Читать книгу Brain Rules for Baby (Updated and Expanded) - John Medina - Страница 10
Оглавлениеbrain rule
Start with empathy
relationship
I remember feeling almost completely overwhelmed when we brought our firstborn son, Joshua, home from the hospital. We placed our new baby in the car seat for the first time, praying that we were buckling him in correctly. I drove home from the hospital at a snail’s pace—miraculous, for me. My wife was in the backseat, just to keep an eye on things. So far, so good.
When the little guy entered our house, his tiny face suddenly corrugated into annoyance. He started screaming. We changed his diaper. Still he screamed. My wife fed him. He took one or two gulps, then resumed screaming, tried to wiggle out of my wife’s arms, tried to get away. This didn’t happen in the hospital. Were we doing something wrong? I held him. My wife held him. Eventually, he calmed down. Then he seemed to go to sleep. We were so relieved. “We can do this,” we kept telling ourselves. It was late, and we decided to follow his lead. No sooner did our heads hit the pillow than Joshua started crying again. My wife got up and fed him, then handed Josh to me. I burped him, changed him, laid him back down. He was calm and settled, and we went back to bed. I didn’t even get to feel the warmth of the sheet before the crying and screaming resumed. My wife was exhausted, recovering from a 21-hour labor, in no shape to help. I got up, held the baby, then set him back into his crib. He calmed down. Success! I crept back to bed. I got only as far as the pillow before the crying began again. I tucked my head under the blankets, hoping it would stop. It didn’t. What was I supposed to do?
This bewildering routine, and my reactions to them, recurred day after day. I had deep feelings for my son—always will—but I wondered at the time what ever made me decide to have a baby. I had no idea that something so wonderful was also going to be so hard. I learned a difficult but important lesson: Once a kid comes into the world, the calculus of daily living coughs up new equations. I am good at math, but I was no good at this. I had no idea how to solve these problems.
For most first-time moms and dads, the first shock is the overwhelmingly relentless nature of this new social contract. The baby takes. The parent gives. End of story. What startles many couples is the excruciating toll it can take on their quality of life—especially their marriages. The baby cries, the baby sleeps, the baby vomits, gets held, needs changing, must be fed, all before 4:00 a.m. Then you have to go to work. Or your spouse does. This is repeated day after day after ad nauseam day. Parents want just one square inch of silence, one small second to themselves, and they routinely get neither. You can’t even go to the bathroom when you want. You’re sleep deprived, you’ve lost friends, your household chores just tripled, your sex life is nonexistent, and you barely have the energy to ask about each other’s day.
Is it any surprise that a couple’s relationship suffers?
It’s rarely talked about, but it’s a fact: Couples’ hostile interactions sharply increase in baby’s first year. Sometimes the baby brings a hormone-soaked honeymoon period. (One couple I know constantly quoted Tagore to each other: “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man!”) Even then, things quickly deteriorate. The hostility can be so severe that, in some marriages, having a baby is actually a risk factor for divorce.
Why do I bring this up in a book about baby brain development? Because it has serious consequences for the baby’s brain. We learned in the Pregnancy chapter how exquisitely sensitive a baby in the womb is to outside stimuli. Once baby leaves his comfortable, watery incubator, his brain becomes even more vulnerable. Sustained exposure to hostility can erode a baby’s IQ and ability to handle stress, sometimes dramatically. An infant’s need for caregiver stability is so strong, he will rewire his developing nervous system depending upon the turbulence he perceives. If you want your child to be equipped with the best brain possible, you need to know about this before you bring home your bundle of joy.
When I lecture on the science of young brains, the dads (it’s almost always the dads) demand to know how to get their kids into Harvard. The question invariably angers me. I bellow, “You want to get your kid into Harvard? You really want to know what the data say? I’ll tell you what the data say! Go home and love your wife!” This chapter is about that retort: why marital hostility happens, how it alters a baby’s developing brain, and how you can counteract the hostility and minimize its effects.
