should be, but the actual felt experience of the child’s hurt.

It helps to proactively tend the fabric of family relationships:

To weave a resilient fabric that will help hold you together, encourage trust in one another’s good intentions. Appreciate out loud, share gratitude reflections, and notice the good. If you’re unsure about a child’s motives, check their intentions behind their behaviors; don’t assume they were ill-intentioned.
Model respect and healthy boundaries, and take responsibility for your own feelings. Work to understand and heal from your own unresolved traumas, instead of blowing them across others.
Watch for tiny bids for repairs. Sometimes we have so much on our minds that we miss the look, gesture, or expression in a child that shows that we transgressed. Catching a misstep early can help.
Normalize requests like “I need a repair” or “Can we have a redo?” We need to let others know when the relationship has been harmed.
Bolster relationships with more equitable horizontal interactions: sharing, playing, negotiating, collaborating.
Spend “special time” with each child individually to create more space to deepen your one-to-one relationship. Let them control the agenda and decide how long you spend together.
When you’re annoyed by a family member’s behavior, try to frame your request for change in positive language; that is, say what you want them to do rather than what you don’t. Language like, “I have a request…” or “Would you be willing to…?” keeps the exchange more neutral and helps the recipient stay engaged rather than getting defensive.
Keep your own activation low.
If you think you might have stepped on someone’s toes, circle back to check. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Cultivate wise speech. Words—and silence—have weight. Consider how the other person might receive what you’re saying.
Adopt the mindset that conflicts are normal and just need some special tending. We will all make mistakes in any long-term relationship.
Model healthy repairs with people around you, so children normalize them and see their usefulness in real time. Children benefit when they watch adults resolve conflict constructively.

When it’s time to recalibrate, authentic repairs have some steps in common:

1. Acknowledge the offense.

“Acknowledging the wound is what gets the thorn out.”

— unknown source

First, try to understand the hurt you caused. It doesn’t matter if it was unintentional or what your reasons were. This is the time to turn off your own defense system and focus on understanding and naming the other person’s pain or anger.

Sometimes you need to find out more and check your understanding. Begin slowly: “Did I hurt you? Help me understand how.” This can be humbling and requires that we listen with an open heart. It also requires that we work to take the other person’s perspective.

Try not to undermine the apology by adding on any caveats like blaming the child for being sensitive or ill-behaved or deserving of what happened. Any attempt to gloss over, minimize, or dilute the wound is not an authentic repair. Children are “emotional Geiger counters” and have a keen sense for authenticity. Faking it or overwhelming them will not work.

A spiritual teacher reminded me of an old saying, “It is acknowledging the wound that gets the thorn out.” It’s what reconnects our humanity.

2. Express remorse.

Here, a sincere “I’m sorry” is sufficient.

Don’t add anything to it. One of the mistakes adults often make, according to therapist and author Harriet Lerner is to tack on a discipline component: “Don’t let it happen again,” or “Next time, you’re really going to get it.” This, says Lerner, is what prevents children from learning to use apologies themselves.

On the other hand, some adults—especially women—says Rick Hanson, can go overboard and be too effusive, too obsequious, or even too quick in their efforts to apologize. This can make the apology more about yourself than the person who was hurt. Or it could be a symptom of a need for one’s own boundary work.

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There is no perfect correctness to an apology except that it be delivered in a way that acknowledges the wound and makes amends. And there can be different paths to that. Our family sometimes uses a jokey, “You were right, I was wrong, you were right, I was wrong, you were right, I was wrong,” to playfully acknowledge light transgressions. Some apologies are nonverbal: My father atoned for missing all of my childhood birthdays when he traveled 2000 miles to surprise me at my doorstep for an adult birthday. Words are not his strong suit, but his planning, effort, and showing up was the repair. A relative has apologized numerous times for a racist remark he made as a teenager about my multiracial family. Apologies can take on all kinds of tones and qualities.

3. Consider offering a brief explanation.

If you sense that the other person is open to listening, you can provide a brief explanation of your point of view, but use caution, as this can be a slippery slope. Feel into how much is enough. The focus of the apology is on the wounded person’s experience. If an explanation helps, fine, but it shouldn’t derail the intent. This is not the time to add in your own grievances—that’s a conversation for a different time.

4. Express your sincere intention to fix the situation and to prevent it from happening again.

With a child, especially, try to be concrete and actionable about how the same mistake can be prevented in the future. “I’m going to try really hard to…” and “Let’s check back in to see how it’s feeling...” can be a start.

Remember to forgive yourself, too. This is a tender process, we are all works in progress, and adults are still developing, too. I know I am.

* * * * *

For further exploration:

Rick Hanson, Ph.D. (2019) Being Well Podcast: Repairing Relationships.

Greater Good Science Center (2020) How to Apologize.

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman (2012). Words Can Change Your Brain: 12 Conversation Strategies to Build Trust, Resolve Conflict, and Increase Intimacy.

The TikTok app is full of families having fun together, especially during the pandemic lockdown. Here are a few examples.

Harriet Lerner (2017). Why Won’t You Apologize: Healing Big Betrayals and Everyday Hurts.

Harriet Lerner and Brené Brown (2020). Podcast: I’m Sorry: How To Apologize & Why It Matters.

Fred Luskin (2002). Forgive for Good: A Proven Prescription for Health and Happiness.

Resmaa Menakem (2020). My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

The Gottman Institute: A Research-based Approach to Relationships

Pandemic 2020: Will the Kids Be All Right? Lessons on Parenting from 100 Years of Crises

April 16, 2020

Massive unemployment. Loss of life. Disrupted education. And an economy in free-fall. These are the ingredients for the kinds of tectonic social shifts that alter the arcs of human lives. And parents, as always, are at the fulcrum of the pressures, protecting their families while trying to hold together a semblance of normalcy for their children.

For 100 years, developmental scientists have studied how families and children respond to disasters, manmade and natural. From the Great Depression to Hurricane Katrina, from 9/11 to wars and historic migrations, we’ve learned a few things. Studies of resilience have shown us that certain conditions enable children to adapt well amidst adversity, and other conditions lead to unfavorable outcomes.

The most critical element, according to the research, is the presence of at least one stable, caring adult, someone who provides a secure psychological container and a scaffold for growth—and I’ll explain that more fully below. But there are other levers at play, too.

In times of societal crisis, the following qualities are important to a child’s psychological resilience. I share these with you in the hope that whatever your situation in caring for children during the pandemic, you can focus on what really matters to your family’s long-term psychological well-being and let go of the more minor concerns.

Dosage

Research on children’s resilience began with developmental psychologist Emmy Werner, who was a child during the horrors of World War II in Europe. Many of the 39 million civilians who died because of the war were children, and 20 million children were orphaned. Werner managed to survive with her cousins by “foraging in the ruins of bombed-out houses and in abandoned beet, potato, and turnip fields” when all of the adult males in her extended family perished on the battlefield or in prisoner camps.[1]

In order to explore how children survived, she studied the letters, diaries, and journals of 200 child eyewitnesses on all sides of the war across 12 countries. In addition, Werner conducted in-depth interviews with 12 adult survivors when they were in their 50s and 60s.

In her book, Through the Eyes of Children, Werner writes that many of the children who survived became adults with “an extraordinary affirmation of life.” However, children were affected differently depending on a number of variables. The most important was their level of direct exposure to violence, bombing, and combat. For example, in a study of 1200 British school children targeted in air raids, 18 percent had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), e.g., intrusive fears; nightmares; sleep disturbances; and heightened reactivity to loud noises, like sirens and explosions. These symptoms were present five years later at a rate comparable to those found in combat veterans of WWII and, later, the Vietnam War. When Werner interviewed her adult subjects more than 50 years later, they still reported frighteningly vivid memories of the sounds of air raid sirens, machine gun fire, and low-flying planes.

(Getty Images: Hulton Deutsch, Fred Ramage, Fox Photos)

Studies of children worldwide in other wars and conflicts, from South Central Asia to Rwanda to Ireland, corroborate that the dose is the poison. In other words, the degree or length of exposure to danger is strongly predictive of later disturbance.

This was true, too, for children who were alive at the time of the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City on Sept 11, 2001. Representative studies of children and adolescents following the attacks showed that the greater the degree of direct or indirect exposure, the greater the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and separation anxiety, and of course children who experienced the loss of a family member suffered most. The proximity of children to the event when tragedy struck mattered. A study of 844 children showed that those who were below Canal Street when the towers collapsed, and witnessed the event or were out in the dust soon after, had more psychiatric and physical health disorders at ages 17-30. Those same children had four times the rates of both disorders co-occurring, compared to a control group of children who were across the bridge in Queens and only saw media coverage of the event.

But media coverage, too, is a kind of chronic exposure, albeit indirect. A study of middle school children who watched repeating loops of television coverage of the Oklahoma City bombings showed that they were more likely to have symptoms of PTSD seven weeks later (even though none of their families were harmed), compared to children who watched less television coverage.

Takeaway: Children with the most direct exposure to the pandemic—e.g., who lose a loved one or whose family is struggling with the disease, food shortages, or other deprivations—may be most at risk for psychological disturbances and should be prioritized for services and resources.
If possible, shield children, especially the youngest, from media exposure so that caregivers stay in control of the messages. Four- to six-year-olds can handle minimal, manageable facts about why their lives have changed. Teenagers can take in more information and are interested in understanding how the world works and their place in it. But even then, caution is warranted. It’s helpful to have a wise adult in the wings to talk about events and emotional responses, and extra care should be taken with sensitive or empathic teens, as they can become overwhelmed and anxious more easily. Staying constructive and action-oriented helps to mitigate the chances of depression and overwhelm.

Availability of loving caregivers

When uncertainty or danger strikes, children are “wired” to look to their caregivers to determine how safe they should feel. If their primary adult is calm, a child feels reassured. But if their adult is upset, the child feels unsafe, and their body and brain go into threat mode. And when the threat system is on too long without relief, physical and mental health problems can result.

The first documentation of the protective effect of a caring adult also came from observations of children during WWII. Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund Freud, founded the Hampstead War Nurseries in England to care for children during the Blitz, the Nazi bombing campaign of the United Kingdom from 1940-41. Freud and her colleague Dorothy Burlingham documented their observations of children in their care in their book War and Children.

Though the children were not exposed to direct combat, they lived through repeated, unpredictable air raids throughout the day and night. Some children saw death up close, some were buried in debris, and many were injured. Freud and Burlingham found that, remarkably, when children were with their family members during these events, they rarely showed “traumatic shock.” They showed “little excitement and no undue disturbance. They slept and ate normally and played with whatever toys they had rescued.” The children seemed to equate their experience with just another childhood “accident,” like falling out of a tree or getting thrown off their bike. That the war “threatened their lives, disturbed their material comfort or cut their food rations” mattered little, according to Freud and Burlingham, as long as the children were with a trusted adult.[2]

But it became “a widely different matter” if a parent was killed or a child was separated from their parents. Children had a much harder time, for example, if they were evacuated for their safety to the countryside. Separation from parents was worse for children than enduring the bombings alongside their family, write Freud and Burlingham. This has been true in every war zone studied, from Rwanda to Bosnia and the West Bank to Syria. Studies show that if children lose the sense of safety anchored by a secure caregiver, the result is often an increase in PTSD, desensitization to violence, anxiety, depression, aggression, and/or antisocial behavior.

However, when the parent is present, their own emotional state matters. Freud and Burlingham write that most of the London population met the air raids with a “quiet manner,” so it was extremely rare to find children who were “shocked.” For example, they describe one Irish mother of eight whose windows were blown out in a bomb blast. When she showed up at the clinic, she said that they were “ever so lucky” because her husband was there and could fix the windows. Another mother brought her daughter in for a “cough and cold” but didn’t think to mention that they’d just escaped a bomb shelter destroyed in a fire. Due to the mother’s “lack of fear and excitement,” Freud and Burlingham write, the child “will not develop air-raid anxiety.” By contrast, they noticed that very anxious mothers had very anxious children. For example, one five year-old boy developed “extreme nervousness and bed wetting” when he had to get up in the night, get dressed, and hold his trembling mother’s hand.[3]

More recent research confirms that depression or anxiety in the primary caregiver is a significant risk factor for children’s psychological health. Anxious parents can overlook their children’s needs, and depressed parents usually under-respond to their children; either situation can lead to missed emotional cues and mental health problems in children.

Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University

On the other hand, when a supportive adult is present, the child can tolerate much more than if they were alone. Simply the presence of a calm adult can reduce the levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in a child’s body. In fact, this supported exposure to manageable stress can even be “inoculating,” helping children to be more resilient, whereas complete avoidance of stress undermines the development of resilience.

The supportive adult figure doesn’t have to be a parent. Research shows that any non-parental figure in a caring capacity, including a neighbor, teacher, counselor coach, sibling, or cousin, etc., can be just as effective.

In addition to her study of children in WWII, Emmy Werner also conducted a 40-year longitudinal study on the Hawaiian island of Kauai to investigate the long-term effects of poverty and family dysfunction on children. She found that one of the strongest predictors of a child’s resilience was an emotional bond with an adult outside the immediate family.

This correlation was also found in a study of children in New Orleans who survived the flooding and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Children who fared the best seven years later were the ones who’d had the most supportive connections—family members, teachers, pastors, or shelter workers. By contrast, those who fared worst had lacked any constructive connections, and the ones who floundered marginally had had only one person as a solid anchor.

