Regular updates and articles about the developmental science of early childhood with relevance for a broad audience including pediatricians, mental health practitioners, and parents
Over one hundred years ago my grandfather Karl, a young soldier fighting for Germany in World War I, lay dying in the front-line trenches. He suffered with a fractured leg and what was described as “catarrh” in the meticulously kept German records. Another young soldier from Adelaide, Australia who presumed him dead, took home a pocket watch he discovered in Karl’s uniform.
Many people in our world today act from a place of anger, often rooted in fear. But if we lean into kindness, we may find our way home.
Many of my colleagues in a variety of disciplines, pediatrics included, feel enormous pressure to be the “expert” and to know “what to do” in a wide range of challenging circumstances. This story reveals how connection lies not in knowing but rather in “not-knowing.” We can offer a relationship: our full presence along with respectful, nonjudgmental observation of parent and infant together. The relationship itself serves to contain the anxiety that accompanies uncertainty.
If we take time to land for a moment on the unique human newborn, both the urgency to support parents, as well as the travesty of neglecting to do so, becomes crystal clear.
Faced with overwhelming anxiety— both internal and external— people cling to certainty as a form of protection. But ironically this certainty only serves to make us more disconnected from each other. We miss the opportunity to grow and change by moving through misunderstanding to understanding.
In my clinical experience I have found that far and away the most powerful agent of change is the process of grieving loss. When I open myself up to what I call “playing in the uncertainty” allowing the visit to unfold without setting an agenda, I’m consistently surprised and amazed that the process takes parents through feelings of profound sadness to powerful moments of connection with me, with their child, and with themselves.
Not only with the glorious birth of my own two children, but also as a pediatrician who has attended many a middle of the night deliveries, I can attest to the profoundly transformative power of witnessing a new life enter the world. In what I have come to refer to as my year of dying— when in less than 9 months I saw my father, mother-in-law, and mother make the transition in the other direction —I learned the deep sense of love and connection that can come with the end of life. Or not.
Our world today appears locked in the iron grip of what many refer to as generational trauma. I wonder if a more apt and descriptive term might be unprocessed and unintegrated loss. A psychoanalyst colleague often said, “All emotional suffering is about loss, and all healing is about mourning.” The Persian poet Rumi expressed a similar sentiment in the aphorism “The cure for the pain is the pain.”
While I hadn’t yet mentioned the movie, my father told me of the radio announcers’ frequent refrain of “all quiet on the Western front” while “hundreds young men were slaughtered every day.” His voice trembled: his face contorted in an effort to contain the flood of emotion. He repeated the phrase in the original German.”Im Westen Nichts Neues” or “Nothing new in the West.” When I shared that we had just seen the movie, tears ran down his cheek. He opened himself to expression of feelings so deeply hidden for so long.