Scientific Parenting: What Science Reveals About Parental Influence

By Nicole Letourneau and Justin Joschko

The latest research on child development may hold the key to the parenting of the future.

Combining the expertise of its author – a celebrated expert in parent-infant mental health and mother of two – with the latest findings in gene-by-environment interactions, epigenetics, behavioural science, and attachment theory, Scientific Parenting describes how children’s genes determine their sensitivity to good or bad parenting, how environmental cues can switch critical genes on or off, and how addictive tendencies and mental health problems can become hardwired into the human brain.

The book traces conditions as diverse as heart disease, obesity, and depression to their origins in early childhood. It brings readers to the frontier of developmental research, unlocking the fascinating scientific discoveries currently hidden away in academic tomes and scholarly journals. Above all, Scientific Parenting explains why parenting really matters and how parents’ smallest actions can transform their children’s lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Aug 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781459710108

Nicole Letourneau

Dr. Nicole Letourneau is a research chair in parent–infant mental health at the University of Calgary. Her research has been featured in the Globe and Mail and Huffington Post and on CTV News, Global News, and the CBC. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Book preview

Bibliography

Preface

You’ve heard the expression before, I’m sure: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I’ve always been fascinated by parenting, how it works and, perhaps even more so, how it doesn’t. I remember as a child listening in on my parents’ conversations with family and friends, gathering gossip on the problems festering beneath the surface of my neighbourhood. So-and-so’s an alcoholic. So-and-so can’t control her weight. So-and-so dropped out of school. So-and-so has some problems upstairs. The problems upstairs intrigued me most of all. It was a mysterious, vaguely menacing term, hinting at something deeper and more complex than drinking or obesity or illness — something in which all those other problems were hopelessly entangled.

I watched and I listened, and as I grew, I continued to wonder about where these social problems originated. We can discuss history, systemic poverty, and cultures of oppression, but I found these provide explanations rather than answers — it’s a subtle difference between those two, but key. Explanations tell us why something is wrong; answers tell us how to fix it. We can’t change our pasts, but we can change our futures. And, to polish a tarnished cliché, the future lies in the hands of our children. I’d spent my entire life spotting nails; parenting, I discovered, was my hammer.

My interest in parenting followed me to graduate school, where I began to study the science underlying child development. The broad trends, I found, were obvious — abuse begets abuse, addiction begets addiction, troubled homes breed troubled youths. It’s in the specifics that things get complicated. Because some kids break free from the cycle of addiction, poverty, and violence. There is something special about these children, but what exactly that might be is difficult to quantify. We call it resilience, but what do we mean by that, really? And why do some children have it when others clearly don’t? Intelligence is one answer. Epigenetics, a fascinating new science, offers another. But more than anything else, it seems that relationships make the difference. Kindness, support, and love lay a foundation solid enough to weather the harshest storms. And it need not come from home (though of course that helps); teachers, coaches, grandparents, and neighbours can all act as vital lifelines to children in need.

There’s no one right way to parent a child. Truly gifted parents don’t have access to a special guidebook or subscribe to any one theory of child-rearing. They simply become the people their children need them to be. They learn. They listen. They adapt. They push when they need to and hold back when they can. They evolve as their children do, developing new solutions to new problems.

There are no easy answers. This book was not intended to preach about how to parent, but to teach about why parenting matters. Parents know, deep down, that theirs is the most important job in the world. This book tells them why. It should be the book you turn to when you are feeling guilty about not spending enough time at work. The time you spend with your children is time well spent.

The studies and experiments we explore pull back the curtain on the mysteries of early childhood, allowing us a glimpse at the amazingly complex mechanisms at play during a child’s first critical years of life. The study of child development is not a homogenous field. It draws conclusions from many different disciplines within medicine, nursing, psychology, sociology, biology, and even chemistry. It trawls the very fringe of scientific inquiry, exploring the findings excavated from the depths of science’s latest theories. It traces conditions as diverse as heart disease, depression, cancer, ADHD, diabetes, alcoholism, aggression, and asthma to their roots in early childhood. It strives to learn exactly what babies need to reach their potential, and examines the consequences when these needs aren’t met. My goal is to gather this information and present it in an accessible, engaging way.

Some may call this another blame the mother book. I don’t see it that way. It’s true that mothers shoulder a disproportionate amount of the responsibility of child-rearing, and catch flak for their failures while their successes yield them little credit. The media seems to fixate on the monstrous, caricaturized figure of the Bad Mother, but I truly believe that all parents try to do their best. And in the most egregious cases of bad parenting, namely abuse, culpability becomes a capricious, shifting thing. Do we blame the mother alone? Where was the father in all this? And what about the neighbours, who watched scenes of abuse unfold and said nothing? Or the ER nurse who asked too few questions? Where were the police? And where did these abusive behaviours come from in the first place? Do we blame the grandparents? Did someone abuse them? How far back do we go? How can you spot the genesis of a cycle of abuse? A circle has no beginning.

