The Science inside the Child

The story of what happens when we're growing up

Sara Meadows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317626824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This engaging book presents some of the ways in which science can describe and explain how and why children develop in the way they do. It looks at children's individual development within the development of our species, at genes, at the hormone systems that flood our bodies, at the neuroscience of children's brains, and at patterns of behaviour. It looks, in other words, at the different influences on child development according to the scientific disciplines of evolutionary theory, genetics, epigenetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, epidemiology and psychology.

Filled with entertaining anecdotes, Sara Meadows shares the story of what happens when we're growing up, revealing how science can add depth to our understanding. This book will be an informative and enriching read for all parents, educators and carers, and those interested in how children develop to be emotionally balanced, socially skilled, and enthusiastic seekers after knowledge.

1 ——————◆——————Introduction In which I explain why this is not an advice book and why it is worth your attention

DOI: 10.4324/9781315755328-1

Nursery rhymes sometimes, disconcertingly, say something that is obviously nonsense and at the same time subversively true. Consider the ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’ versus ‘slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails’ assertion about what girls and boys are made of. Part of what is going on here is the implication that children are both ‘all things nice’ and ‘some things nasty’. In my experience of being a parent, it could feel like this: being a parent involves anxiety and fear and loss of self-confidence and exhaustion and anger and love and excitement and delight and satisfaction and pride and wonder – absolutely simultaneous feelings as well as amazingly strong ones. My offspring was in the very same single moment the best and brightest and most beautiful thing that there has ever been in the entire universe, and the source of my sleep deprivation, my anxieties about feeding and health and staying out late, some singularly aversive high-pitched or bass-heavy noises, and yet another sticky and indelible stain on the carpet or a demand for new clothes or an emptied fridge or a borrowed-and-lost hair-brush. Sugar and spice, indeed, but snail trails were lurking.

I had been a developmental psychologist by trade for years by the time she was born, and I was used to reading, researching, and teaching the science of child development. This helped, I think. But although the bits of my mind that were not sleep-deprived or irritated or panicked valued the science – and there were occasional tips for very specific things to do, a lot of tips for things to avoid doing if possible, and a sense of ‘good enough’ parenting being good enough for the child, and better than perfect parenting in the sense that it was achievable – the science rarely functioned as a source of advice.

I do think it enriched my sense of what was going on. Even when what the science told me to do was ‘obvious’, I understood the parenting dilemma differently; and when it said there is no single right thing to do (which happened much more often), that tended to reduce the anxiety and guilt and to increase my confidence that no single action would be catastrophic or a guarantee of total success and that we would have second chances to do things better and to muddle through in the end. My child has grown up to be indeed the best and brightest and most beautiful thing that there has ever been in the entire universe, and efficient, conscientious, stylish, witty, compassionate, and much loved to boot, but I don't think that makes me an expert who can offer advice on how to bring up children.¹ My motivation for rwriting this book is something different.

This is not a book about how to bring up your child. It is a book about the ways in which science describes and explains children. These descriptions and explanations may or may not be helpful to parents, caregivers, and educators. I would be very pleased if they were helpful, but that is not the main point. The point is that there is a lot of science about children, much of it very new and not especially well-known. I thought it would be useful and interesting to bring it together and see how the scientific picture compared with the everyday one we all have. We've all been children and had parents, many of us have had children and are parents, and we may feel completely certain of what is going on or we may be puzzled and bemused. Science may not tell us what to do in a moment of despair and panic about our child – for that we may need to have recourse to an advice book – but it can correct too much certainty (such as you may well find in some advice books) and clarify a fog of confusion and doubt (such as you may develop if you read too many advice books). This is not a user's manual or a recipe book, but it could be a guide to what we might think about while we live alongside children.

I believe that science is one of the glories of human activity. I believe that we should all have access to scientific understanding and know how science works. I believe that scientific pictures of children are interesting in themselves. I believe that people concerned with the practicalities of bringing up children might enjoy the bringing up more if they knew what ‘the science inside the child’ says. This is not so much because the science helps when we don't know what we should do (though sometimes it does), but for its own sake, and for the sense of a deeper and wider perspective that it gives.

I do also know that there is a lot to be enjoyed in nonscience and a lot to be learned from it. I've read novels and biographies that illuminate the human condition quite as vividly as science does, but they are not what this book is about. I've also had good advice from nonscience sources (for example my mother, my daughter's childminder, my friends) and from sources (such as Dr Benjamin Spock) who had a lot of science behind them but presented mainly experience-based advice. I've even read advice books that felt very helpful. My advice on advice is this: relax; see if the action that's being advised feels comfortable to you; think about whether there would probably be seriously bad consequences from not doing what's advised; think about whether the person advising you is really trying to sell you something; be prepared to try things and not blame yourself if they don't work; know some experts to go to for urgent help or if things feel wrong; have a support system (and a support system for the first support system, and ideally a support system for the second support system, too); remember you have needs and rights yourself, as well as responsibilities; and again, relax. Mostly the children of intelligent and conscientious persons turn out quite well. You, as a parent, will probably be nicer to them than the rest of the world will be, so you don't need to tell yourself the usual story of the conscientious person: ‘It's all my fault’. Instead, reflect on the other set of stories that I am going to tell you on behalf of science.

