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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 her husband, Sophie manages to overcome her depression and eventually bond with Elizabeth. Thawed by therapy support, and introspection, Sophie’s heart finally melts in response to Elizabeth’s blue eyes, chubby fists, giggles, and first words. However, the scars of her childhood pain remain with her always and she worries about how she will cope if she has a second baby.

Such is the dark underbelly of resilience. Some children can escape abusive homes and lead successful, happy, productive lives, but few, if any, can ever completely escape their early childhood experiences. Werner and Smith, while commenting on the remarkable tenacity of some of their study’s participants, noted that resilient individuals often remain socially withdrawn. They struggle with depression or anxiety or bad relationships and fight an endless uphill battle with the ghosts of their pasts.

A troubled childhood pursues us indefinitely. It affects our relationships with our family, our co-workers, our spouses, and our children. It impacts our health, both emotional and physical, in a number of ways; studies have linked disadvantaged upbringing to conditions as diverse as obesity, heart disease, aggression, depression, substance abuse, and schizophrenia. It causes tremendous suffering, much of it silent, ignored, or denied. It is, above all, highly individual. No one can predict precisely how someone with a difficult home life will cope. Given sufficient data, we can speculate about a given child’s probability of developing a behaviour disorder, or getting pregnant at 15, or becoming an alcoholic. But prediction on its own does not mean prevention. Telling Sophie that her emotional outcome is among the highest percentile of success, considering her family’s behaviour and socioeconomic status, will do nothing to help loosen the icy fist clenched around her guts every time she faces stress, nor will it see her through long nights spent lying awake in bed and staring at the ceiling, cocooned by the radio, overwhelmed by her fears and a suffocating sense of personal failure. Statistics are public knowledge, but Sophie’s private, inner pain remains her own.

Even those statistics, blunted and impersonal as they are, make for troubling reading. As science continues to unravel the mysteries of human development, the importance of a nurturing, supportive environment has become increasingly clear. In the January 2012 issue of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report urging healthcare professionals and policymakers to address the threat of toxic stress — the presence of severe and chronic stress in infancy and early childhood — on health and development. Their technical report, drawing from disciplines as varied as genomics, developmental psychology, epidemiology, sociology, and economics, highlights the influence of early environments on how children develop. They provide evidence linking a number of adverse conditions — including heart disease, depression, liver cancer, autoimmune disorders, and asthma — to toxic stress. Similar reports have been made across the scientific community. Even a trait as seemingly deep-rooted in our genes as height can be affected by childhood stress! There is no longer any doubt that poverty, discrimination, and maltreatment greatly increase a child’s chances of becoming overly aggressive, engaging in criminal activity, being dangerously promiscuous, or suffering from ADHD, depression, and a host of other symptoms.

Though some of the examples in this book are extreme, the findings we discuss are by no means limited to the abusive and impoverished households banished to the fringes of our society. They affect all of us. Mercifully, Sophie’s home life is not the norm. But the fallout of her childhood — the anxiety, the postpartum depression, the compulsive people-pleasing — affects a distressing number of people every day. Parenting is not a binary of good and bad, but a complex network of actions and reactions, emotions and behaviours and relationships that play off one another to produce a unique individual. It is not our aim to judge or reinforce barriers between good and bad parenting, but to help parents understand how their genes, attitude, behaviours, diet, and home life influence the way their child fits into the world. In so doing, we hope to show you how parenting really is the most important job you will ever do. Your efforts shape an individual and help set the course of their lives. The lives of these many individuals combined affect and, indeed, reflect all of society.

To do this, we’ve cast a wide net, trawling the seas of biology, genomics, medicine, nursing, sociology, epigenetics, and psychology for the freshest and most illuminating research these fields can offer. Not content with the flotsam that washes up on the media’s well-trodden shores, we’ve dredged the murky depths of academic discourse, diving into laboratories and textbooks for treasures hidden from the light of day. We’ve snared some good theories in our efforts, wondrous bejewelled ones, slimy ones still wriggling in the hands of those who first discovered them. This book is an exhibit of our findings, each display neatly labelled so as to explain what we found and why it matters.

Is this a parenting book? Yes and no. It’s about parenting, surely, though it’s also about being parented, the biological and behavioural mechanisms whirring beneath the surface of a growing child. Parents will find it interesting and enlightening (we hope), but the scientific findings we discuss apply to everybody. We all come from families, after all. Some are wonderful and supportive and kind, others cold and formal and detached, still others abusive and neglectful and downright cruel. But every one of them, for better or worse, made us who we are today. This book explains how they did so.

Raising a child is not like building a bookshelf; one cannot simply by a kit from IKEA, follow a few simple instructions, and end up with something identical to the picture on the package. Not every household is allocated the same tools, or even the same building materials. Every child fits together a different way, and what reinforces one child’s development may undermine the integrity of another. Quite unlike carpentry, child-rearing is messy, organic, and occasionally unpredictable. Thankfully, it’s also a lot more forgiving. One false cut or misread measurement won’t ruin the finished product.

Because of this, we cannot provide a set of easy-to-follow instructions. We have no grand comprehensive Parenting Strategy guaranteed to produce a perfect, even-tempered, kind, loving, intelligent, talented, chubby-cheeked child. What we can offer is a thorough and accessible explanation of the latest scientific findings on how children develop, why they behave in certain ways, and how this information can inform the way you parent.

In short, this book is not about the “what” of parenting — what lessons to teach your child, what demeanour to adopt when interacting them, what programs to enroll them in — but the “why” and “how.” Why do some children stop crying the instant their mothers pick them up while others seem inconsolable? Why do identical twins raised in the same environment grow into unique individuals with distinct personalities? How does neglect in infancy link to heart disease or addiction in adulthood?

Parenting is not something to fear. Our ancestors have been doing it for eons. If survival is our measure of success, then we have been very successful. But if success means something more, we need to consider how children succeed in today’s context. Parenting is an intricate and sublime process, a ballet of genetic and environmental influences, a kaleidoscope of factors converging into a single harmonious entity. In short, it is something worth learning about.

The anecdotes found throughout the book, we should note, are fictional.[1] They don’t represent the experiences of any one real person or family, but are cobbled together from 20 years of professional experience. Their purpose is to illustrate, through narrative, the theories this book discusses, to pin a human face to the numbers and definitions and conclusions of scientific studies. Sophie may not exist, but I (Nicole) can assure you that people like her do.

Lastly, while this book was written with the average reader in mind, it will occasionally deal with fairly complex scientific concepts. Our goal is to explain these ideas in an enlightening and accessible way so that you can really understand “why” parenting is so important. Readers interested in exploring epigenetics and gene-by-environment interaction in greater detail can avail themselves of our bibliography.