Most marriages suffer
Most couples don’t imagine such marital turbulence when they get pregnant. Babies, after all, are supposed to bring endless, unremitting joy. That’s the idealistic view many of us have, especially if our parents grew up in the late 1950s—an era steeped in a traditional view of marriages and families. TV programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie & Harriet depicted working fathers as all-wise; stay-at-home mothers as all-nurturing; children as surprisingly obedient and, when not, creating small but manageable crises easily resolvable in 23 minutes. The protagonists were mostly middle class, mostly white, and, it turns out, mostly wrong.
A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E. E. LeMasters. Rather than babies bringing nirvana to marriages, he showed the opposite. In 1957, he published a paper showing that 83 percent of married couples experienced more turbulence in their relationships with the birth of a baby—some couples severely so. Not surprisingly, these findings were met with a great deal of skepticism.
Time, and further research, proved to be on the side of LeMasters. Armed with better methodologies and longer study periods, studies consistently show that having a baby stresses most couples’ marriages. LeMasters, it turns out, was on to something.
By the late 1980s and ’90s, investigations in 10 industrialized countries, including the United States, demonstrated that marital satisfaction for most men and women dropped after they had their first child—and continued to fall over the next 15 years. Things didn’t improve for most couples until the kids left home.
We now know that this long-term erosion is a regular experience of married life, starting in the transition to parenthood. Marital quality, which peaks in the last trimester of a first pregnancy, decreases anywhere from 40 percent to 67 percent in the infant’s first year. More recent studies, asking different questions, put the figure closer to 90 percent. During those 12 months, scores on hostility indices—measures of marital conflict—skyrocket. The risk for clinical depression, for both fathers and mothers, goes up. Indeed, one-third to one-half of new parents display as much marital distress as troubled couples already in therapy trying to save their relationship. The dissatisfaction usually starts with the mother, then migrates to the father. To quote an excerpt from a recent research paper published in the Journal of Family Psychology: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition.”
A British divorce lawyer recalled one illustrative case. Emma’s husband was obsessed with soccer, particularly the Manchester United team, also called the Reds. This condition was made worse with the introduction of a child. Emma actually cited it as grounds for the divorce. Her husband responded, “I have to admit that nine times out of 10, I would rather watch the Reds than have sex, but that’s no disrespect to Emma.”
Given all of these findings, it seems any couple contemplating children should undergo a psychiatric evaluation, then choose voluntary sterilization. What are we going to do?
Seeds of hope
There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood: sleep loss, social isolation, unequal workload, and depression. We will examine each. Couples who make themselves aware of these can become vigilant about their behavior, and they tend to do better. We also know that not every marriage follows this depressing course of events.
Couples going into pregnancy with strong marital bonds withstand the gale forces of baby’s first year better than those who don’t. Those who carefully plan for their children prior to pregnancy do, too. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of marital bliss appears to be the agreement to have kids in the first place. One large study examined couples where both parties wanted kids versus couples where only one did. If both partners wanted the child, very few divorced, and marital happiness either stayed the same or increased in the baby’s first year of life. All conflicted couples where one partner had caved (usually the man) were either separated or divorced by the time the child was 5.
The data behind this come from the Journal of Family Psychology study mentioned previously. The full quote gives much more hope: “In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline—even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition—but planning status and pre-pregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.”
Marriages do not suffer evenly in the transition to parenthood; some not at all. But as LeMasters and later researchers showed, that is not the majority experience. The social consequences were great enough to warrant investigation. Researchers began to ask: What do couples fight about when a baby comes home? And what does that conflict do to the baby?
Babies seek safety above all
What researchers found is that the emotional ecology into which a baby is born can profoundly influence how his or her nervous system develops. To understand this interaction, we have to address the almost unbelievable sensitivity a baby has to the environment in which he or she is being raised. It is a sensitivity with strong evolutionary roots.
Hints of this vulnerability first came from the lab of Harry Harlow, who was observing monkey baby behavior at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. That his findings apply to human infants illustrates how deep these evolutionary roots can go. Harlow looked like virtually every other scientist of the 1950s, complete with nerdy, Frisbee-sized glasses. By his own admission, he was preoccupied with “love,” though he had a strange way of showing it—both professionally and personally. He married his first wife, who had been his student, divorced her after two children, married a psychologist, watched her die of cancer, and then, in his final years, remarried his former student.