Werner also studied the records of pioneer families who travelled across deserts, mountains, and rivers in wagon parties. The Donner Party is perhaps the most tragic and well-known story of westward migration. A small band of 87 travelers took an ill-advised shortcut away from the Oregon Trail and onto a lesser known route around Salt Lake. The path eventually ended, and they had to cut through forests and brush to clear their way. The delay caused them to get trapped in the heavy Sierra snowfalls, unable to move for four months. As supplies dwindled, travelers resorted to eating their animal skin rugs and animals, and a few resorted to cannibalizing their deceased companions. Of the 41 children in the party, a third died, mostly infants and toddlers.

The ones who survived, according to Werner, had the strongest social supports from mothers, aunts, cousins, and a teacher who pooled what resources they had, maintaining whatever shreds of structure and normalcy they could muster. Werner details the particular significance of the sibling bond. Siblings shared food and drinks, nursed the sick and injured, and were confidants and supports to each other when the going got tough. The majority of children who survived went on to lead “long and productive lives,” becoming lawyers, ranchers, writers, prospectors, and heads of large families.[4]

Takeaway: Children are most resilient when they’re embedded in a network of social support: a parent, a caring parent figure, and/or siblings. Accounts like these suggest that the support that works for children doesn’t have to be overly-precious or hyper-conscious. Rather, practical, positive decency offered by ordinary people will suffice.
The message to parents who aren’t able to care for their own children because they’re essential workers—or are sick and quarantined away from their families—is that other committed adults can pinch-hit as caregivers just fine.
For stressed parents at home caring for children 24/7 and trying to work, too: Put on your oxygen mask first. Your self-care is essential. It’s a consuming challenge to bring your best self to this quarantine day after day, but your wellbeing is essential to you and your children. And rest assured, you don’t have to be perfect. Even in the healthiest relationships, parents are only “in-tune” with their children 30% of the time. What matters more is your flexibility to repair, to come back together, and perhaps to reunite at the end of a long day. Apologies, forgiveness, and self-compassion are key. Remember: the biggest lesson your children are learning from you is how to handle themselves in stressful situations.

Child characteristics

What about the characteristics of children? Do some kinds of children do better than others?

First, there is no “resiliency gene,” but difference in biological makeup does affect how children register and regulate stress. These foundations are created by genetic and epigenetic transmissions across generations and by childhood experiences, especially during sensitive periods. The physiology of the stress regulation system is established from the prenatal period, through the first three years of life, so the stress experienced during that time is very influential in shaping stress-sensitivity of a child’s system. However, research also shows that in puberty—a period of brain remodeling—a child’s stress physiology can be recalibrated for better or worse, depending on how much stress they’re experiencing.

About one in five children is more biologically “sensitive” to stress than others. Their “fight-or-flight” systems react more quickly, easily, and intensely to mild stressors. They can become more devastated in difficult conditions, even more susceptible to respiratory illnesses. But they bloom more brilliantly in favorable conditions—becoming the world’s artists, poets, inventors, and empaths.

The first wave of resiliency research presumed that children who were more easygoing and sociable (i.e., could enlist other people’s help), and “intelligent” did better. Newer research has refined those generalizations into more specific abilities.

Recent studies have pointed to certain kinds of cognitive and emotional skills related to resilience. Executive control involves the higher-order thought processes in the prefrontal cortex. These include self-management abilities like setting goals, devising a plan to accomplish the goal, problem-solving, flexibility, and monitoring progress along the way. Historical studies show that a family’s survival often depended on the contributions of children, and that the mastery and competence the children developed through these tasks served them well in their adult lives.

Emotion regulation is the process of monitoring feelings and using strategies to minimize unpleasant ones (down-regulation), increase pleasant ones (up-regulation), and maintain desirable ones in order to accomplish a goal. Positive strategies include reframing, acceptance, and finding a purpose. Drawing on children’s unique inner resources, like friendliness, musicality, humor, building, organizing, or creating can help keep their focus constructive. Unhelpful strategies include ruminating, numbing, escapism, venting, blaming, and disengaging; all of these lead to greater anxiety and poorer mental health outcomes in children.

Resiliency studies show that a combination of executive control and emotion regulation leads to the best outcomes and the lowest anxiety in children.

Takeaway: Some children may need a little more attention and support than others because of their age or their sensitivities. Pregnant women, infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and young teens need extra support and stress-buffering. It’s a good time to model, demonstrate, and teach executive control (e.g., through planning and completing projects) and emotional skills. Many professionals have suggested that during this time, traditional school lessons may be less important than social and emotional ones.

Prior vulnerability

Whatever the future effects of the pandemic on children and families, according to Jack Shonkoff, pediatrician and director of the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard, they will not be evenly distributed across families. Vulnerable families who already struggle with difficulties such as poverty, food insecurity, racism, immigration stress, and disabilities will experience more breakdowns like substance abuse, family violence, mental health problems, and later educational and employment challenges.

We’re already seeing news reports of faltering families. Divorce rates spiked in China following the peak of the pandemic, and early reports are signaling a similar trend in the U.S. The United Nations has reported a “horrifying” increase in domestic violence. As of this writing, calls to police and domestic violence hotlines are up 15-20% in New York; they’ve doubled in Lebanon and Malaysia, tripled in China, and increased 75% in Australia. Quarantined victims are trapped at home without access to teachers, counselors, or doctors who could support their emotional and physical safety. Part of the U.S. government relief package provides funding for shelters and hotlines. It seems that disasters that immediately threaten mortality like 9/11 or wars are less likely to spike family disturbance, but those that become chronic stressors like unemployment and the quarantine bring out the worst.

The disruption of education is a serious risk for vulnerable children. Educational consistency is a stabilizer for children in uncertain times, and teachers play critical roles in keeping disadvantaged children on track. Schools give structure and focus amidst disruption; many studies show that disasters interrupt children’s education, leading to unfulfilled lives, as well as a loss of human capital to society. UNESCO estimates that 91% of the world’s students are currently affected by school closures. While many schools are shifting to online education, the approaches are ad hoc and unstudied. Digital access is not available to everyone, though schools are struggling to provide students with internet hotspots. Some schools report that large numbers of students have “disappeared,” i.e., fewer than one half are engaging in online courses.

During the Great Depression, schools reduced their hours or closed. A million children lost access to school, and a quarter of a million children hit the road and rails, becoming “drifters” in search of work. For the first time, the federal government was spurred to take an interest in children’s well-being, because it was afraid that large numbers of disaffected youth could be susceptible to a rise of authoritarianism, similar to what was happening in Europe. The New Deal launched the first free school lunch program, free nursery schools, the first federally funded work-study programs, and the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed over seven million young people. The schools were funded to reopen, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children helped poor families. The government ended child labor and raised the mandatory school attendance age to 16 in order to eliminate having children compete with adults for jobs. The first safety net for children and families was cast, and the word “teenager” entered the vocabulary for the first time.

On the other end of the economic spectrum, affluent families that tend toward “overparenting” can be at risk for fostering anxiety, as they strive to perfectly recreate the school learning environment at home in order to keep up with standardized testing and the college admissions cycle. These families might benefit from broadening their definition of learning to focus on simply reading, problem-solving, communication, and social and emotional skills.

“When children are involved in things they’re really interested in, a project or an exploration, they will be learning. Everything around them is a learning experience. Parents should think about how to take advantage of that,” advises Linda Darling-Hammond, professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Education and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute.

Takeaway: Vulnerable and disadvantaged families, especially with multiple stressors, should have access to and seek help from mental health and legal services. Local schools and each states’ Department of Education list educational guidance and resources for students and families. Staying connected to education is especially critical for children with any kind of disadvantage, while families who tend toward overparenting may benefit from dialing down excessive traditional educational demands.

A higher calling

Many studies of resilience find that survivors who do well have philosophies or spiritual traditions through which they interpret events and derive hope and optimism. Ann Masten, professor at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota, is a noted theoretician in the study of children’s resilience. In her book, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development, she writes that many faith traditions—including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—naturally incorporate all of the ingredients for resilience. They offer parenting guidance; identify moral conduct; provide role models, mentors, and community support; teach and practice self-regulation; and value the greater good. A connection to some definition of the divine and a philosophical framework help survivors make meaning of their experience and in the process, help them keep calm. Studies show that some homeless families in shelters persevere because of their faith. African American communities find connection, spiritual guidance and a coherent vision through their churches; and orphans in war-torn Sri Lanka find acceptance and peace through Buddhist and Christian practices of meditating, storytelling, and reading scripture.

Sometimes, cultural practices offer meaningful support. A study of 1000 Afghani adolescents showed that in prolonged periods of armed conflict, Afghani cultural values of faith, family unity, service, effort, morals, and honor shored up resilience. Werner’s longitudinal research in Kauai showed that many adults who eventually created happy lives drew from their cultural heritage, becoming involved in Hawaiian conservation efforts, going to the ocean in times of trouble, or caring for their elders.

Recent psychological work suggests that having a sense of purpose may be enough to get you through. Surviving, ensuring your child’s well-being, volunteering, keeping your job, or finding awe in the moment may just be enough for now.

Takeaway: A connection to something greater than ourselves—whether it’s a spiritual practice, cultural beliefs, or a sense of purpose—can help families and children orient their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Participating in a larger flow can feel supportive and calming. Children, even very young ones, enjoy and benefit from these kinds of feelings and experiences.

* * * * *

Children are neither inherently resilient nor vulnerable. Instead, their well-being arises out of who they are as individuals together with the cascades of experiences they have. Some children may luck into a combination of resources that set them on a good path early on. But even for children who don’t do well initially, studies of the life course show that many can still find happiness later in life from a new opportunity, education, a good relationship, or a fulfilling career.[5]

For now, the world is in a difficult state of uncertainty. We don’t know how long we’ll be sheltering in place, the course of the virus, or what kind of “normal” life we will return to. But the enduring lessons for our children will surely be the emotional ones. These are the lessons they will remember as adults when they inevitably experience upheaval again—only then, it may be without us. So let’s stay focused on, and grateful for, what really matters.

What Does Your School Do to Prevent Bullying?

October 28, 2019

[Note: This post draws from a scholarly paper I wrote with a colleague summarizing what does and doesn’t work in bullying prevention. Full disclosure: I work with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, which implements and researches the social and emotional learning approach called RULER.]

If you’re the parent of a school-age child, or an educator, it’s hard to miss that October is Bullying Prevention Month. And while a campaign to raise awareness can sometimes feel contrived, it does present an opportunity to learn more. So if you’re not sure what your school’s approach is to bullying (or other mean or aggressive behaviors, for that matter), this month’s campaign is an invitation to find out.

Here are a few ideas that will be helpful to be aware of before you have that conversation.

First, it’s worth knowing that every school is required by state law to have some kind of bullying prevention policy. There are websites listing your state’s regulations on bullying, cyberbullying, sexting, and even revenge porn. Many states also identify the purview of the school’s responsibility—for example whether a school is responsible for a cyberbullying incident that happens off-campus. (In many cases, they are, if the incident spills over to create an unsafe or hostile learning environment.) The laws do not intend, though, that bullying should be dealt with through the legal system, which would be inappropriate for children; rather, the laws are there to hold schools accountable for what happens in their environment.

When you ask your child’s teacher, division head, or head of school what their approach is to preventing bullying, there should be three parts to their answer: how they address true prevention, intervention, and evaluation.

First, schools should be able to define bullying (aggression that is repeated and involves a power imbalance) and describe their plan for preventing it from popping up in the first place. True prevention would cultivate the behaviors, skills, attitudes, and beliefs that would make bullying less likely to happen—which, of course, is effortful and complicated to do.

Traditional approaches have focused simply on raising awareness, making new rules about bullying, monitoring “hot spots” better (like hallways and bathrooms), and administering stiffer consequences. But that approach does not consistently work. National data shows that bullying rates have flatlined in the last decade; worse, there’s been a slight uptick in all forms of bullying in the last three years. Students consistently report that teachers don’t see most of the bullying that happens (bullies are skilled at hiding below the radar) and that many educators don't actually help students in need when asked.

The specific kind of prevention matters.

Many programs are trendy but lack any rigorous evaluation of their efficacy:

· Programs that rely solely on punishment and zero tolerance aren’t healthy or successful, and they disproportionately target students of color.

· Programs that place sole responsibility on the students for working out the conflict (like peer mediation) can be contraindicated and may actually increase bullying and aggression.

· A peer conflict-resolution approach can be useful under certain conditions, as when the students are of equal social power, positive skills are taught proactively, and the adult facilitators are skilled in conflict resolution. But a bully by definition always has more power, and placing the target and the tormentor in the same room can be clinically unethical. (Adult victims of abuse are never asked to “work it out” with their abuser.) Additionally, children have extra legal protections because of their developmental status.

· Programs that rely solely on bystanders to intervene also have mixed results. Bystander intervention has been successful in some homogenous societies like Finland, and it can be effective when students are empowered to make positive changes in the norms of the school culture. But as for intervening in an active bullying situation, it’s not always safe, not all students can do it, and it deflects responsibility from the adults who have convened the school environment.

What does work to prevent bullying?

Data consistently show that creating a positive school climate and teaching specific skills of emotional and social intelligence are the two best bets for reducing all kinds of hostilities, including bullying, mean behaviors, micro-aggressions, conflicts, and aggression. This makes sense. After all, just because you’ve punished the behaviors you don’t want doesn’t mean that you’ll create the behavior you do want. To create appropriate behavior, you have to proactively guide children, scaffolding the desired skills in age-appropriate steps. In other words, if you want to turn a ship around, you first have to know where you’re going, and then you have to give everyone the sailing skills to get there.

