Sue Gerhardt tells a story of a Patagonian culture in South America where women are treated like royalty when they are pregnant. They are awoken to the sound of beautiful music and entertained in a way that suits her tastes. In the same way that a sound tree produces good fruit, the Patagonians realised that the future well-being of society depended on the mother being well cared for in pregnancy. This equates with what Darcia Narvaez calls the importance of ‘soothing perinatal’ experiences for the health of the baby. The Patagonian picture contrasts sharply with the experience of modern mothers who often have to work throughout their pregnancy in stressful environments.
Emotional systems are shaped by early parenting and the wider culture and society (Gerhardt, 2015). When these influences are less that optimal it leads to social and emotional problems later in life. Conception through to the first two years is the most important period of development. The foetus is picking up signals about cultural conditions while in the womb and figuring out: Is this a loving and nourishing culture it is being born into? Or do they need to prepare for conditions of hardship and deprivation?
Child psychiatrist, Bruce Perry claims that our culture is ‘developmentally illiterate’ and ‘child ignorant’. The needs of infants have not changed in 50,000 years: They require safe, predictable, touch-rich interactions with parents. For 99% of our time on this planet we have lived in multi-generational groups of forty or fifty people. In these hunter-gatherer groups, for every child under six there were four developmentally more mature caregivers. Babies were held and carried, often skin-to-skin throughout the day. At night the infant slept next to the mother, not one hundred metres away in another cave or hut. Touch is the most important form of parent-child communication and there is nothing more important for a child’s development. We have lost touch with what is most important for children: relationships.
According to Allan Schore, the roots of psychopathology lie in traumatic attachment experiences. The beginnings of living systems set the stage for every aspect of an organism’s functioning throughout the lifespan. A scientific consensus is emerging that the origins of adult disease can be found in the developmental and biological disruptions in early childhood. Early relational trauma has been referred to as ‘the hidden epidemic’.
There is evidence of an increase in emotional disorders in childhood and adolescence. There is also compelling evidence that adverse biological and developmental disruptions are rapidly increasing. The declining mental health of children is having a marked effect on psychosomatic and psychosocial disorders which have deep impacts on society. The American academy of childhood and adolescent psychiatry describe a ‘crisis’ in children’s mental health where one in five has a diagnosable psychiatric disorder and one in ten has a mental illness that impairs everyday living. Why has there not been a massive response to this crisis? Allan Schore argues that defences against uncertainty and painful information (denial, repression, dissociation) operate not just individually but collectively in a culture to avoid facing the stressors that lie at its core.
Dr. Michael Meaney and his colleagues at McGill University looked at two groups of rat mothers and rat pups. Researchers noted that the development of the pups’ response to stress was directly affected by whether the mother was a ‘high licker’ or a ‘low licker’. The pups of high licker Mums had lower levels of stress hormones. Low licking pups had higher spikes of corticosterone in response to a stressor and they had a harder time shutting off their stress response that the other pups. The licking and grooming that the pups received in the first ten days of life predicted changes to their stress response that lasted an entire lifetime. These changes continued into the next generation because female pups who had high-licking Mums became high lickers themselves.
Beginning in 1975 and continuing for almost thirty years, Alan Sroufe and his colleagues followed one hundred and eighty children and their families in the Minnesota longitudinal study of risk and adaptation. The study set out to answer questions about the role of nature versus nurture and personality and the environment in development. They found that quality of care and biological factors were closely interwoven. The key issue and determinant was found to be in the nature of the parent-child relationship – how parents felt about and interacted with their kids. A child’s resilience can be understood to based upon the quality of that relationship.
When, as a society, we neglect the early years, we pay a high price for this in terms of personal and social ill-health further down the track.