Harlow also designed a series of groundbreaking experiments with rhesus monkeys that was so brutal, some scholars credit Harlow for inadvertently creating the animal rights movement. These experiments involved isolation chambers and metallic surrogate mothers. Harlow himself would use colorful language to describe his research, calling his chambers “pits of despair” and his surrogate mothers “iron maidens.” But he almost single-handedly uncovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. This in turn laid the groundwork for understanding how parental stress influences a baby’s behaviors.
Harlow’s classic attachment experiments involved two of these iron maidens—doll-like structures serving as maternal stand-ins. One was made of harsh wire, the other of soft terry cloth. He took newly born rhesus monkeys, removed them from their biological mothers, and placed them into cages containing both dolls. There are many variations on this experiment, but the initial finding was striking. The cold wire doll provided food, delivered from an attached bottle. The soft terry-cloth doll did not. Nonetheless, the animals greatly preferred the cloth mom. The baby would feed from the wire mom, but do so while clinging tightly to the cloth mom. If the babies were placed in an unfamiliar room, they clung tightly to the cloth surrogate until they felt secure enough to explore the cage on their own. If placed in that same room without the cloth mother, the animals froze in terror, then went crying and screaming, running from one object to another, seemingly looking for their lost mother.
The preference was the same no matter how many times the experiment was done or in what variation. These experiments are heartbreaking to watch—I’ve seen old films of this stuff—and the conclusions are unforgettable. It wasn’t the presence of food that telegraphed reassurance to these little ones, a behavioral idea prevalent at the time. It was the presence or absence of a safe harbor.
Human babies, complex as they are, are looking for the same thing.
Monkey see, monkey do
Babies are highly attuned to these perceptions of safety, though they may not look it. At first blush, babies seem mostly preoccupied with more mundane biological processes, like eating and pooping and spitting up on your shirt. This fooled a lot of researchers into believing that babies weren’t thinking about anything at all. Scientists coined the term “tabula rasa”—blank slate—to describe these “empty” creatures. They regarded infants as merely helpless helpings of cute, controllable, human potential.
Modern research reveals a radically different point of view. We now know that a baby’s greatest biological preoccupation involves the organ atop their necks. Infants come preloaded with lots of software in their neural hard drives, most of it having to do with learning. Want some startling examples?
In 1979, University of Washington psychologist Andy Meltzoff stuck out his tongue at a baby 42 minutes old, then sat back to see what happened. After some effort, the baby returned the favor, slowly rolling out his own tongue. Meltzoff stuck his tongue out again. The infant responded in kind. Meltzoff discovered that babies could imitate right from the start of their little lives (or, at least, 42 minutes from the start of their little lives). That’s an extraordinary finding. Imitation involves many sophisticated realizations for babies, from discovering that other people exist in the world to realizing that they have operating body parts, and the same ones as you. That’s not a blank slate. That’s an amazing, fully operational cognitive slate.
Capitalizing on this finding, Meltzoff designed a series of experiments revealing just how much babies are prewired to learn—and how sensitive they are to outside influences in pursuit of that goal. Meltzoff constructed a wooden box, covered by an orange plastic panel, into which he inserted a light. If he touched the panel, the light turned on.
What happened next is described in the book The Scientist in the Crib: “[Andy] would show babies a completely unexpected way to use a new object—he would touch his forehead to the top of a box, and it would light up. The babies watched in fascination, but they weren’t allowed to touch the box themselves.” Mom and baby would then leave the lab, probably wondering what they’d just experienced. But the experiment wasn’t over: “A week later, the babies came back to the lab. This time Andy just gave them the box, without doing anything to it himself. But the babies immediately touched their foreheads to the top of the box.”
The babies remembered! With only a single exposure to this event, eight out of 12 babies recalled it perfectly a week later. None of the 24 babies in the control group made the motion on their own.