The research on social and emotional learning (SEL) shows that when an evidence-based approach is implemented correctly, it improves classroom relationships and prosocial behavior among the students and teachers—and it simultaneously reduces conflicts, aggression, bullying, and even hostile attribution bias (the tendency to believe that others have mean intentions). For example, a study of 36 first-grade teachers showed that developing SEL skills was more effective at reducing aggression and improving self-regulation than traditional classroom management techniques.

Children from preschool to high school have typical emotional and social challenges that play out in, and even dominate, the school day. They need constructive skills to learn how to:

· change friendships (which spikes in mid-elementary school and again in adolescence), without prompting accusations of exclusions

· resolve peer conflicts without ganging up or resorting to power-assertion

· manage their own difficult feelings constructively

· foster feelings of inclusion

· manage feeling vulnerable and support others in a vulnerable exposure

· express their sense of agency and assertiveness appropriately

· allow others to shine without feeling diminished

· maintain close friendships inside and outside of school and balance closer friendships within a wider circle of peer acquaintances

· express their needs constructively

· care for all students

· spot—and counter—the hegemony of the outside world inside the school environment

· foster empathy for others without giving themselves away

· manage the volatility of feelings of sexual attraction

· know the difference between having fun and harmful teasing

Some people will judge this kind of educational focus as inappropriate for schools. But research shows that emotional and social skills are predictors of success. Schools report increases in academic engagement and decreases in aggression; organizations that track employment success recommend social and emotional skills more and more; and the teaching of social and emotional skills has been demonstrated to be cost-effective.

The second part of an educator’s response to your query should describe the action (intervention) that a school plans to take once bullying happens. Educators need to respond swiftly and skillfully, without avoiding or minimizing. This requires a lot of discernment.

Sometimes parents may not have all the information about a situation. Sometimes it takes time and gentle investigating to elicit the full story from the children involved. Sometimes it’s not actually bullying (i.e., repeated aggression involving an imbalance of power) but simply hurt feelings, a distinction that leads to different kinds of interventions. But if true bullying is happening, everyone needs to step up quickly to end the day-after-day abuse and suffering of the bullied child. And while there isn’t one prescriptive silver bullet, educators should have a plan that draws on the culture and skills they have been cultivating in the school environment for healthy and swift problem-solving.

And finally, the third part of an educator’s response to your query should address exactly how they’ll know if their approach is working. How will they assess whether bullying and other unwanted behaviors are decreasing? A red flag should go up if educators rely on parent surveys. The data should come from the children themselves, for example in regular school climate surveys.

Parents have an important role to play:.

· Harsh parenting is associated with bullying and victimization. Authoritative parenting—a style that combines warmth and support with limits and structure—has been repeatedly shown to lead to better school engagement, stronger prosocial skills, and emotional wellbeing in children.

· Sibling and family dynamics that are respectful, where children’s agency, assertiveness, and negotiating skills are cultivated and where consent is a value, lead to better outcomes for children.

· Parents can support their children’s friendships by making home a welcoming place for their children’s friends. Parents should encourage their children to have multiple friendship groups, not only in school but in their extended family, neighborhood, and/or larger community.

· It’s also useful for parents to network with each other. Establishing open lines of communication can help everyone stay on the same page and may head off trouble in the early stages.

Bullying is a complicated issue, but it’s also not a mystery. At this point, we have plenty of research showing us what works and what doesn’t—not only to reduce and prevent bullying but to create positive home, school, and community environments that give our children the social and emotional skills they need to succeed. Once you find out which approach your child’s school is using, you may want to take an active role in guiding and supporting the implementation of the best evidence-based approaches.

Can a Pregnant Woman’s Experience Influence Her Baby’s Temperament?

October 8, 2018

Thirty years ago, when my Indian mother-in-law first learned that I was pregnant, she had some advice: Eat a lot of ghee (clarified butter), think pleasant thoughts, and gaze upon beauty.

Charming, I thought. I had a full time job with a two-hour commute. Where was there any time for meditative reflection? Still, she planted a thought in my mind, and I began to wonder. Was there a connection between my internal state and the development of the baby growing within me?

Folk wisdom and cultural beliefs throughout history have maintained that a woman’s emotions affect the fetus. Animal studies have shown that maternal stress, especially, can affect offspring—but it’s not been clear exactly how relevant those findings are for humans. In the last 15 years, though, research on human mothers and babies has caught up to show that my mother-in-law was at least partly correct: A pregnant woman’s emotional state—especially her stress, anxiety, and depression—can change her child’s development with long-lasting consequences.

Yerkes and Dodson, 1908, in Diamond, DM et al. (2007).

Some stress is good.

When it comes to stress, psychologists often affirm the Goldilocks approach: too little is not good, as it makes us passive. And too much is not good because it can overwhelm us and contribute to emotional upheaval and physical disease. Along the spectrum, there’s a “just-right” amount of stress that helps us to function optimally in most situations.

The Goldilocks principle (called the Yerkes-Dodson law, in psychology) seems to be true in pregnancy, too. “The human brain requires sufficient, but not overwhelming, stress to promote optimal neural development both before and after birth,” writes researcher Janet DiPietro of Johns Hopkins University.

Pietro and colleagues studied pregnant women who were mentally healthy, well-educated, and had low-risk pregnancies. Midway through the pregnancies, Pietro measured the level of the mothers’ psychological distress (stress, anxiety, or depression). After the babies were born, she tested their development at six weeks and then again at the two-year point. She found that babies whose mothers had mild-to-moderate distress were more advanced in their physical and mental development. Another study showed that the babies’ brain development benefitted from a little prenatal stress, maturing a bit faster, with quicker connectivity among neurons.

Does that mean that women should welcome stress in order to boost their fetus’ development?

Absolutely not. According to DiPietro, the normal stresses of modern life are enough already. “The last thing a new mom needs is to head into newborn baby care stressed and exhausted.” In other words, healthy women leading reasonably normal lives can “stop worrying about worrying.”

But too much stress can be harmful.

On the other hand, when women experience severe stress during pregnancy, their babies can be at risk for serious problems. What kinds of stresses are harmful?

In studies on pregnant women, intense stress has been defined to include the following: the loss of a loved one; war; a major catastrophe like an earthquake, flood, fire, or terrorist attack; and interpersonal violence. These stresses have been linked to subsequent miscarriage, prematurity, or low birth weight in infants.[1] Stress that is chronic—like poverty, homelessness, racism, and discrimination—can also lead to low birth weight, as well as later physical and psychological problems. Babies whose mothers experienced these kinds of toxic levels of stress while pregnant are statistically more likely to have respiratory and digestive problems, irritability, or sleep problems in the first three years of life. They are also more apt to experience developmental problems, with cognitive, behavioral, social-emotional, and health issues that suggest neurodevelopmental changes that ripple into adolescence and adulthood. Many of the studies were careful to rule out other potentially confounding environmental factors in order to isolate the effects to the prenatal environment.

A woman who experiences depression is also cause for concern. Newborns of mothers who were depressed during pregnancy are four times more likely to have a low birth weight than babies born to mothers who are not depressed. When women are depressed during pregnancy, there’s also a greater likelihood that they’ll suffer postpartum depression, which can become a major challenge for the whole family. Not only does the mother suffer, but research shows that depression in the primary caregiver is one of the strongest predictors of poor developmental outcomes in children. These children simply do not receive the normal interpersonal attunement and feedback they need in order to grow in emotionally healthy ways.

Even anxiety about being pregnant can be cause for concern. Research shows that “pregnancy-related fears”—worrying about an unplanned pregnancy, a specific medical risk, the fetus’ health, labor and delivery, or your ability to be a good parent—can be problematic in high doses. Excessive levels of anxiety (as opposed to what you worry about) are correlated with a greater likelihood of having a preterm birth. Also, pregnant women’s high levels of anxiety are correlated with later problems in children, including a difficult temperament, behavioral and emotional problems, anxiety, problems with attention regulation, impulsivity and hyperactivity, immune functioning and autoimmune disease, cognitive problems, and stress regulation.

Fetal stress and infant temperament

Psychologists have long known that babies enter the world with different temperaments. Some babies seem easy and sociable; others are more reactive, difficult to soothe, and are more sensitive to their environment. Until recently, scientists thought babies were “just born that way,” with temperaments that were “constitutional,” part of their makeup, or “inherited” from parents.

But the new research on fetal development changes that notion, and our understanding has progressed toward an interplay between biology and environmental influences—even before birth.

Catherine Monk, Professor of Medical Psychology in Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and her colleagues study the long reach of prenatal influences, especially among women who suffer from depression, stress, and anxiety. They found that some fetuses register mothers’ stress, and that fetal reactivity correlates with infant temperament at four months.

Monk and her colleagues brought 50 pregnant women into the lab and monitored the fetal heart rate while the women completed the Stroop Test, a mildly stressful mental task. Fetuses of women who were clinically depressed or anxious showed they registered the performance stress of their mothers, by the changes in their heart rates during the task. Later, when the babies were four months old, researchers assessed their temperaments by watching how reactive they were to a range of new stimuli (sounds, sights, smells), and some important patterns emerged. In particular, fetuses who had greater heart rate changes during their mothers’ task were more likely to be highly reactive at four months of age.

Subsequent studies have shown while the heart’s reaction to stress is important, the recovery from the stressor—how soon the heart returns to baseline—is also predictive. A quicker heart-rate recovery in the fetal period predicts an easier temperament and even more prosocial behavior later in childhood.

The fetus’ response to stress and the ability to return to baseline, may be the earliest sign of a fetus’ emerging stress regulation system, which in turn is the foundation of temperament (reactivity and regulation). The stress regulation system involves complex processes throughout the brain and body, and its effects cascade through complicated pathways into all the other areas of development. In infancy, the stress regulation system affects babies’ ability to form an attachment with others, to explore and learn about their world, and to receive feedback from others that helps them grow. It also affects their health and immune systems. Even for adults, scientists find that over the entire lifespan, the ability to manage the ups and downs of our interior worlds—stress, emotions, energetic “arousal,” and positivity—affects our physical and mental health, relationship quality, decision-making, and even creativity. Some studies assert that stress regulation has consequences for education, employment, and overall life satisfaction.

But a baby isn’t born with a thermostat set to some ideal of normal. In utero, the fetus is programmed to listen for cues about their future environment and start adapting accordingly.

“Theoretically, it’s an elegant evolutionary adaptation,” Monk told me in a recent interview. “The pregnant female communicates to her offspring cues about what the postnatal world is like, and the adaptation starts in utero.” But problems arise when the fit between the stone-age brain and the modern world is misaligned. “It could be advantageous to be reactive and vigilant if you’re in a dangerous postnatal environment,” Monk explains. “But we’re not facing bears in the woods now, so maybe the system for prenatal adaptations made to anticipate adverse environments (the environments that are eliciting stress and anxiety in pregnant women) aren’t adaptive for our modern world.”

The stress regulation system operates much like a thermostat that sets the room temperature, increasing the heat or turning it down to achieve a desired range. When we perceive a threat, the sympathetic nervous system activates a fight-flight-or-freeze response throughout the body and brain. When we judge that the threat has subsided, the parasympathetic system turns on to try to bring the whole system back to a resting state.

Because the biological “hardware” is just forming during the fetal period and early infancy, these are crucial times for setting the stress baseline in each fetus and young baby.

How do mother’s feelings get through to the fetus?

Scientists are curious about how stress reaches a developing fetus. This research is just in its early stages, and much more needs to be learned. But so far, scientists are focusing on a few mechanisms which may operate together or independently:

One is cortisol, a stress hormone that’s a downstream product of the body’s stress response. Women with anxiety and depression have higher levels of cortisol. And there is some evidence that when the placenta registers higher levels of cortisol from the mother, it creates an epigenetic change—a molecular modification to the gene that changes how it functions—that allows more cortisol through to the growing fetus, which in turn affects the stress regulation system.

“The placenta is highly susceptible to maternal distress and a target of epigenetic dysregulation,” Monk and colleagues write.

Inflammation is another focus of investigation. The pro-inflammatory cytokines—proteins that impact the behavior of cells and resulting immunity—may play a role, but the research on the exact pathways involved is still in the early stages.
Scientists are also looking at the role of infection and the microbiome, but there is no conclusive evidence at this time.

There are other complications, too. For example, one gestational period doesn’t seem more sensitive than another, but the impact of stress might vary depending on which areas of the brain are developing when the stress occurs. And while both sexes are affected, there are hints that male and female fetuses might react differently. For example, some research shows that female fetuses are more reactive to stress in utero, but other studies suggest males and females react similarly, but that males recover more quickly.

How much control do pregnant women have?

It should be obvious that almost every source of major stress—war, the loss of a loved one, violence, poverty, homelessness, a demanding workload, etc.—is outside the control of the woman experiencing it. But given that we live in a culture that frequently blames mothers for whatever happens to their children, I was concerned that this new research might be wielded against women.

“Could this research be used as a new form of mother-blaming?” I asked Monk.

“I think about this a lot,” she replied. “I don’t want my research to be adding stress to a woman’s life.”

Monk pointed out several caveats to the findings:

First, she cautioned that the research is just beginning, and we have to consider that these are correlations, not cause-and-effect. The associations have been shown repeatedly by different researchers, but it is not possible to complete a scientifically controlled study of intense stress on humans that would sort that out.