Blame is unproductive. We are a society, and we succeed or fail as one. The brighter and better and more innovative we raise the next generation to be, the better all of our lives become. Parents need support, and providing it can only benefit all of us. And our efforts now will pay dividends generation down the line. As leading attachment theorist Pat Crittenden said, we are raising the next generation of parents.

Parenting is my hammer. And that’s fine. Even the simplest of tools can build structures of great and lasting beauty.

Introduction

The Rise and Fall of the Resilient Child

"The best way to not get your heart broken

is to pretend you don’t have one."

— Charlie Sheen

Chapter 1

Resilience at What Cost?

Sophie sits on the floor by the foot of her bed. She is eight years old. Her mother tucked her in moments ago, but she’s up again already, knees drawn to her chest, rocking silently back and forth. The sound of her parents fighting echoes from a vent across the room. She places a pillow over the vent and weighs it down with a stack of old books, but her contraption only muffles the sound; no matter what she does, the voices always worm through. She can’t sleep when her parents fight, and they often fight late and long. The Walkman she once used to drown out their voices no longer works — the batteries are dead, and she’s afraid to ask her father for new ones. He rarely hits her, but he can say mean things when he’s in a bad mood, and his bad moods have become more and more common since he lost his job. Her mother is a safer choice, but she doesn’t control any of the household money, what little of it there is. Eventually a plate shatters, a few more harsh words are exchanged, and the back door slams. Sophie hears her mother collapse in her favourite armchair, its worn springs creaking beneath her weight, and sob quietly. This could go on for some time, but it’s a gentler sound than the fighting, and Sophie can, at least, sleep through it.

The next day Sophie comes downstairs to a big breakfast. Her plate brims with two eggs — sunny side up, just the way she likes them — four strips of bacon, and two slices of diagonally cut toast shimmering with butter. Beads of condensation collect on the side of her orange juice. Sophie’s mother putters around the kitchen, smiling brightly and humming some long, meandering melody. The performance is well-intentioned but not terribly effective; her smile fails to reach her tired, red-rimmed eyes. Sophie offers her an equally forced smile in return. She knows her mother tries her best, and wants more than anything to please her. Things go best, she’s learned, when her parents are happy, and they’re happiest when she’s quiet and well-behaved.

As Sophie eases the front door shut behind her, the anxiety balled up in her chest dissipates. She spends the short bus ride to her elementary school hoisting up a smile and pushing unpleasant thoughts of the night before as far back as she can, where they collect like gloomy refuse in the basement of her mind.

School is a welcome respite from the tension of her home life. Sophie excels in her studies, chats with her friends, and though she is sometimes teased for her ratty clothes and scuffed, oversized sneakers — hand-me-downs from an older cousin — she’s never really been bullied.

At the end of the school day Sophie’s teacher hands out parent notices. Her class is going to a museum next Friday and in order to attend Sophie needs 10 dollars to cover the cost of admission. On her way out of the building Sophie pauses by a waste basket and, with a sigh, tosses the pink paper away. She knows better than to ask her parents for money.

As Sophie grows, she learns more and better ways to avoid conflict with her family. She joins the school soccer team and the drama club, and plays at her friends’ houses. At 14, she starts her first part-time job. She uses her newfound cash to buy a CD player with which to drown out her parents’ squabbles. Her cousin, with whom she is fairly close, has an apartment downtown, and when problems at home escalate Sophie sometimes stays with her. She sees her friends often, though always at their houses or around town. No one hangs out at her place. She has never offered and her friends know enough not to suggest it.

In high school, Sophie starts talking back to her parents and staying out later and later. Occasionally one of her friends gets a hold of a bottle of gin or wine and together they drink it greedily. Sophie becomes known as a partier. Some nights, when the desire overtakes her, she drinks with the urgency of a drowning woman, filling her belly and struggling madly against a riptide of drunkenness. After such binges, she feels ashamed. Memories of her father’s drunkenness, his reeling and aggression and clownish behaviour, flood her mind. Disgust fills her mouth with its bitter taste and she fears and loathes with equal measure the thought that she may be like him. To compensate, she throws herself into her studies, spending long hours at the library and enrolling in as many extracurricular activities as she can handle.