Those are just two examples illustrating that infants come equipped with an amazing array of cognitive abilities—and are blessed with many intellectual gadgets capable of extending those abilities. They understand that size stays constant even when distance changes the appearance of size. They display velocity prediction. They understand the principle of common fate; for example, the reason the black lines on the basketball move when the ball bounces is because the lines are part of the basketball. Infants can discriminate human faces from nonhuman faces at birth and seem to prefer human ones. From an evolutionary perspective, this latter behavior represents a powerful safety feature. We will be preoccupied with faces most of our lives.
How did babies acquire all of this knowledge before being exposed to the planet? Nobody knows, but they have it, and they put it to good use with astonishing speed and insight. Babies create hypotheses, test them, and then relentlessly appraise their findings with the vigor of a seasoned scientist. This means infants are extraordinarily delightful, surprisingly aggressive learners. They pick up everything.
There’s a funny example of this. A pediatrician was taking her 3-year-old daughter to day care. The good doctor had left her stethoscope in the backseat and noticed that the little girl began playing with it, even inserting the ear pieces correctly. The pediatrician got excited: Her daughter was following in her footsteps! The little girl grabbed the bell of the stethoscope, then put it to her mouth and declared in a loud voice: “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order, please?”
Yes, your children are constantly observing you. They are profoundly influenced by what they record. And that can quickly turn from funny to serious, especially when mommy and daddy start fighting.
Limited time to establish perceptions of safety
If survival is the brain’s most important priority, safety is the most important expression of that priority. This is the lesson Harlow’s iron maidens teach us. Babies are completely at the mercy of the people who brought them into the world. This understanding has a behavioral blast radius in infants that obscures every other behavioral priority they have.
How do babies handle these concerns? By attempting to establish a productive relationship with the local power structures—you, in other words—as soon as possible. We call this attachment. During the attachment process, a baby’s brain intensely monitors the caregiving it receives. It is essentially asking such things as “Am I being touched? Am I being fed? Who is safe?” If the baby’s requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if not, genetic instructions trigger it to develop in another way. It may be a bit disconcerting to realize, but infants have their parents’ behaviors in their sights virtually from the moment they come into this world. It is in their evolutionary best interests to do so, of course, which is another way of saying that they can’t help it. Babies have nowhere else to turn.
There’s a window of several years during which babies strive to create these bonds and establish perceptions of safety. If it doesn’t happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In extreme cases, they can be scarred for life.
We know this because of a powerful and heartbreaking story from Communist Romania, discovered circa 1990 by Western reporters. In 1966, in an effort to boost the country’s low birth rate, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu banned both contraception and abortion and taxed those who were childless after age 25—whether married, single, or infertile. As the birth rate rose, so did poverty and homelessness. Children were often simply abandoned. Ceausescu’s response was to create a gulag of state orphanages, with children warehoused by the thousands.
The orphanages soon were stripped of resources as Ceausescu began exporting most of Romania’s food and industry to repay the country’s crippling national debt. The scenes in these orphanages were shocking. Babies were seldom held or given deliberate sensory stimulation. Many were found tied to their beds, left alone for hours or days, with bottles of gruel propped haphazardly into their mouths. Many infants stared blankly into space. Indeed, you could walk into some of these hundred-bed orphanages and not hear a sound. Blankets were covered in urine, feces, and lice. The childhood mortality rate in these institutions was sickening, termed by some Westerners “pediatric Auschwitz.” Horrible as these conditions were, they created a real opportunity to investigate—and perhaps treat—large groups of severely traumatized children.
One remarkable study involved Canadian families who adopted some of these infants and raised them back home. As the adopted children matured, researchers could easily divide them into two groups. One group seemed remarkably stable. Social behavior, stress responses, grades, medical issues—all were indistinguishable from healthy Canadian controls. The other group seemed just as remarkably troubled. They had more eating problems, got sick more often, and exhibited increasingly aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable? The age of adoption.