Second, Monk explained that a pregnant woman’s stress is just one of many “exposures.” There are numerous biological and environmental influences on development: The air a woman breathes, the water she drinks, the nutrition she ingests, and whether she exercises, gets sick, or is exposed to toxins. There are genetics. The father’s sperm quality matters, too, and is affected by his age, health and risk factors, and even frequency of physical exercise. Support from partners, families, and friends is important in mitigating stress.

Third, we should care for pregnant women more preventatively. “If we want to have a healthy population, a healthy workforce, then society is responsible,” Monk says. “So let’s take care of women and families early on with policies and programs that support them.”

Fourth, some stress is modifiable. “I see homeless women living in shelters, and I see busy medical doctors juggling family life with their practices,” says Monk. “One person can’t move the level of poverty in the country, but we can do something to help people cope with it. We really do know how to de-stress people and help them with depression and anxiety.”

And finally, stress hardware isn’t completely formed by birth. Once born, the quality of early caregiving continues to alter the epigenome that regulates stress, emotions, and behavior, dialing up or down the expression of genes that set the baseline for stress regulation. In many cases, good caregiving after birth can offset a rocky prenatal start.

How much stress is too much?

“How can women know if their stress levels are harmful or normal?” I asked Monk. “Are some kinds of stress worse than others?”

She replied, “Science is not at a place yet of saying that one kind of stress is worse than another. In our clinic, we see women in extreme stress, and what matters is how much, and what inner and outer resources they can bring to the experience.”

Monk listed some indicators of harmful stress:

When stressful feelings are chronic (symptoms might include an inability to get up in the morning, a continual low mood, not eating or sleeping)
When there’s prior exposure to trauma or abuse (which the anticipation of parenting might reactivate)
When a person’s life foundation is weakened by repetitive daily stresses (e.g., “Will I lose my job?” “Where’s my next meal coming from?” “Are we getting a divorce?”)
Or continual feelings of being overwhelmed

In addition, Monk and her colleagues use the Perceived Stress Scale to measure stress in their research subjects. They found that women in poorer mental health (comprising about 20% of their samples) score around a 26 or less on the scale. Items such as “I feel like I don’t have control,” “I often feel overwhelmed,” and “I feel like I can’t get things done,” are indicative.

Monk adds, though, that fewer psychologists are trying to measure a person’s amount of stress, and instead are looking at how they function across different areas of their lives. For example, a person might ask, “How am I functioning now compared to six months ago?” Or, “How am I functioning cognitively, physically, interpersonally, or emotionally?” This approach offers more useful information, Monk notes, allowing the person to leverage what is going well and to shore up what is not.

What helps?

Every person has unique vulnerabilities and strengths, and every situation is different. But research confirms that although we might not be able to control what happens to us, we have some control over how we react. And that matters. We can change our responses to stress through self-care (nutrition, sleep, and moderate physical activity); increasing our repertoire of emotion strategies for coping; having positive experiences; and seeking support from others. A strong support network of engaged partners, helpful family members, and good friends can buffer the ill effects of stress. Techniques like meditation and mindfulness have been shown to reduce stress and create better pregnancy outcomes and physical health.

As an example, Monk and her colleague Elizabeth Werner developed a four-session intervention that reduces the risk of depression in pregnant women by half. The PREPP program (Practical Resources for Effective Postpartum Parenting) reaches out to women through OB-GYN offices, and offers them education on three topics:

Parenting skills (e.g., How to help babies sort out day-night cues; encouragement for carrying the baby when he’s not crying, etc.)
Psychoeducation (e.g., What to expect about babies’ crying); and
Mindfulness and self-reflection (e.g., Examining how you were parented)

This intervention reduced depression and anxiety in mothers, and their babies became better self-regulated as well.

“By learning more about handling their baby, a mother may literally be facilitating their baby’s regulation along with their own. Mothers and babies get onto a bidirectional, more positive cycle,” Monk says.

As for me, since this knowledge wasn’t around to confirm my mother-in-law’s advice during my pregnancies, I hedged my bets. I knew I carried high levels of stress from a turbulent childhood, so I took some extra care. I exercised, was thoughtful about my food, and took a prenatal yoga and meditation course. But by the second pregnancy, I was frequently overwhelmed with panic attacks at the prospect of managing work and two children. Already my energy was low, and I filled in with chocolate milkshakes when I should have rested. Fortunately, both daughters did fine in the long run and are well-adjusted adults. But many women face graver challenges, and as a society, it’s our responsibility to protect and support them. Many countries have made children a collective investment, but in America, tragically, we haven’t. It’s a big problem—and a big topic, which I’ll save for a future blog entry.

More Resources

How pregnant women’s emotions affect prenatal and child development:

Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives, by Annie Murphy Paul.
Catherine Monk’s videos on prenatal stress here.
Newsletter from Janet DiPietro’s lab.

Stress reduction in pregnancy:

Newman, K. M. (2016, August 17). “Four Reasons to Practice Mindfulness During Pregnancy,” Greater Good Magazine. Retrieved from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_reasons_to_practice_mindfulness_during_pregnancy.
Bardacke, N. (2012). Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond. New York, NY: HarperOne.
Mindful Birthing Network: Mindful birthing. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.mindfulbirthing.org/.
Hardwiring happiness: Zimmer, E. (2015, June 24). 082: Dr. Rick Hanson. The one you feed. Retrieved from http://www.oneyoufeed.net/rick-hanson/.
Introduction to mindfulness-based stress reduction:
- Palouse Mindfulness. (2015, August 28). Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (UMass Medical School, Center for Mindfulness). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TA7P-iCCcY.
- Sega, A. (2016, August 22). Jon Kabat Zinn: Practical Stress Reduction. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fjNPbErciU.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (2016). Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life. Boulder, CO: Sound True.
This is one of my favorite resources for self-development:
- Hanson, R. (n.d.). Rick Hanson. Retrieved from http://www.rickhanson.net/rick-hanson/

How to find out about, and advocate for paid leave from work:

Find out if your state has paid family and medical leave protection here:
- National Partnership for Women and Families. (n.d.). Paid leave means a stronger nation. Retrieved from http://www.nationalpartnership.org/issues/work-family/paid-leave-means-map.html.
Quick economic statistics re: the costs to both employers and employees of NOT having paid leave: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1geQNdDBd2MDBvzvOMJg_YKdfVqSsduWZ/view.
Companies that offer paid leave, and their rationales for doing it:
- National Partnership for Women and Families (2018, January). Companies with new or expanded paid leave policies (2015-2018). Retrieved from http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/paid-leave/new-and-expanded-employer-paid-family-leave-policies.pdf
An article on how businesses can adopt paid leave:
- Williams, J. C., & Massinger, K. (2015, November 23). “Need a Good Parental Leave Policy? Here It Is.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2015/11/need-a-good-parental-leave-policy-here-it-is.
How to negotiate a leave, from the Harvard Business Review:
- Gallo, A. (2012, October 25). “How to Negotiate Your Parental Leave,” Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/10/how-to-negotiate-your-parental-leave.html.
The effects of paid leave on child health and employee retention:
- National Partnership for Women and Families. (n.d.). Studies on the Effects of Paid Leave. Retrieved from http://go.nationalpartnership.org/site/PageServer?pagename=issues_work_library_paidleave_research#effect

Reference

Yerkes and Dodson, 1908, in Diamond, D.M., Campbell, A.M., Park, C.R., Halonen, J., & Zoladz, P.R. (2007). The temporal dynamics model of emotional memory processing: A synthesis on the Neurobiological basis of stress-induced amnesia, flashbulb and traumatic memories, and the Yerkes-Dodson law. Neural Plasticity, article ID 60803, 33pgs. doi:10.1155/2007/60803

Footnote

[1] Low birth weight, sometimes referred to as “small for gestational age,” occurs when the weight at birth is lower than expected for the length of the pregnancy. It is a risk factor for subsequent development. The U.S. has the one of the highest rates of babies born with low birth weight—about 1 in 13. Babies who are born very small for their gestational age are more likely to go on to develop problems, but most low-birth-weight babies who receive good nutrition and sensitive, affectionate care and stimulation, catch up and do just fine.

Additional Photo Credits

Top panel, left to right: MaxRiesgo, RapidEye, vm, DragonImages

Middle panel, left to right: FatCamera, photominus, Dean Mitchell, martinedoucet

What is a Secure Attachment? And Why Doesn’t "Attachment Parenting" Get You There?

April 3, 2017

A few months ago, a young friend of mine had a baby. She began a home birth with a midwife, but after several hours of labor, the baby turned to the side and became stuck. The midwife understood that the labor wouldn’t proceed, so she hustled the laboring Amelie into the car and drove the half-mile to the emergency room while Amelie’s husband followed. The birth ended safely, and beautiful, tiny Sylvie emerged with a full head of black hair. The little family of three went home.

When the baby was six weeks old, Amelie developed a severe breast infection. She struggled to continue breastfeeding and pumping, but it was extremely painful, and she was taking antibiotics.[1] Finally she gave in to feeding her baby formula, but she felt distraught and guilty. “Make sure you find some other way to bond with your baby,” her pediatrician said, adding to her distress.

“Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. “Pooh!” he whispered.
”Yes, Piglet?”
”Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

— A. A. Milne

Fortunately, sleep came easily to Sylvie; she slumbered comfortably in a little crib next to Amelie’s side of the bed. Still, at four months, Amelie worried that the bond with her baby wasn’t forming properly and she wanted to remedy the problem by pulling the baby into bed. Baby Sylvie wasn’t having it. When she was next to her mother, she fussed; when Amelie placed her back in the crib, she settled. Again, Amelie worried about their relationship.

“Amelie” is an amalgam of actual friends and clients I have seen in the last month, but all of the experiences are real. And as a developmental psychologist, I feel distressed by this suffering. Because while each of the practices—home birth, breastfeeding, and co-sleeping—has its benefits, none of them is related to a baby’s secure attachment with her caregiver, nor are they predictive of a baby’s mental health and development.

“Attachment is a relationship in the service of a baby’s emotion regulation and exploration. It is the deep, abiding confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver.”

— Alan Sroufe

“Attachment is not a set of tricks,” says Alan Sroufe, a developmental psychologist at the Institute for Child Development at the University of Minnesota. He should know. He and his colleagues have studied the attachment relationship for over 40 years.

Why the confusion about a secure attachment?

Over the last 80 years, developmental scientists have come to understand that some micro-dynamics that take place between a baby and an adult in a caring relationship have a lifelong effect, in very specific ways, on the person that baby will become.

“Attachment,” Sroufe explains, “is a relationship in the service of a baby’s emotion regulation and exploration. It is the deep, abiding confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver.”

A secure attachment has at least three functions:

Provides a sense of safety and security
Regulates emotions, by soothing distress, creating joy, and supporting calm
Offers a secure base from which to explore

In spite of the long scientific history of attachment, psychologists have done a rather poor job of communicating what a secure attachment is and how to create one. In the meantime, the word “attachment” has been co-opted by a well-meaning pediatrician and his wife, William and Martha Sears, along with some of their children and an entire parenting movement. The “attachment parenting” philosophy promotes a lifestyle and a specific set of practices that are not proven to be related to a secure attachment. As a result, the movement has sown confusion (and guilt and stress) around the meaning of the word “attachment.”

The attachment parenting philosophy inspired by the Searses and promoted by an organization called Attachment Parenting International is centered on eight principle concepts, especially breastfeeding, co-sleeping, constant contact like baby-wearing, and emotional responsiveness. The approach is a well-intentioned reaction to earlier, harsher parenting advice, and the tone of the guidance tends to be baby-centered, supportive, and loving. Some of the practices are beneficial for reasons other than attachment. But the advice is often taken literally and to the extreme, as in the case of my “Amelie,” whose labor required hospital intervention and who suffered unduly in the belief that breastfeeding and co-sleeping are necessary for a secure attachment.

Attachment parenting has also been roundly critiqued for promoting a conservative Christian, patriarchal family structure that keeps women at home and tied tightly to their baby’s desires. Additionally, the philosophy seems to have morphed in the public consciousness into a lifestyle that also includes organic food, cloth diapers, rejection of vaccinations, and homeschooling. The Searses have sold millions of books, and they profit from endorsements of products that serve their advice.

“These [attachment parenting principles] are all fine things,” observes Sroufe “but they’re not the essential things. There is no evidence that they are predictive of a secure attachment.”

Sroufe unpacks feeding as an example: A mother could breastfeed, but do it in a mechanical and insensitive way, potentially contributing to an insecure attachment. On the other hand, she could bottle-feed in a sensitive manner, taking cues from the baby and using the interaction as an opportunity to look, talk, and play gently, according to the baby’s communication—all behaviors that are likely to create secure attachment. In other words, it is the quality of the interaction that matters. Now, one might choose breastfeeding for its digestibility or nutrition (though the long-term benefits are still debated), but to imply, as Amelie’s pediatrician did, that bottle-feeding could damage her bond with her baby is simply uninformed.

There is also confusion about what “constant contact” means. Early on, the Searses were influenced by the continuum concept, a “natural” approach to parenting inspired by indigenous practices of wearing or carrying babies much of the time. This, too, might have been taken up in reaction to the advice of the day, which was to treat children in a more businesslike manner. There is no arguing that skin-to-skin contact, close physical contact, holding, and carrying are all good for babies in the first few months of life, as their physiological systems settle and organize. Research also shows that the practice can reduce crying in the first few months. But again, what matters for attachment is the caregiver’s orientation and attunement: Is the caregiver stressed or calm, checked out or engaged, and are they reading a baby’s signals? Some parents misinterpret the prescription for closeness as a demand for constant physical closeness (which in the extreme can stress any parent), even though the Searses do advise parents to strive for a balanced life.