At 18, Sophie graduates, applies for student loans, and moves away to attend university. Bills are a constant struggle, and she has to work two jobs while studying full-time, but she stays afloat by earning scholarships that take her, fully funded, through to graduate school. She earns her Masters of Education and lands a job as a teacher. She is a warm, talented, and outgoing educator, and her students love her.

Sophie is resilient. She is the American Dream made manifest, a testament to the ability of talent and drive to overcome the most seemingly insurmountable odds. Hers is a story from which we as a society draw immeasurable comfort. We love meritocracy. We love to be the authors of our own destinies, to believe the outcomes of our lives are governed by our actions, and not by the indifferent hands of chance. This belief populates our modern stories and our most enduring fables, from Harry Potter to Cinderella to Oliver Twist. We embrace underdogs, cheering their successes, lamenting their failures, and assuring ourselves that their virtues, and not their social standing, are the basis on which they will ultimately be judged. It is a pleasant thought, and, better still, not solely the product of Hollywood fantasy.

For more than 30 years, researchers Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith chronicled the lives of 505 children from the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Beginning in 1955, the children were interviewed at multiple stages from infancy to adulthood. In the early years, their parents were interviewed as well. Participants answered a range of questions about their home lives, worries, memories of childhood, and plans for the future. Approximately one-third of the children involved in the study were considered to be from vulnerable homes, meaning they grew up in families suffering from chronic poverty, marital discord, a disorganized family structure (their mother or father leaving for prolonged periods, etc.), and/or substance abuse problems. Some of these children were beaten, berated, and belittled by their parents.

Unfortunately, these adverse environments often took their toll. Two out of three children in the vulnerable group developed serious learning or behaviour problems by 10 years old, and accumulated a record of delinquencies and mental health problems by age 18. A sad statistic, but one with a silver lining: though two out of every three children succumbed to the negative aspects of their environments, one out of three flourished in the face of these challenges. Like Sophie, they adapted to their environments and developed ways to thrive despite being denied the picture-perfect family life to which every child should, and in a better world would, be entitled.

A child’s resilience can be the product of many factors. There is no golden attribute that, if possessed, can protect every child from the emotional fallout of a tumultuous or abusive childhood. But many small things can, together, make a big difference in children’s capacity to shield themselves from the consequences of an ailing home life. Werner and Smith noted three clusters of factors commonly possessed by resilient children: 1) a robust intelligence coupled with other attributes generally correlated to success, such as toughness, drive, and a sociable temperament; 2) strong ties with a non-parental guardian figure, such as a teacher, older sibling, or other relative; 3) some kind of external support system, be it school or church or an organized sports team, that offered the child a sense of purpose and achievement. Not every resilient child will necessarily meet all three categories, but each one improves her chances.

Consider Sophie from our story at the start of this chapter. She was certainly a bright, well-liked, and driven child. She had a network of friends that she could rely on for support, and an older cousin who provided her with a much-needed emotional outlet and a safe space. Her job, her schoolwork, and her extracurricular interests gave her a sense of agency and independence from her parents. And her mother tried her best under difficult circumstances.

If one of these three supports had been taken from her — if she’d been less bright, or if her friends had shunned her, or if she’d not been allowed to take a part-time job or join clubs at school — would she have fallen, or could she have balanced effectively on the remaining two? It’s impossible to say for sure, though her access to all three forms of support certainly helped her. The more legs a person stands on, the harder they are to topple.

The Dark Side of Resilience

Sophie loves being a teacher. Her days are full and gratifying; it’s the evenings that get to her. When she is home at night, a low and looming anxiety wells up in her chest. She thinks about commitments she’s made throughout the day, promises to co-workers, students, and parents, some of which she’s not sure she can fulfill. Saying no does not come naturally to Sophie; in the moment it can be almost impossible for her to do so. The urge to please is simply too overwhelming to deny.

Though most nights she comes home exhausted, Sophie finds it difficult to sleep without music playing, and the smallest creak or groan makes her jump. She often has a glass of wine with dinner to calm her nerves, and sometimes the glass becomes a bottle. Sometimes her teenage thirst for oblivion returns to her and one bottle becomes two. Her doctor complains about her blood pressure, and though Sophie is active and eats well, she can’t seem to make it go down.

Dating is a bewildering and painful affair. She wavers between promiscuity and guilt-fueled promises of celibacy. She has trouble trusting men, and after a few dates, all of which end in sex, she inevitably pushes them away. The cycle continues until she meets David, a kind, patient man she can’t help but trust. Fighting her subconscious spasms of panic in the face of commitment, she continues to see him. His relaxed, easy-going nature sooths her, and he eventually earns her trust. Over time, her panic withdraws, and she finds herself less and less in thrall to it.