If the children were adopted before the fourth month of life, they acted like every other happy kid you know. If they were adopted after the eighth month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly caused immense stress to their systems. And that stress affected these children’s behavior years later. They may have been removed from the orphanages long ago, but they were never really free.
What stress does is kick into action our “fight or flight” responses. They really should just be called “flight,” though. The typical human stress response is devoted to a single goal: getting enough blood into your muscles to get you out of harm’s way. We generally lash out only when cornered. Even then, we usually engage in combat just long enough to escape. When threatened, the brain signals the release of two hormones, epinephrine (also known as adrenaline) and cortisol, from a class of molecules termed glucocorticoids.
These responses are complex enough that it takes time to properly tune every connection. That’s what the first year of life is for. If the infant is marinated in safety—an emotionally stable home—the system will cook up beautifully. If not, normal stress-coping processes fail. The child is transformed into a state of high alert or a state of complete collapse. If the baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his vulnerable little stress responders turn hyperreactive, a condition known as hypercortosolism. If the baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, the system becomes under-reactive, a condition known as hypocortisolism (hence, the blank stares). Life, to quote Bruce Springsteen, can seem like one long emergency.
What happens when parents fight
You don’t have to raise kids under death-camp conditions to see negative changes in baby brain development. All you need are parents who, on a regular basis, wake up wanting to throw emotional punches at each other. Marital conflict is fully capable of hurting a baby’s brain development. The effects begin early and, though there is some controversy about this, may echo clear into adulthood.
Every parent knows children become stressed when their kids see them fighting. But the age at which they can react was completely unexpected by researchers. Infants younger than 6 months old can usually detect that something is wrong. They can experience physiological changes—such as increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and stress hormones—just like adults. Some researchers claim they can assess the amount of fighting in a marriage simply by taking a 24-hour urine sample of the baby. Babies and small children don’t always understand the content of a fight, but they are very aware that something is wrong.
Difficulty regulating emotions and much more
The stress shows up behaviorally, too. Babies in emotionally unstable homes are much less able to positively respond to new stimuli, calm themselves, and recover from stress—in short, regulate their own emotions. Even their little legs sometimes won’t develop properly, as stress hormones can interfere with bone mineralization. By the time these children are 4 years old, their stress hormone levels can be almost twice as high as children in emotionally stable homes.
And that’s sad, because the effects are fully reversible. Even infants younger than 8 months who are taken from severely traumatized homes and placed in empathic, nurturing environments can show improvements in their stress-hormone regulation in as little as 10 weeks. All you have to do is put down the boxing gloves.
If marital hostility continues, the children show all the unfortunate behavioral signs of long-term stress. They are at greater risk for anxiety disorders and depression. They catch colds more often, because stress cripples the immune system. They’re more antagonistic toward peers. They’re less able to focus attention or regulate their emotions. Such children have IQs almost 8 points lower than children being raised in stable homes. Predictably, they don’t complete high school as often as their peers and attain lower academic achievement when they do.
If we take the end point of this instability—divorce is a convenient target—we observe that kids are still paying for it years later. Children from divorced households are 25 percent more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14. They are more likely to get pregnant out of wedlock. They are twice as likely to get divorced themselves. In school, they get worse grades than children in stable households. And they are much less likely to receive support for college. When marriages stay together, 88 percent of college-bound kids will receive consistent support for their college education. When marriages fall apart, that figure shrinks to 29 percent.
So much for Harvard.
Reconcile in front of your kids
Even in an emotionally stable home, one without regular marital hostility, there will be fights. Fortunately, research shows that the amount of fighting couples do in front of their children is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation the kids observe. Many couples will fight in front of their children but reconcile in private. This skews a child’s perceptions, even at early ages, for the child always sees the wounding but never the bandaging. Parents who practice bandaging each other after a fight, deliberately and explicitly, allow their children to model both how to fight fair and how to make up.
The four biggest reasons you’ll fight
Why will you fight? I mentioned four consistent sources of marital conflict in the transition to parenthood. Left to their own devices, all can profoundly influence the course of your marriage, and that makes them capable of affecting your child’s developing brain. I’ll call them the Four Grapes of Wrath. They are:
• sleep loss
• social isolation
• unequal workload
• depression
If you have a child, you are statistically likely to tramp on at least a few of these when your baby comes home. The battle begins in bed—and no, it’s not about sex.