“There’s a difference between a ‘tight’ connection and a secure attachment,” Sroufe explains. “A tight attachment—together all the time—might actually be an anxious attachment.”

And what of emotional responsivity? This, too, has a kernel of truth, yet can be taken too far. It is safe to say that all developmental scientists encourage emotional responsiveness on the part of caregivers: The back-and-forth, or serve-and-return, is crucial to brain development, cognitive and emotional development, the stress regulation system, and just authentic human connection. But in my observation, well-meaning parents can become overly-responsive—or permissive—in the belief that they need to meet every request of the child. While that is appropriate for babies in the first half to one-year year of life (you can’t spoil a baby), toddlers and older children benefit from age-appropriate limits in combination with warmth and love. On the other hand, some parents feel stressed that they cannot give their child enough in the midst of their other responsibilities. Those parents can take some comfort in the finding that even within a secure attachment, parents are only attuned to the baby about 30% of the time. What is important, researchers say, is that the baby develops a generalized trust that their caregiver will respond and meet their needs, or that when mismatches occur, the caregiver will repair them (and babies, themselves, will go a long way toward soliciting that repair). As long as the caregiver returns to the interaction much of the time and rights the baby’s boat, this flow of attunements, mismatches, and repairs offers the optimal amount of connection and stress for a baby to develop both confidence and coping, in balance.

What is the scientific view of attachment?

The scientific notion of attachment has its roots in the work of an English psychiatrist named John Bowlby who, in the 1930s, began working with children with emotional problems. Most professionals of the day held the Freudian belief that children were mainly motivated by internal drives like hunger, aggression, and sexuality, and not by their environment. However, Bowlby noticed that most of the troubled children in his care were “affectionless” and had experienced disrupted or even absent caregiving. Though his supervisor forbade him from even talking to a mother of a child (!), he insisted that family experiences were important, and in 1944 he wrote his first account of his observations based on 44 boys in his care. (Around the same time in America, psychologist Harry Harlow was coming to the same conclusion in his fascinating and heart-rending studies of baby monkeys, where he observed that babies sought comfort, and not just food, from their mothers.)

Bowlby went on to study and treat other children who were separated from their parents: those who were hospitalized or homeless. He came to believe that the primary caregiver (he focused mainly on mothers) served as a kind of “psychic organizer” to the child, and that a child needs this influence, especially at certain times, in order to develop successfully. To grow up mentally healthy, then, “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with this mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.”

But the attachment figure doesn’t have to be the mother or even a parent. According to Bowlby, babies form a “small hierarchy of attachments.” This makes sense from an evolutionary view: The number has to be small since attachment organizes emotions and behavior in the baby, and to have too many attachments would be confusing; yet having multiples provides the safety of backups. And it’s a hierarchy because when the baby is in need of safety, he or she doesn’t have time to analyze the pros or cons of a particular person and must automatically turn to the person already determined to be a reliable comfort. Research shows that children who have a secure attachment with at least one adult experience benefits. Babies can form attachments with older siblings, fathers, grandparents, other relatives, a special adult outside the family, and even babysitters and daycare providers. However, there will still be a hierarchy, and under normal circumstances, a parent is usually at the top.

photo credit: K. Merchant

photo credit: D. Divecha

In the 1950s, Mary Ainsworth joined Bowlby in England, and a decade later back in the U.S. began to diagnose different kinds of relationship patterns between children and their mothers in the second year of life.[2] She did this by watching how babies reacted in a sequence of situations: when the baby and mother were together, when they were separated, when the baby was with a stranger, and when baby was reunited with the caregiver after the separation. Ainsworth and colleagues identified the first three of the following patterns, and Mary Main and colleagues identified the fourth:

When babies have a secure attachment, they play and explore freely from the “secure base” of their mother’s presence. When the mother leaves, the baby can become distressed, especially when a stranger is around. When the mother returns, the baby expresses her joy, sometimes from a distance and sometimes reaching to be picked up and held (babies vary, depending on their personality and temperament, even within a secure attachment). Then the baby settles quickly and returns to playing.

The mothers who fall into this pattern are responsive, warm, loving, and emotionally available, and as a result their babies grow to be confident in their mothers’ ability to handle feelings. The babies feel free to express their positive and negative feelings openly and don’t develop defenses against the unpleasant ones.

Babies in insecure-avoidant attachments seem indifferent to the mother, act unstressed when she leaves, and exhibit the same behaviors with a stranger. When the mother returns after a separation, the baby might avoid her, or might “fail to cling” when picked up.

The mothers in insecure-avoidant attachments often seem angry in general and angry, specifically, at their babies. They can be intolerant, sometimes punishing, of distress, and often attribute wrong motivations to the baby, e.g., “He’s just crying to spite me.” One study showed that the insecurely-attached babies are just as physiologically upset (increased heart rates, etc.) as securely attached babies when parents leave but have learned to suppress their emotions in order to stay close to the parent without risking rejection. In other words, the babies “deactivate” their normal attachment system and stop looking to their mothers for help.

As toddlers, insecure-avoidant children don’t pay much attention to their mothers or their own feelings, and their explorations of the physical world are rigid and self-reliant. By preschool, these children tend to be more hostile, aggressive, and have more negative interactions overall. Avoidance and emotional distance become a way of dealing with the world, and instead of problem-solving, they are more likely to sulk or withdraw.

Babies with an insecure-ambivalent/resistant attachment are clingy with their mother and don’t explore or play in her presence. They are distressed when the mother leaves, and when she returns, they vacillate between clinging and angry resistance. For example, they may struggle, hit, or push back when the mother picks them up.

These babies are not easily comforted. They seem to want the close relationship, but the mother’s inconsistency and insensitivity undermine the baby’s confidence in her responses. This pattern also undermines the child’s autonomy, because the baby stays focused on the mother’s behavior and changing moods to the exclusion of nearly everything else. In insecure-ambivalent babies, separation anxiety tends to last long after secure babies have mastered it. Longitudinal studies show that these children often become inhibited, withdrawn, and unassertive, and they have poor interpersonal skills.

The last pattern of insecure attachment—which is the most disturbing and destructive—is disorganized attachment, and it was described by Ainsworth’s doctoral student, Mary Main. This pattern can occur in families where there is abuse or maltreatment; the mother, who is supposed to be a source of support, is also the person who frightens the child. Such mothers may be directly maltreating the child, or they might have their own histories of unresolved trauma. Main and her colleague write, “[T]he infant is presented with an irresolvable paradox wherein the haven of safety is at once the source of alarm.”

This pattern can also result when the mother has a mental illness, substance addiction, or multiple risk factors like poverty, substance abuse and a history of being mistreated. Babies of mothers like this can be flooded with anxiety; alternatively, they can be “checked out” or dissociated, showing a flat, expressionless affect or odd, frozen postures, even when held by the mother. Later these children tend to become controlling and aggressive, and dissociation remains a preferred defense mechanism.[3]

“The emotional quality of our earliest attachment experience is perhaps the single most important influence on human development.”

— Alan Sroufe and Dan Siegel

How important is attachment?

“Nothing is more important than the attachment relationship,” says Alan Sroufe, who, together with colleagues, performed a series of landmark studies to discover the long-term impact of a secure attachment. Over a 35-year period, the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaption (MLSRA) revealed that the quality of the early attachment reverberated well into later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, even when temperament and social class were accounted for.

One of the most important—and, to some ways of thinking, paradoxical—findings was that a secure attachment early in life led to greater independence later, whereas an insecure attachment led to a child being more dependent later in life. This conclusion runs counter to the conventional wisdom held by some people I’ve observed who are especially eager to make the baby as independent and self-sufficient as possible right from the start. But there is no pushing independence, Sroufe found. It blooms naturally out of a secure attachment.

photo credit: K. Merchant

In school, securely attached children were more well-liked and treated better, by both their peers and their teachers. In one study, teachers who had no knowledge of a child’s attachment history were shown to treat securely attached children with more warmth and respect, set more age-appropriate standards, and have higher expectations. In contrast, teachers were more controlling, had lower expectations, got angry more often, and showed less nurturing toward the children with difficult attachments—and who, sadly, had a greater need than the securely attached kids for kindness from adults.

The MSLRA studies showed that children with a secure attachment history were more likely to develop:[4]

A greater sense of self-agency
Better emotional regulation
Higher self-esteem
Better coping under stress
More positive engagement in the preschool peer group
Closer friendships in middle childhood
Better coordination of friendships and social groups in adolescence
More trusting, non-hostile romantic relationships in adulthood
Greater social competence
More leadership qualities
Happier and better relationships with parents and siblings
Greater trust in life

A large body of additional research suggests that a child’s early attachment affects the quality of their adult relationships, and a recent longitudinal study of 81 men showed that those who grew up in warm, secure families were more likely to have secure attachments with romantic partners well into their 70s and 80s. A parent’s history of childhood attachment can also affect their ability to parent their own child, creating a cross-generational transmission of attachment styles.

But early childhood attachment with a parent is not destiny: It depends on what else comes along. For example, a secure preschool child can shift to having an insecure attachment later if there is a severe disruption in the caregiving system—a divorce or death of a parent, for example. But the effect is mediated by how stressed and available the primary attachment figure is. In other words, it’s not what happens, but how it happens that matters. Children who were previously secure, though, have a tendency to rebound more easily.

Sroufe writes in several articles that an insecure attachment is not fate, either; it can be repaired in a subsequent relationship. For example, good-quality childcare that offers emotional support and stress reduction can mitigate a rocky start at home. A later healthy romantic relationship can offset the effects of a difficult childhood. And good therapy can help, too, since some of the therapeutic process mimics the attachment process. Bowlby viewed development as a series of pathways, constrained by paths previously taken but where change is always possible.

Without conscious intervention, though, attachment styles do tend to get passed through the generations, and Bowlby observed that becoming a parent particularly activates a parent’s childhood attachment style. One study looked at attachment styles over three generations and found that the mother’s attachment style when she was pregnant predicted her baby’s attachment style at one year of age for about 70% of cases.

What about parents who might not have gotten a good start in life and want to change their attachment style? There’s good news. Research on adult attachment shows that it is not the actual childhood experiences with attachment that matter but rather how well the adult understands what happened to them, whether they’ve learned some new ways of relating, and how well they’ve integrated their experience into the present. In other words, do they have a coherent and realistic story (including both good and bad) of where they’ve been and where they are now?

Support matters, too. In one of Sroufe’s studies, half the mothers were teenagers, which is usually a stressful situation. Sroufe found that the teenagers with good social support were able to form secure attachments with their babies, but if they didn’t have support, they were unlikely to form a secure attachment.

How to parent for a secure attachment and how to know if it’s working.

“The baby needs to know that they’re massively important,” says Sroufe. “A caregiver should be involved, attentive, sensitive, and responsive.”

“The baby will tell you what to do,” Sroufe explains. “They have a limited way of expressing their needs, so they’re not that difficult to read: If they’re fussing, they need something. If their arms are out, they want to be picked up. And if you misread them, they will keep on signaling until you get it right.” He gives the example of bottle-feeding a baby: “The baby might want a break, and she looks around. What does the baby want? To look around! If the parent misreads and forces the bottle back, the baby will insist, maybe snap her head away, or pull away harder.”

“How can I know if my baby is securely attached?” a client asked me about her six-month old. Clearly observable attachment doesn’t emerge until around nine months, but here are some clues that a secure attachment is underway:

0-3 months:

The baby’s physiology is just settling as the baby cycles quickly among feeding, sleeping, and alert wakefulness. Meeting the baby’s needs at different points in the cycle helps establish stability.
At this point, the baby has no clear preference for one person over another.
In her quiet, alert state, the baby is interested in the faces and voices around her.

4-8 months:

Attempts to soothe the baby are usually effective at calming her down. (Caveat: An inability to soothe might not be predictive of insecurity but rather point to one of a host of other possible issues.)
The primary caregiver has positive interactions with the baby where the back-and-forth is pleasant.
The baby has calm periods where she is interested in the world around her, and she explores and experiments to the extent she is physically able to—looking, grasping, reaching, babbling, beginning crawling, exploring objects with her mouth, hands, etc.
Infants begin to discriminate between people and start to show preferences. They direct most of their emotions (smiles, cries) toward the caregiver but are still interested in strangers.
They are very interested in the people they see often, especially siblings.

9 months:

The baby shows a clear preference for a primary caregiver.
The baby shows wariness toward strangers, though the degree varies with temperament.
The baby is easily upset when separated from her primary caregiver, though that, too, varies with temperament.
The baby is easily soothed after a separation and can resume her exploration or play.

9 months – 3 years:

The child shows a clear emotional bond with a primary person.
The child stays in close proximity to that person but forms close relationships with other people who are around a lot, too, e.g., babysitter, siblings.

Beyond this age, the attachment relationship becomes more elaborated. With language and memory, the rhythms of attachment and separation become more negotiated, talked about, and planned, and there is more of a back-and-forth between parent and child. By toddlerhood and beyond, an authoritative parenting style deftly blends secure attachment with age-appropriate limits and supports. A sensitive parent allows the changing attachment to grow and stretch with a child’s growing skills, yet continues to be emotionally attuned to the child and to protect their safety.

