Regular updates and articles about the developmental science of early childhood with relevance for a broad audience including pediatricians, mental health practitioners, and parents
Safety and trust go hand-in-hand with a sense of belonging. The fact that those who stay home and spend their time watching funny YouTube videos are protecting the front line healthcare workers offers a striking demonstration of belonging. The virus itself shows us how interconnected we are.
When it became clear that all our lives would all be upended for an indefinite period of time by the corona virus pandemic, as an infant-parent mental health specialist my first thought went to families due to deliver babies in the coming days, weeks, and months. Some degree of fear and uncertainty around the birth of a baby is typical. Expecting parents worry that the baby will be damaged, that the “real” baby will be different from the wished for baby. Now for pregnant women and their families these ordinary feelings are suddenly exponentially magnified.
So while there is much to say about the lessons from her brilliant book, I am writing this post to highlight the insights she offers into the complex intertwining of poverty and parent-child relationships.
In preparation for teaching a course on early childhood mental health, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with the profound wisdom of his writings. While Winnicott wrote extensively for both a general and a professional audience, I discovered, on careful re-reading of his essay for a general audience entitled “The Ordinary Devoted Mother” that it contains a vast wealth of ideas. In fact, if I had to assign only one paper for the entire course, this could be it.
Joy and love mix with disorganization, sometimes verging on chaos, when a new life enters the world. As renowned pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton and developmental psychologist Ed Tronick have wisely observed, that disorganization itself facilitates healthy growth and development as parents and baby engage in the messy process of getting to know each other.
Young-Breuhl, an analyst, political theorist and biographer, calls attention to the way human rights of children are threatened. Childism is defined as “a prejudice against children on the ground of a belief that they are property and can (or even should) be controlled, enslaved, or removed to serve adult needs.”
Many parents today are burdened by an expectation of perfection. When we can protect time to listen to parent and baby together, we convey the idea that, in contrast to a “right” way, they will figure things out together. Growth happens through repair of inevitable mistakes we make along the way.
Several years ago NPR had a story about temper tantrums, describing a study showing that the sounds children make during a tantrum indicate that they are primarily sad rather than angry. The written version of the story opens with description of tantrums as ” the cause of profound helplessness among parents.”
“But it’s genetic” or “these are brain diseases,” are frequent response to this reframing of our concepts of mental wellness and illness. Once we recognize that our genes, brains, and bodies develop in relationships, the false duality of biology and experience, of nature and nurture collapses. Expression of our genes and wiring of our brains occurs in the interactive process of mismatch and repair in our closest relationships starting from birth. It used to be thought that brain wiring was pre-determined; that our brains had a fixed wiring plan. But now we know this is not true. Formation of new neural connections- the “wires” that make up the brain- is flexible not only in early development, but throughout our lifespan.