1. Sleep loss
If you know new parents, ask them if this complaint from “Emily” sounds familiar:
I am spiteful of my husband because he gets to sleep through the night. My daughter is 9 months old and still waking up 2–3 times per night. My husband sleeps right through, and then wakes up “so exhausted.” I have not had more than 5–6 hours of sleep per night in the last 10 months, have an annoying toddler and a baby to deal with all day, and HE’s tired???
We’ll address the marital disparity in this behavioral snapshot, but first let’s examine how little sleep Emily is getting and what it is doing to her marriage.
It is hard to overestimate the effect that sleep loss exerts over couples in the transition to parenthood. Most parents-to-be have a notion that something will change at night. Most don’t realize how big it is going to be. Write this across your heart: Babies have no sleep schedule when they are born. The fact that you do does not occur to them. Sleep and eating times have no fixed pattern in the newborn brain; the behaviors are randomly distributed throughout a 24-hour period. There’s that social contract again. They take. You give.
This can persist for months. A predictable schedule may not make itself visible for half a year, maybe longer, though most babies show some kind of organizing pattern by 3 months old. Between 25 percent and 40 percent of infants experience sleep problems in that time frame, a statistic observable around the world. Babies eventually acquire a sleep schedule; we think it is actually burned into their DNA. But there are many frequent disturbances in the dry, uncomfortable post-uterine world—some internal, some external—capable of keeping infants up at night. It just takes a while for their inexperienced brains to adjust. Even after a year, 50 percent still require some form of nighttime parental intervention. Because most adults require about half an hour to fall back asleep after they attend to an awakened child, moms and dads may go for weeks on end with only half the hours of sleep per night they need. That’s not healthy for their bodies. Not for their marriages, either.
Sleep-deprived people become irritable—far more irritable—than people who are not. Subjects saddled with sleep debt typically suffer a 91 percent loss in their ability to regulate strong emotions compared with controls. The decline in general cognitive skill is equally dramatic (which is why chronically drowsy people don’t perform as well at work, either). Problem-solving abilities typically plummet to 10 percent of their non-drowsy performances, and even motor skills become affected. You have to be moderately sleep deprived for only a week to start getting these numbers. Mood changes occur first; cognitive changes come next, followed by alterations in physical performance.
If you don’t have a lot of energy, and you are called upon to give to your youngest several times a minute (preschoolers demand some form of attention 180 times per hour, behavioral psychologists say), you quickly exhaust your reservoir of good will toward your spouse. Sleep loss alone can predict most of the increases in hostile interactions between new parents.
2. Social isolation
This rarely happens in a visit to the pediatrician’s office, but it should. The good doctor would ask you about the health of your baby and give your little bundle of joy a routine examination. Then she’d look you in the eyes and ask some truly intrusive questions about your social life. “Do you have many friends?” the pediatrician would inquire. “What social groups do you and your husband belong to? How important are these groups to you? How diverse are they? How much contact time do you and your husband have with them?” The doctor doesn’t ask about these things because your social life is none of her business. The problem is, it is plenty of the infant’s business.
Social isolation can lead to clinical depression in the parents, which can affect the parents’ physical health, including an increased risk of infectious diseases and heart attacks. Social isolation is the lonely result of the energy crisis that faces most new parents. Studies show it is the main complaint of most marriages in the transition to parenthood. One mom wrote:
I have never felt more alone than I do right now. My kids are oblivious and my husband ignores me. All I do is housework, cooking, childcare … I’m not a person anymore. I can’t get a minute to myself, and yet, I am completely isolated.
Loneliness, painful and ubiquitous, is experienced by as many as 80 percent of new parents. After the birth of a child, couples have only about one-third as much time alone together as they had when they were childless. The thrill of having a child wears off, but the incessant job of parenting does not. Being a mom or dad becomes a duty, then a chore. Night after sleepless night depletes the family energy supply; increasing spousal conflicts exhaust the reserves.