One of the best resources for how to parent for a secure attachment in the first few years of life is the new book Raising A Secure Child by Kent Hoffman, Glen Cooper, and Bert Powell, all therapists who have worked with many different kinds of families for decades. Their work is based squarely on the science of attachment, and they call their approach the Circle of Security. The circle represents the seamless ebb and flow of how babies and young children need their caregivers, at times coming close for care and comfort, and at other times following their inspiration to explore the world around them. The caregivers’ role is to tune into where on the circle their child is at the moment and act accordingly. Parenting for a secure attachment, the authors say, is not a prescriptive set of behaviors but more a state of mind, a way of “being with” the baby, a sensitivity to what they are feeling. The authors also help parents see the ways that their own attachment history shows up in their parenting and help them to make the necessary adjustments.

The neurobiology of attachment

“Attachment theory is essentially a theory of regulation,” explains Allan Schore, a developmental neuroscientist in the Department of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. A clinician-scientist, he has elaborated modern attachment theory over the last three decades by explaining how the attachment relationship is important to the child’s developing brain and body.

Early brain development, Schore explains, is not driven just by genetics. The brain needs social experiences to take shape. “Mother Nature and Mother Nurture combine to shape Human Nature,” he writes.

Infants grow new synapses, or neural connections, at a rate of 40,000 new synapses a second, and the brain more than doubles in volume across the first year. Genetic factors drive this early overproduction of neurons, Schore explains, but the brain awaits direction from the social environment, or epigenetic processes, to determine which synapses or connections are to be pruned, which should be maintained, and which genes are turned on or off.

One of the first areas of the brain that begins to grow and differentiate is the right brain, the hemisphere that processes emotional and social information. The right brain begins to differentiate in the last trimester in utero, whereas the left-brain development picks up in the second year of life. Some of the regions that process emotion are already present in infants’ brains at birth—the amygdala, hypothalamus, insula, cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex. But the connections among these areas develop in specific patterns over the first years of life. That’s where input from the primary relationship becomes crucial—organizing the hierarchical circuitry that will eventually process, communicate, and regulate social and emotional information.[5]

“What the primary caregiver is doing, in being with the baby,” explains Schore, “is allowing the child to feel and to identify in his own body these different emotional states. By having a caregiver simply ‘be with’ him while he feels emotions and has experiences, the baby learns how to be,” Schore says.

The part of the brain that the primary caregiver uses for intuition, feeling, and empathy to attune to the infant is also the caregiver’s right brain. So it is through “right-brain-to-right brain” reading of each other, that the parent and child synchronize their energy, emotions, and communication. And the behaviors that parents are inclined to do naturally—like eye contact and face-to-face interaction, speaking in “motherese” (higher-pitched and slower than normal speech), and holding—are just the ones shown to grow the right-brain regions in the baby that influence emotional life and especially emotion regulation.

The evidence for epigenetic effects on emotion regulation is quite solid: Early caregiving experiences can affect the expression of the genes that regulate a baby’s stress and they can shape how the endocrine system will mobilize to stress. Caregiving behaviors like responsiveness affect the development of the baby’s vagal tone (the calming system) and the hypothalamic-pituitary axis (the system that activates the body to respond to perceived danger). High quality caregiving, then, modulates how the brain and body respond to and manage stress.

Schore points out that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region in the right hemisphere, both has the most complex emotion and stress-regulating systems of any part in the brain and is also the center of Bowlby’s attachment control system. Neurobiological research confirms that this region is “specifically influenced by the social environment.” [6]

Stress management is not the only important part of emotion regulation. In the past, Schore explains, there was an overemphasis in the field of emotion regulation on singularly lowering the baby’s distress. But now, he says, we understand that supporting positive emotional states is equally important to creating [what he quotes a colleague as calling] a “background state of well-being.” In other words, enjoy your baby. It’s protective.

A baby’s emotion regulation begins with the caregiver, and the Goldilocks principle applies: If the caregiver’s emotions are too high, the stimulation could be intrusive to the baby, Schore explains. Too low, and the baby’s “background state” settles at a low or possibly depressive emotional baseline. Just right, from the baby’s point of view is best.

And babies are surprisingly perceptive at registering their feeling environment. Hoffman, Cooper and Powell write:

The youngest babies can sense ease versus impatience, delight versus resentment or irritation, comfort versus restlessness, genuine versus pretending, or other positive versus negative responses in a parent when these reactions aren’t evident to a casual observer. Little babies may pick up on the smallest sigh, the subtlest shift in tone of voice, a certain glance, or some type of body language and know the parent is genuinely comfortable or definitely not pleased.

Schore explains that in a secure attachment, the baby learns to self-regulate in two ways: One he calls “autoregulation” which is self-soothing, or using his own mind and body to manage feelings. The second is “interactive regulation” which is going to other people to help up- or down-regulate feelings. This twin thread of self-reliance and reliance on others, then, begins in the earliest months, becomes very important in the first two years of life, and continues in more subtle ways throughout the life span.

This all might sound daunting for a new parent, who could still be tempted to overdo the focus on the infant and how the connection is going—potentially leading to the same kinds of stress and guilt that the attachment parenting movement creates.

But fortunately, the caregiver doesn’t have to be 100% attuned to the baby and ongoing repairs are an important part of the process:

“The idea that a mother should never stress a baby is problematic,” Schore says. “Insecure attachments aren’t created just by a caregiver’s inattention or missteps. It also comes from a failure to repair ruptures. What is essential is the repair. Maybe the caregiver is coming in too fast and needs to back off, or maybe the caregiver has not responded, and needs to show the baby that she’s there. Either way, repair is possible, and it works. Stress is a part of life, and what we’re trying to do here is to set up a system by which the baby can learn how to cope with stress.” Optimal stress, he explains, is important for stimulating the stress-regulating system.

Still, both Sroufe and Schore acknowledge the emotional labor of parenting. And they are vehement that parents need to be supported in order to have the space and freedom to care for babies.

“It takes time for parents to learn to read their baby’s signals,” Sroufe said.

Schore calls America’s failure to provide paid family leave—and we’re the only country in the world that doesn’t—the “shame of America.”

“We are putting the next generation at risk,” he explains, pointing to rising rates of insecure attachments and plummeting mental health among American youth. Parents should have at least six months of paid leave and job protection for the primary caregiver, and at least two months of the same for the secondary one, according to Schore, and Sroufe goes further, advocating for one full year of paid leave and job protection. And a recent study showed that it takes mothers a year to recover from pregnancy and delivery.

Intellectual and cognitive development have been privileged in our society, but it is our emotion regulation that organizes us, our existence, and how we experience life, Schore says. A study from the London School of Economics draws the conclusion that “The most important childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child’s emotional health…. The least powerful predictor is the child’s intellectual development.”[7]

So where does this leave my friend Amelie? The hard part will be navigating the distracting advice and creating the workarounds she needs for the lack of cultural support. But she enjoys her baby immensely, and I’m confident that she’ll form a secure attachment with Sylvie, as she trusts her own “right-brain” flow of empathy, feeling, and being, and tunes in to Sylvie’s own unique ways of communicating.

And Sylvie will do her part to draw her parents close. Because regardless of babies’ individual personalities—and whether they cry a lot or sleep very little, whether they’re breastfed or bottle-fed—they draw you in with their wide-open gaze, their milky scent, and their tiny fingers that curl around your big ones. Before you know it, they light you up with their full-body smile that’s specially for you, and they draw you near with their plump little arms clasped around your neck.

And the sweet elixir of the attachment relationship is underway.

References:

[1] While many medications are considered safe to take while breastfeeding, complete side effects may not be fully understood. For example, recent research suggests antibiotics may change the test baby’s microbiome (the implications of which are unclear), and some antibiotics are thought to discolor developing teeth.

[2] This section refers to primary caregivers as mothers since this research focused just on mothers.

[3] This section was adapted from the chapter on Attachment, in D. Davies’ Child Development: A Practitioner’s Guide, Guilford, 2011.

[4] Sroufe, A. & Siegel, D. “The verdict is in: The case for attachment theory.”

[5] From Schore, A. (2017). Modern attachment theory, in APA’s Handbook of Trauma Psychology, p. 6.

[6] Schore, A. (2017). “Modern attachment theory.” In APA Handbook of Trauma Psychology: Vol 1 (publication pending).

[7] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecoj.12170/full p. F720, in Layard,R., Clark, A.E., Cornaglia, F., Powdthavee, N. & Vernoit, J. (2014) What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of well-being. The Economic Journal, 124, p. F720-F738.

What Does a Developmental Psychologist See in a 40th Class Reunion?

July 23, 2016

When I told people I was going to my 40th high school reunion, I might as well have said I was jumping off a cliff. Almost across the board, the reaction was shock, though the reasons varied. Granted, I hadn’t been in touch with my classmates, so some degree of surprise was legitimate. But my friends and family also projected their own reasons: high school had been the “worst time of their lives”; that they had never “fit in”; they didn’t want to open their present lives to judgment. But I’m a developmental psychologist, and I wanted to understand what a reunion ritual might mean. Nothing is more interesting to me than discovering how children grow up and their lives turn out.

As the date approached, I finally became apprehensive myself. Most of us had been together since kindergarten, but what if I didn’t recognize people after forty years? After all, I now have silver hair and 40 additional pounds; others would also have changed. Or what if we didn’t have anything to talk about? How would I react to an old “flame,” or he to me? Could I finally uncover the story behind a friend who had so traumatically “dropped” me in sixth grade? When nervous jokes started showing up on the Facebook reunion page, I saw that I wasn’t the only one with anxiety. I recruited a childhood friend to go with me.

“I’m only doing this for you, you know,” Vic joked when she greeted me at my hotel. Our mothers went to high school together and been friends long before we were born. Vic remembers the fuzzy socks I wore in second grade and how my father had carried me into school in his arms when my broken leg was in a cast. I remember making vinegar and baking soda volcanoes at Vic’s house and singing soprano next to her in choir.

We arrived at the Curling Club (home to the winter sport of sliding granite stones on ice) to a frenzy of slightly boozed-up greetings. About a third of my class of 140 was there. A current of excitement crackled through the crowd—hails from across the lawn; flying wisecracks and boisterous teasing; and enthusiastic, if somewhat self-conscious, hugging. It was a relief to find my old friend Dave, who was just as unruffled as I’d remembered him—a straight shooter, unperturbed by his surroundings. He had worked for a time for my father, a milkman; his mother had been my beloved third grade teacher. I was happy to meet Dave’s wife, and a meaningful conversation ensued about parents, illness, children, and more.

Sociologist Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi has observed that high school reunions can trigger a sudden threat to one’s identity. In the space of a short gathering, we are called upon to reconcile past expectations with our present reality, among people who shared that past. At my reunion, the actual list of predictions that our peers had made about each other 40 years ago hid amidst the memorabilia. “Diana will run a computer dating service,” it read, and the old memory of craving connection amidst my chaotic environment flashed. Other predictions were equally unpredictive: that a high school romance would end in marriage (it didn’t) or that a career would peak in a grocery store stockroom (it didn’t); and predictions for women centered on marriage and children. Predictions can be entertaining, but since these weren’t about activating our best future selves, I regretted their presence. Reunions are not just happy gatherings, Vinitzky-Seroussi writes. They “telescope the life course” and create pressure to evaluate, or protect, or project our choices, often in the space of a very short, catch-up conversation.

But this was not our tenth or even twenty-fifth reunion, the early ones that Vinitzky-Seroussi studied. This was our fortieth, a time when life achievements are behind for most of us and some are even looking toward retirement. Fortunately, I felt well-anchored in the present, and I think others did, too.

The conventional wisdom about reunions is that people can surprise you, and I found that to be true. Who would have known that the quiet boy in the back of the band would be a pillar of the community as the trusted funeral director? Or that the guy who seemed lost in high school would be so crisp and successful at 58? Psychologists use the terms “equifinality” and “multifinality” to describe how very different paths can lead to similar outcomes, or, conversely, how similar paths can lead to very different outcomes. At the same time, our perceptions of what’s important changes, too: The kids who once dominated in popularity might now appear boring and superficial, and the former “outsiders” often turn out to be the really interesting ones. And yet when I asked Vic if she recognized everyone, she replied, “Not so much from their faces, but their energy—it’s the same.”

Even though we all shared a large part of our pasts, we couldn’t have truly known each others’ lives while we were children. A few kids had seemed to sail through with equanimity—they ran the student council at school and collected maple syrup at home–but even then, there were hints of malaise. I knew that it wasn’t right that the gentle, deer-like boy who sat in front of me in seventh grade homeroom smelled like alcohol and cigarettes. Another child was rumored to have been abused, though there was no action taken to protect her. I was a high achiever but suffered with parents who were in constant conflict; they struggled with mental health and substance use issues. Many parents were alcoholics before the disease was even named.

Psychologists now know that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are predictive of later physical and mental health problems, including heart disease, depression, and suicidality. Research suggests that about a third of kids are lucky enough to escape trauma, but about a quarter suffer such high doses that it affects brain development, immune and endocrine functioning, and can create mental and physical disease systems that reduce the lifespan by an average of 20 years. How different might many students’ lives have been if an adult had recognized their feelings and had the skill to approach them and say, “You look down. What’s going on, and can I help?” Today, innovative schools throughout the country are feathering emotional skill development into their academic curricula, and studies show that both individual kids, and the school as a whole do better. Pediatricians, too, are beginning to screen for ACEs and offer early intervention services to families and children at risk.