Sophie and David move in together. She is reluctant to get too serious, but David makes her happy and she feels more at ease with him than she has ever felt with anyone. They buy a house, get married, and after a couple of years of trying, have a baby girl. They name her Elizabeth. Hers was a difficult birth, requiring a Caesarean section, but both Sophie and Elizabeth pull through well. David rises to the occasion, taking on the bulk of the household chores, feeding and changing Elizabeth, and catering to Sophie’s every whim during her recovery. In spite of this treatment and her erstwhile excitement about being a mother, Sophie doesn’t feel the rush of love and affection for Elizabeth that she’d expected. The whole experience seems anticlimactic, tedious, and regrettable. Horrified by these feelings, she blames the painkillers the doctor prescribed her, and assures herself that, once she heals, the sense of loving fulfillment all mothers must feel will come.

But they don’t. Even after she recovers, Sophie continues to feel nothing but resentment toward Elizabeth, sadness at her situation, and a kind of terrible emptiness sucking at her insides, a black hole into which every good thought, every positive emotion, every ounce of optimism disappears. She performs her motherly duties — feeding Elizabeth when she’s hungry, changing her diaper, bathing her — but does so either begrudgingly, greeting Elizabeth’s every gurgled entreaty with a grumble or exasperated sigh, or numbly, performing her duties with the perfunctory, emotionless bearing of an automaton. She feels old beyond her years and robbed of any pleasure her life once contained.

Elizabeth is a beautiful baby, with soft, round cheeks and eyes of a deep, shimmering blue that beckon for attention. With her father, Elizabeth is all coos and smiles, but with Sophie, she is strangely listless and withdrawn. Playtime, to Sophie, is a frustrating experience, another duty doled out by despotic parenting experts. Try as she might, she can’t understand what Elizabeth wants or likes as easily as her husband can. If infants speak a language of giggles and cries, then David is fluent while Sophie can barely speak a word. And this language barrier works two ways. Elizabeth, faced with her mother’s garbled missives and begrudging attention, grows fussy and uncooperative. Sophie reacts to her daughter’s petulance by becoming increasingly frustrated and exhausted. The two of them enter a vicious circle of resentment and hostility.

Whatever she tries, Sophie cannot seem to understand her daughter’s needs. Her resentment turns to desperation, which turns to fear. It seems as if Elizabeth never stops crying, and nothing Sophie does can placate her. Sophie feels like a hapless peasant press-ganged into service by a tiny tyrannical captain whose language she doesn’t even speak.

Farther down beneath Sophie’s resentment and anger and fear festers a profound sense of guilt and inadequacy. She knew raising a child would be hard work, but she’d always been told that the rewards reaped far outweighed the effort sown. Instead, she feels as if she’s laboured over salted earth, her sweat and tears yielding nothing but a few scraggily weeds.

During the first few months of Elizabeth’s life, David stays home as much as possible. However, their tenuous finances eventually catch up with them, giving him no choice but to return to work full-time. He is reluctant to do so, considering his wife’s deteriorating emotional state, but they simply cannot afford to have him home any longer.

With David gone for long hours, Sophie’s old fears begin to resurface. Her family live in another city and she can’t turn to them for support. She feels utterly alone. Her insomnia returns. When David leaves for work in the morning, the sound of the door closing behind him slides like an ice pick into her heart. The walls of her house seem to contract. The air stiffens and she finds it hard to breathe. David senses his wife’s anxiety, but he’s powerless to do anything about it. He has to work, and every month his hours get longer and longer.

One day, while Sophie is preparing lunch, Elizabeth pinches her finger in a kitchen cupboard. She wails uncontrollably. Sophie picks her up, perfunctorily caressing her back and telling her everything’s okay in a voice that seems unsure and a little annoyed. Unappeased, Elizabeth continues to cry. Sophie feels her chest tighten. Elizabeth’s cries punch through her like a power drill, boring into the shell in which her fear and dread and pain had throbbed and festered, waiting for release. Their prison punctured, the bilious thoughts pour out, sweeping her away in a flood of self-loathing. She only just manages to set Elizabeth down safely before she collapses, knees drawn up to her chest, face contorted into a rictus of misery. She rocks silently back and forth to the sound of Elizabeth’s wailing. David finds her hours later when he returns home from work, still rocking, her eyes red and swollen.

Sophie seeks professional help. She is — belatedly — diagnosed with postpartum depression, an insidious and all-too-common condition affecting mothers (and, less frequently, fathers) during the first year of their child’s life. Through counselling and the support of