These losses cause a couple’s social activities to run out of gas. Mom and dad have trouble maintaining friendships with each other, let alone with acquaintances. Friends stop coming over. Parents find little energy to make new ones. Outside of their spouses, typical new parents have less than 90 minutes per day of contact time with another adult. A whopping 34 percent spend their entire days in isolation.
Not surprisingly, many new parents feel trapped. Said one stay-at-home mother, “Some days, I just want to shut myself in my bedroom and talk on the phone with my best friend all day instead of dealing with my children. I love them, but being a stay-at-home mom is not all I dreamt it would be.” Another simply said of the loneliness: “I cry in my car. A lot.”
Belonging to multiple social groups is a critical buffer. But those relationships are most likely to collapse in the transition to parenthood. Women experience a disproportionate amount of this isolation, and there are biological reasons why it may be particularly toxic for them. Here’s the theory:
Birth—before the advent of modern medicine—often resulted in the mother’s death. Though no one knows the true figure, estimates run as high as one in eight. Tribes with females who could quickly relate to and trust nearby females were more likely to survive. Older females, with the wisdom of their prior birthing experiences, could care for new mothers. Women with kids could provide precious milk to a new baby if the birth mother died. Sharing and its accompanying social interactions thus provided a survival advantage, says anthropologist Sarah Hrdy (no, there’s no a in her last name). She calls it “alloparenting.” Consistent with this notion is the finding that we are the only primates who regularly let others take care of our children.
One mother put this need for social connections succinctly: “Sometimes when I’m holding my beautiful baby in my arms and we’re gazing lovingly at each other, I secretly wish that she would fall asleep so that I could check my email.”
Why female neighborliness and not male? Part of the reason may be molecular. Females release oxytocin as part of their normal response to stress, a hormone that increases a suite of biological behaviors termed “tend and befriend.” Men don’t do this. Their resident testosterone provides too much hormonal signal-to-noise, blunting the effects of their endogenous oxytocin. The hormone, which also acts as a neurotransmitter in both sexes, mediates feelings of trust and calm, perfect if you need to cement relationships with someone who may have to become a foster parent. Astonishingly, conveniently, and completely consistent with this notion, oxytocin is also involved in stimulating lactation.
Social relationships, it turns out, have deep evolutionary roots. You will not escape the need in your lifetime. Psychotherapist Ruthellen Josselson, who has studied “tend and befriend” relationships, underscores their importance: “Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women. We push them right to the back burner. That’s really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other.”
3. Unequal workload
The third Grape of Wrath is pointedly illustrated by the painful testimony of a new mom I’ll call Melanie.
If my husband tells me one more time that he needs to rest because he “worked all day,” I will throw all of his clothes on the front lawn, kick his car into neutral and watch it roll away and I’ll sell all of his precious sports stuff on eBay for a dollar. And then I’ll kill him. He seriously doesn’t get it! Yes, he worked all day, but he worked with English speaking, potty trained, fully capable adults.
He didn’t have to change their diapers, give them naps and clean their lunch from the wall. He didn’t have to count to 10 to calm himself, he didn’t have to watch Barney 303,243,243 times, and he didn’t have to pop his boob out 6 times to feed a hungry baby and I KNOW he didn’t have peanut butter and jelly crust for lunch. He DID get TWO 15-minute breaks to “stroll,” an hour break to hit the gym, and a 1 hour train ride home to read or nap.
So maybe I don’t get a paycheck, maybe I stay in my sweatpants most of the day, maybe I only shower every 2 or 3 days, maybe I get to “play” with our kids all day … I still work a hell of a lot harder in one hour than he does all day. So take your paycheck, stick it in the bank and let me go get a freakin’ pedicure once a month without hearing you say “Maybe if you got a job … and had your own money.”
Ouch. And, I might add, bull’s-eye. I will give you fair warning: This next section is not going to be pleasant reading if you are a guy. But it may be the most important thing you read in this book.