Childhood is not easy, even at the best of times, and middle school is an especially stressful period. Conventional wisdom used to hold that it was the changing sex hormones that made kids “crazy,” but scientists now understand that puberty kicks off changes in the brain that make youth more emotionally sensitive, more sensitive to their social world, more willing to take risks, and more vulnerable to mental illness and addictions. Combine all of that with changes in schools, new peer groups, or family troubles, and you quickly get a pile-up of stressors that can be overwhelming.

Jockeying for status in peer groups begins as early as the fifth grade, and, in my day, peer dynamics were raw and lacking any guidance. Consistent with the research, it was the male athletes and the conventionally pretty girls (especially cheerleaders) who were conferred high status, and kids who were “different” were often marginalized—through teasing, exclusion, and gossip. Girls who physically matured earlier than average, or boys who matured later than average, were at greater risk, just as they are today. Too tall, too skinny, too heavy, too awkward, too shy, too country, too slow…the “faults” can be endless.

Kids naturally form and re-form friendships, but without real social skills, the process can be excruciating. In sixth grade, I was shattered when my best friend of six years decided one day to simply stop talking to me. While it’s natural for a child to feel ready to find new friends, this particular friend had had no skills with which to explain her needs. Her silent treatment left a mark, and I used it both as a cautionary tale for my own children and an illustration in the college courses I taught on teen development. Research now shows that humans are such intensely social creatures that social ostracism lights up physical pain pathways in the brain; it can be more damaging than even physical abuse. Sometimes, I imagine how our friendship “breakup” could have gone differently, had we had the social skills kids can learn in school nowadays to navigate peer conflict. Though my well-being is no longer affected by that experience, I was curious to know my former friend’s side of the story. Yet when we greeted each other at the reunion, we didn’t get much beyond a hello. I took that to mean that it was not likely to be the place—or perhaps the person—where such a conversation could happen.

“Humans are storytelling, story-loving creatures,” says psychologist Matthew Lieberman, author of Social Brain, Social Mind. One of the most powerful ways we understand the experience of being human is by constructing a narrative of our lives. Young children begin this process as soon as they learn the word “I,” and parents begin telling them stories about when they were little. And at the other end of lifespan, elders engage in a “life review,” telling and retelling their stories to help them make sense of their lives.

Reunions—where our past selves meet our present selves—can be a special opportunity to re-weave our stories. I observed it happening all evening. One woman who had seemed defiant and tough in junior high apologized to the PE teacher, telling her that she hadn’t meant to be the teacher’s “nemesis” but in fact was a military kid who got moved around a lot.

“I never knew that,” the teacher breathed, empathically.

A man who had been a geek before geeks were cool enthusiastically shared that he was an inventor, held patents, had designed a part of the space shuttle and a medical device, and had made millions doing so.

A friend divulged her confusion about some same-sex experimentation that had gone on at a childhood sleepover. Of course there had been no framework for normalizing that, or even language to name it.

I, too, had a story to revise. When a popular biology teacher’s name came up, I shared that six years after we’d graduated, he had prevented my Lutheran church from marrying me and my husband, because my husband is from India. “He’s not a good guy,” I grumbled about the teacher.

The life stories flowed, from what it’s like for a Minnesotan to be transplanted to the Deep South, to taking care of grandchildren, to being the youngest in a senior citizen woodworking shop, to losing a child. There was a lot of loss and growth to process, as well as joy to celebrate.

One evening is not enough time together to truly span 40 years; it’s just a sliver of reality. But I happily put new numbers and email addresses into my phone. I want to keep up with some old friends, and I discovered new ones that I’d missed earlier.

And that old flame?

“I learned from you,” he told me. “Your family had high expectations, and I craved some of that.”

“You sheltered me at a stormy time,” I replied, remembering his laughter and easy-going manner.

Class reunion? For me, at least, it wasn’t so scary. What we went through together mattered, and bearing witness to one another’s stories—from our shared past and the years that had followed— felt like a good way to honor that.

Ten Reasons Teens Need an Emotion Revolution: My Speech to Lady Gaga's Foundation and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

October 30, 2015

Developmental scientists are alarmed about American teens' well-being. Our teens are doing much more poorly, in many spheres, than teens in other countries, and indicators of mental illness have been rising among American teens in recent decades.

On October 24th, I joined 400 high school student students, educators, policymakers, funders, and parents at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. We were there for an all-day summit to launch the Emotion Revolution--a movement to improve the emotional climate for teens at school.

Last spring, the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence teamed up with Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation to conduct a survey of 22,000 diverse teens. The survey asked the teens how they were feeling in school and how they wanted to feel. In the first morning session of the Emotion Revolution Summit, the results were revealed:

Students surveyed reported that they are not feeling well at school. 80% of the top ten feelings were negative: tired, stressed, and bored, followed by anxious, annoyed, sad, alone, and depressed. (The remaining 20% was accounted for by "happy" and "good" or neutral.)
Students said they would rather feel happy, excited, and energized, along with safe, comfortable, valued, respected, connected, supported, balanced, and contented.

In response the Center, along with the BTW Foundation and Facebook, created a website called InspirED. There, teachers and students can find classroom activities of every size designed to foster exactly the feelings that students said they want to have.

But it's going to take more than a resource center. Like any great change, helping teens feel good at school is going to take attitude shifts, policy changes, funding, and more.

I gave a talk at the Summit which laid out ten reasons, based on adolescent development, for why a revolution is necessary to bring a greater and more sophisticated investment in teens themselves, and in the environments they move in.

My 15-minute talk is here:

If you don't have time to watch, here are my points in a nutshell:

Compared to teens in other developed countries, American teens are struggling in most spheres that matter.
Developmental scientists, who study child and adolescent development, are calling the teen years the new Zero-To-Three. Zero-To-Three was an effort to pour money, policies, and programs into the first few years of children's lives, founded when the science revealed that what happens in a child's environment affects critical brain development. Well, now we're understanding that the brain changes that happen in the teen years are just as critical--and they need just as intense a focus. Never again in a person's life will there be such a window of opportunity.
Beginning in puberty, the brain undergoes tremendous "pruning" of neuronal connections. The neurons that are necessary, and are still used, remain. The unnecessary ones get pruned, or cut out. ("Use it or lose it.") This means that teens' environments are important--what they are paying attention to becomes entrenched in the brain.
A number of changes happen in the brain to make teens more emotional. They need strategies to deal with this intense emotionality.
Due to imbalances in the development of brain systems, teens are "all gas and no brakes," which makes them take uncalculated risks, for better and worse.
Teens are more sensitive to other people than are younger children or adults, and could benefit from more skills for handling their greater depth of feeling.
Teens want to become independent, but they also want to stay connected to their parents--and have been telling researchers so for decades.
This current generation of teens has strong values. They are less materialistic than earlier cohorts of teens, they care more about others, they are concerned for the environment, and they have progressive attitudes.
Most human rights documents concerning youth give them the explicit right to have a say in the matters that affect them.
Teens have led revolutions before.

If we give teens the skills they need and the respect they crave, who knows what force for good we could unleash?

What Does a Developmental Psychologist See in Burning Man?

September 15, 2015

When I sent my 86-year old father my photos from Burning Man, he replied that he didn't understand: Wasn't it for "hippie kids"? What was I doing there, and what did the experience do for me?

The Burn is famously different for each participant. Some Burners go to strut and party, some to share their art, a few to network and get ahead. Approaching our 60s, my husband and I get the most pleasure from camping there with our 20-something kids who extended an open invitation for the second time. But I also go to stay fresh, keep up on emerging ideas, and to prevent the fixed mindset I fear might creep in with age.

Like everyone, I bring my own kaleidoscopic lens to the playa. In my everyday life as a developmental psychologist, I experience much of my social world through a chronological telescope: When I look at children, I see the adults they may become; when I meet adults, I see the children they likely were. I’m keenly aware that we are all developing, all the time.

And I recognize that we are not nailed uniformly to a single rung on some developmental ladder. While some parts of us are reasonably established in adulthood, some parts of us remain deep in childhood. Psychologists call this normal developmental unevenness décalage, a French word that translates to “lag” or “gap.” Many people are not stuck but move flexibly and adaptively—like various spiritual teachers I’ve encountered, whose equanimity is spacious and evolved, yet who can erupt with the laughter and delight of young children.

At home, preparing for Burning Man, I gave myself permission to go the craft table and the dress-up corner to immerse myself in the elixir of creativity and make-believe. I emerged wearing a homemade caftan, wooden necklaces, and a medieval horned headpiece, along with a second headpiece of papier-mâché branches sprouting from a drywall skullcap anchored inside a turban. By the time I hopped on my bike at the edge of the playa, I could see my 10-year-old self in the mirror.

In my adult life, I advocate for improving childhood through my research, speaking, and writing. And there's much to do. In the first twenty years of life, we find out how the world works and we wrangle a place in it. For some, the process is kind, and for others it is bumpy yet manageable. For a surprising number, though, it is a tortured and traumatic path and they are deposited at the door of adulthood with handicaps and scar tissue. In a famous study of over 17,000 adults, about a third said their childhoods were free of “adverse childhood experiences” (one of ten serious conditions that can derail a child’s life), but about a quarter reported three or more types of traumas— a number that science now links to emotional and physical problems that persist well into adulthood.

And in a Hansel-and-Gretel world, the places meant to shelter, nurture, and protect children are the ones that do the most damage. Many children are traumatized in their homes, and show up at school unable to concentrate or manage their strong feelings. They are frequently misdiagnosed, drugged, punished or expelled. When adults have emotional problems, they are treated as mental health concerns, but when children have emotional struggles, they are often "behavior problems" to be controlled. Schools, too, can be unsafe: Punishment is a popular but harmful approach to managing children, while cultivating kind, emotionally supportive school cultures is effective but slow to catch on. About a quarter of kids are bullied or harassed at school--an experience that can undermine the rest of their lives. Children do not enjoy the same relationship rights that adults are privileged with; they're made to return, day after day, to the places and people who abuse them.

Burners are a well-educated, modestly financially secure group, but emotional difficulties are equal opportunity. The playa is sometimes described as a kind of playground, but through my eyes it is unlike the one of our childhoods. This one acknowledges some real developmental concerns. Through installations, workshops, and talks, Burning Man offers a chance for some re-dos. Some rewiring.

And it can start with letting go of some of the grief collected on the journey so far. The Temple of Promise, a stunning Gothic cornucopia rising 97 feet above the playa—is a paean to both the normal and the outsized suffering of being human.

Temple of Promise (photos by Diana and Arjun Divecha)

Visitors walk through its increasingly narrowing form, leaving baggage, burdens, pains, fears, and mementos to be burned away at the end of the week. Messages fill and are hung from every available surface, and this year someone left three small suitcases. One woman vented an angry diatribe of suffering at the hands of an abusive stepfather and a complicit mother. Another message was written to parents who had died in a plane accident: “I have not been in a small plane since yours was taken down,” it said. “A friend has offered to fly me over this temple, and I am going to try to overcome my fear. My love is eternal.” On our fourth walk through the temple, my husband quietly released some of the sorrow of losing his mother three months ago.

Reflect (photo by Diana Divecha) — *Reflect* *(photo by Diana Divecha)*

A giant 20-by-40-foot colored tear drop, called Reflect, was captured at the point where it hits water, to represent all the tears shed by those left behind when someone takes his or her own life.

In childhood, adult power hierarchies—based on social status, gender, ethnicity, even height and attractiveness—are replicated inside the school walls, and kids learn early who’s on top and who’s pushed to the exit ramps. Kids often punish each other for being different, and power structures like schools and other institutions use whatever behavioral control possible to keep kids “in line.”

A 50-foot chapel called the Totem of Confessions contained dioramas of surreal and dreamlike black-and-white photos, oddities that might pop up from the subconscious into dreams or fantasies or fears, and that would likely be considered shameful by others. And as a reminder of ever-present judgment, there was a confessional in the interior of the chapel.

Totem of Confessions (photos by Diana Divecha)

Time Out Corner (photo by Diana Divecha) — *Time Out Corner* *(photo by Diana Divecha)*

A Time Out Corner appeared out of nowhere on the playa, recalling the frequent punishment—deserved or not—of our childhood transgressions. Timeouts for children are now understood to be ineffective, even harmful. Brain imaging studies show they light up the same neural pathways as physical pain.

Some days, after writing about bullying and trauma, I marvel that most of us make it to adulthood as well as we do. The striving to connect, to still try, to be able to still wonder, was manifest in the sculpture Love. There, two massive wire adult forms were seated back-to-back, heads down in withdrawal, while the glowing child inside each of them reached out for the other, touching hands.

Love (photo by Diana Divecha) — *Love* *(photo by Diana Divecha)*

Identity Awareness (photo by Diana Divecha) — *Identity Awareness* *(photo by Diana Divecha)*

At Burning Man, there is an invitation to sort out what is personal encumbrance and artifice, from what authentically belongs to us. A giant question mark, barely propped up by a human figure reminded us to question the source of our choices, the source of our identity.

One of the Ten Guiding Principles of Burning Man—radical self-expression—is a direct antidote to the censoring—and censuring—of growing up, making space to question the conventions we take for granted. We took part with our crazy clothes, our go-with-the-flow schedules (some of us got up before dawn when others were just going to bed), and our explorations of new topics (from beekeeping to twerking). We passed the “Dick Parade” where 150 men bicycled through camp, bottomless, while gentle hecklers (a thing) encouraged the liberal use of sunscreen. In its counterpart, women paraded topless in "Critical Tits." Overhead, a man flew a glider, naked. “You’re guaranteed to not be the weirdest kid in the classroom,” the online guide soothes. It would be easy to dismiss the naked experimentation as exhibitionism, but I'm sure some riders may have been struggling with their body image or health concerns; for some it may have been a healing process from being bullied, targeted, or abused; and perhaps others simply wanted to walk through the wall of a conventional boundary. There are as many possible reasons as there were riders.

(Photos by Arjun and Zai Divecha)

But by radical, they mean deep, not crazy: Consent is the cornerstone of a civil community, the Burning Man literature reads. It doesn’t refer to just sexual and physical touch, but anything that “will radically alter the experience of another person.” Prompts to good behavior were everywhere.

Another principle, "radical inclusion," is the antidote to the emotional abuse and social exclusions suffered in childhood. The consistent expectation of kindness is refreshing and softening, and people are just more present. I felt my own guardedness melt just a bit, with hugs, gifts, conversations, and gentle heckles.

Developmental psychologists find that play is the cauldron of intellectual, creative, and social development in childhood, and according to the Burner census, many people come to the playa just for that. The playful mood is their "top priority."

Everything that can be climbed on, is:

(Photos by Arjun Divecha)

You can be a flamethrower, safely:

Serpent Mother (photo by Jordana Joseph); Fire safety rules (photo by Arjun Divecha)

Puns are everywhere:

Burning Man: What Where When (photo by Arjun Divecha); Camp Nevada (photo by Diana Divecha)

And a Disney singalong and Thriller flashmob are open to all comers—not something we normally have an opportunity to attend.

The Bunny March Against Humanity herds humans into a bus and they exit dressed as bunnies. Humans haven’t done such a good job of being in charge, the organizers say. So let’s give the bunnies a chance.

“The only cure for reality,” says the author Gary Lindberg, “is imagination.”

And finally, our sense of wonder was on full throttle much of the time. The location itself is dramatic, and the playa was saturated with one stunning installation after another.

(Photos by Diana, Arjun, and Zai Divecha, and Julie Light)

The burning of The Man at the end of the week might not just represent an anger toward the political and economic establishment but perhaps a rebellion against the colonization of the heart and spirit as well.

This is a struggle we are all wired for. As we watched a group of young yogis strain, falter, and ultimately succeed in positioning themselves atop giant letters, an observer called out encouragement, shouting “This is what it is to LIVE!”

DREAM LIVE BE OK (photo by Arjun Divecha) — *DREAM LIVE BE OK* *(photo by Arjun Divecha)*

The Only Parenting Model You Need

June 28, 2015

Do these scenarios sound familiar? A four-year-old has a meltdown because he refuses to wear his fancy new clothes to his cousin's wedding. Or a middle-schooler quits basketball after an altercation with the coach and announces she wants to change schools.

These situations, and many more, can challenge even experienced parents. And parents looking around for advice today are met with a barrage of conflicting information.

But one parenting model has withstood fads and changing times. It's an approach backed by four decades of developmental research showing that it is the very best style of parenting for both children and teens. And it works well for all different kinds of families, regardless of their ethnicity, income, education, or structure. It's called authoritative parenting. And it deserves more attention.

Developed by Diana Baumrind in 1966 at the University of California at Berkeley, the authoritative parenting model has evolved over the years. But most importantly, studies show that children raised with authoritative parenting are the most psychologically well-adjusted. They are creative and intellectually curious, and intrinsically motivated to achieve. They have good social skills and remain connected to parents and friends. And they manage themselves well--they are self-reliant, self-confident, they take initiative, and they have good self-control.

What is authoritative parenting?

As Baumrind explains, authoritative parenting artfully combines qualities of responsiveness and demandingness.

Responsiveness, or nurturance, refers to the warmth, love, understanding, and empathy that a parent offers a child. Responsive parenting accepts the child's unique needs, abilities, and perspectives, taking age and temperament into account. Responsive parents delight in their children and stay attuned to their feelings.
Demandingness, or control, refers to age-appropriate limits, boundaries, and expectation that parents set for children. Behavioral guidelines and standards are best clarified through discussion and explanation, preferably ahead of time, which exercises the child's ability to reason rather than blindly obey. Discipline and power-assertion are last resorts--best reserved for issues of safety. Children become more autonomous as they get older (the end goal is they manage their lives themselves), so the authoritative parent celebrates the child's small steps toward independence. Again, skilled authoritative parents keep their expectations appropriate, taking into account the child's developmental skills and temperament.

How might these elements be applied to a real situation? In the case of the preschooler above (a true story), the parents sympathized with the child's distress. They knew he tended toward a sensitive temperament--that he might have been overwhelmed by the new situation and new people, on top of the 18-hour car journey they had just made. (Children with different temperaments react differently to situations.) They knew, too, that children this age are just developing the neurological ability to manage and inhibit their own behavior. So the parents decided this was not a battle they wanted to fight. How he looked, they reasoned, was less important than his comfortable participation in the happy events. So they allowed him to wear what he wanted, and the family met their bigger goal of connecting with and enjoying their extended family celebration.

What authoritative parenting is NOT

The two dimensions of responsiveness and demandingness can intersect in at least four ways. Each way yields different parenting behaviors and leads to different child outcomes.

Authoritarian parenting uses too much control and not enough nurturance. With these parents, it's "my way or the highway." An authoritarian parent might force the preschooler to wear the uncomfortable clothes or punish him for resisting. These parents want the child to "suck it up" without exploring what it feels like for the child. They value rules, obedience, and conformity, and they tend to be punitive, inflexible, and controlling. They do not value a child's growing independence but rather restrict his autonomy--often creating increasing conflict as the child grows. Authoritarian parents are not very interested in their child's point of view, since they are sure they know what's best. In the extreme, this type of parenting can devolve into abuse.

Children raised by authoritarian parents tend to become more dependent and passive than those raised by authoritative parents. They have fewer social skills and are less self-assured. Not used to following their own initiative, they also tend to be less intellectually curious.

Roz Chast from The New Yorker — Roz Chast from *The New Yorker*

Indulgent or permissive parenting, on the other hand is high in nurturance but low in control. These parents are child-centered to the point of indulgence, offering a lot of freedom but too few expectations or boundaries. Indulgent parents are often overly concerned with their child's happiness, or they may see any behavioral control or demand as an infringement on the child's "rights" (a position popular in the sixties). This approach can also describe the classic helicopter parent: Rather than helping the child to develop her own skills, a parent will overcompensate, doing her child's homework or running interference for a college-age child who doesn't get along with a new roommate. In the example of the middle schooler who has an altercation with a coach, the indulgent parent is sympathetic, allows the child to drive the decisions, but does not help the child cultivate skills: A middle schooler, however, can be better supported by helping her speak up, advocate for herself, or come up with alternative ways to solve her problem. Avoiding the problem, by leaving the school should be a last resort only when the benefits clearly outweigh the costs.

Children raised by indulgent parents tend to be immature, with little self-reliance or self-confidence, and they take less personal responsibility than children raised with authoritative parenting. Lacking their own strong internal compass, they are also more easily vulnerable to peer influences.

Indifferent parenting is low on both nurturance and control. These parents are neglectful, "checked out." They are self-centered and take little interest in the child.

Children raised by indifferent parents have some of the worst psychological adjustment second only to hostile or abusive parenting. With little parental oversight or monitoring, these children tend to precociously experiment with sex, drugs and alcohol. They are more likely to be involved in delinquent behavior.

Why does authoritative parenting work?

Some behaviors and relationships are protective "developmental delivery vehicles," and authoritative parenting is one. It packages together a lot of elements that promote healthy development.

Responsiveness, for example, promotes the attachment bond, and when children have a strong attachment they naturally want to be more aligned with the parent.

Then, too, the discussion- and explanation-based approach helps children understand why to do things a certain way. As such, it promotes intellectual development by helping children to understand, and reason about, how relationships work, and to develop moral judgment and empathy. Back-and-forth discussion that respects the child's perspective is the best way to help her develop thoughts and ideas. In this way, she grows an internal compass of her own--one that will guide her when a parent isn't around.

High expectations are good, but children need the supports to achieve these. I insisted that my children learn to write thank-you notes but I let them pick out their notepaper and we made the writing session fun. They've continued the habit into their twenties. The same holds for the development of bigger skills: taking responsibility, being safe, gaining independence, learning assertiveness, and achieving psychological autonomy. These abilities come step by step, with each step identified and supported. And a warm and light tone helps. (For further reading, try Laurence Steinberg's classic, The 10 Basic Principles of Good Parenting.)

Authoritative parenting results from a highly effective balance of lovingness and high expectations. Depending on the situation and the child's temperament and development, this balance constantly shifts. But if parents can keep both dimensions in mind, they'll hit the sweet spot that enables the best long-term outcomes for the children.

My Daughter Took Me to Burning Man

September 27, 2014

Originally published by the Huffington Post on September 10, 2014.

I checked my packing list for the long Labor Day weekend: antler headpiece, hair extensions, hot pants, fur coat, support hose and estrogen cream. My husband and I were going to Burning Man for the first time -- under the tutelage of our 26-year old daughter, Zai, her partner, Phil, and a large group of their friends.

We packed up the car with food and water for five days, drove to the Nevada desert, and, after a three-hour wait at the gate watching the sunset -- some waited 23 hours while the gates closed for rain on the playa -- it was our turn at the entrance. A distant din and twinkling lights beckoned in the otherwise dark void ahead.

"Welcome home," the young attendant smiled as she took our tickets. "First time?" We told her it was. "Birgins! Please get out of the car, roll in the dust, and ring the bell!"

It's easy to make fun of Burning Man from a distance, and many have. It's even easier up close: People stroll naked or half-naked, in Star-Wars-meets-Mad-Max-meets-Indian-guru garb. Sessions are offered on respectful fisting, penis worship, and making your own greeting cards by stamping your genitals with colorful paint on cardstock -- a craft I typically enjoy, though I've never used that particular stamp.

There is no Internet or cell coverage, no plumbing and no power grid. My husband Arjun gravitates to new experiences, and while I'd rather meditate in a lush forest, I was determined to keep an open mind. I respected our daughter and trusted that what she valued here would be revealed to me. After all, her visit the previous year had inspired her decision to leave a secure job and pursue her passion for metal working and furniture design. I wanted to know -- what could be so powerful here?

What Do Children Worry About and How Can Grown Ups Help?

January 30, 2013

When I was young, I worried so much that my parents called me Worrywart and bought me a stuffed toy with the same name. It wasn’t the best strategy—I was left feeling bewildered and wondering how to not worry—but what did parents know then? Research from the field of developmental emotion science finds that children who understand and manage their feelings are happier, have better relationships, and do better in school. But as a developmental psychologist I’ve often wished for resources to help parents deal with worrying in their children. So I was pretty excited when I found a lovely picture book recently at a professional conference: Is a Worry Worrying You? by Ferida Wolff and Harriet May Savitz. This light-hearted problem solving “manual,” based on good emotion science, introduces young children to the idea that worry may be more optional and flexible than they believe—and that they may be able to do something about the suffering it causes them.

As a parent, I’m moved by the realistic examples in the book; as a developmental psychologist, I’m impressed by the sophistication of the advice contained it its slim 16 pages.

The cover illustrates the idea that we are more than our worries, and that worry is something that comes to us like an unwelcome visitor: “It doesn’t ask if it can enter. It just barges in. And it will stay as long as you let it.”

The feeling and qualities of worry are named and described. One of the first steps in managing a feeling is to recognize it—name it to tame it, we say: "A worry is a thought that stops you from having fun, from feeling good, from being happy." "Anyone can have a worry. Parents. Teachers. Brothers. Sisters. Friends." "You can feel tired from a worry. Or sad. Or sick. A worry can feel like a heavy sack is on your back. Only it isn’t there."

Most importantly, the authors offer many strategies for problem-solving. Research shows that young children ages 3-6 tend to ruminate, or spin their wheels, so they, especially, can benefit from help in problem-solving. And older children who worry a lot believe they can’t solve the problem, though their problem-solving skills in other areas are equal to those of children who worry very little.

“The family is the most effective and economical structure for nurturing and sustaining the capacity of human beings to function effectively in all domains of human activity—intellectual, social, emotional, and physiological.”

— Urie Bronfenbrenner

Check out “Real Talk,” an online or in-person group for teen girls to learn how to have honest conversations, meaningful connections, and good fun.

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“Adolescents appear to do best when they grow up in a family atmosphere that permits the development of individuality against a backdrop of close family ties.”

— Laurence Steinberg

I got the chance to interview legendary Bay Area child and family therapist, Sheri Glucoft Wong for a three-hour conversation about what matters most in the small, everyday moments of life with children.

No one understands kids like Sheri, and she

This past weekend we saw images of American teenagers fleeing ordinary high school football games because of gun violence and images of Iranian teenagers protesting their lethal oppression by the state. Here in the U.S., we are experiencing continual

What helps to support teens’ emotional wellbeing? Permission to explore their identity, witnesses in their lives who clearly “see” and support them, and participation in “competing joys” that offset stress, are just a fe

Burning Man is a different experience for everyone. To me, a developmental psychologist, it feels like a mirror on childhood, full of magic and playfulness and spontaneity. But it is better than many childhoods, with its intentional culture of care,

“If we can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.”

— Mr. Rogers

Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence uses the power of emotions to create a more effective and compassionate society. The Center conducts research and teaches people of all ages how to develop their emotional intelligence. Learn more here.