Humans are inveterate storytellers, but for me one of the important things about science is the particular sorts of stories it tells. It's impressive how science has enabled us to describe and analyse and appreciate and marvel at, and in some cases predict and control, an enormous range of phenomena – how the universe came into being, how old its components are, how life evolved, how the body works, why a tsunami happens, how to eradicate smallpox, why there are fewer bees and more cases of cancer, and so on. We simply understand our physiology better than previous generations did. Scientific knowledge deepens and widens and becomes more precise in ways that I don't see in nonscience stories. A sixteen-year-old pupil doing science today will have a much better understanding of the menstrual cycle than Queen Victoria's gynaecologist did (a ‘top’ doctor of the time, he thought women should not be educated beyond a very cursory minimum because the stress of it would upset their menstruation and make them infertile). A novelist writing now, early in the twenty-first century, does not ‘know’ more or write ‘better’ novels, which is one among the thousands of reasons that we should still be reading Middlemarch and Persuasion and The Turn of the Screw (each of which still tells us things about parents and children, though that's not the main thing to be gained from reading them).

What I am going to do in this book is present some of the science that could help us to understand what children's development is made of. This is going to mean looking at children's individual development within the development of our species, at genes, at how genes express themselves during children's development, at the hormone systems that flood our bodies, at the neuroscience of children's brains, at how there are clues to better and worse development in the patterns of behaviour you can see in large populations – at the scientific disciplines, therefore, of evolutionary theory, genetics, epigenetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and psychology. There will be some discussion of the basics of these scientific disciplines, but I am going to concentrate on the science that is tightly relevant to children and their development, and especially the science that is near the cutting edge of discovery.

To help ground this science, I'm going to begin with a psychological model² of how parenting rand child development fit together that first took my fancy when I began teaching developmental psychology, and then proved useful again when I became a parent. The centre is the idea of ‘functional frames’ that parents provide for their offspring as part of the social systems that the child inhabits. This model is probably going to look as though it comes from the school of the ‘bleeding obvious’, and at this point it's not going to be specified in detail, but I think it's useful. This book is about the evolution, the genetics, the epigenetics, the endocrinology, the neuroscience, the epidemiology, and the psychology that feeds into it. That interdisciplinarity is important.

All over the science that studies children we will see evidence of the importance of development in determining our chances of health and happiness. On one level we all know this. We know that lack of cuddles is a bad thing, that lack of conversation is a bad thing, that patience and negotiation are good things, that it's good if we get enjoyment out of each other's company. But the science I'm going to talk about shows why and how development happens, that development affects our behaviour and our emotion and our thinking, as we all know, and also our brain cells, our stress hormones, and even our genes, as we may not have thought it would. I am not saying that the ‘inside the skin’ levels are more important than what's obvious in our behaviour and our society, but I am saying that it is worth knowing what is going on at multiple levels.

Although children's development is very predictable, no outcome is completely fixed in someone's ancestry or at someone's conception or birth; whatever is specified at an early point in one's existence is capable of being modulated to some degree at later points, as one adapts to the way things happen to be. It's never just nature, never just nurture; conceptually and practically, what we have is an interplay of both – epigenetic and developmental are the terms you are going to see. This is the first bleeding obvious point: children's development means that they are living a predictable set of changes, with some things more stable and others more volatile, with some things fast and some things gradual, with some things affecting a long period of life and other things more transitory. Some useful science describes and explains a lot of this.

The second obvious point: many different influences coexist in shaping children and their lives. It's not just their parents, or their schools, or their genes, or their economic situation or their social class. When the prime minister says that the reason that young people went out and rioted and looted in British cities in the summer of 2011 is ‘criminality, pure and simple’, the only pure and simple thing you can say is that this statement is wrong and stupid (intellectually and morally). When we see the exam results of a school and blame (or praise) the school for the level of achievement, we are – in large part – wrong. When we bask in how wonderful our children are, we are wrong to feel that is all down to us (although that's such a lovely feeling it's hard to give it up – one of the unsung benefits of breastfeeding is that for several months you can look at your wonderful and rapidly plumping-up baby and say ‘apart from a sperm, a vitamin K injection, and some few spoonfuls of water, all this came from my body’). Concentrating on only one factor and ignoring others is pretty much always a mistake in child development. And since the different factors may be studied in different sorts of ways by different sorts of scientists, we need to coordinate a lot of different types of understanding.

All over the science, we are going to see evidence of the importance of other people in the development of each individual child. Maternal licking and nuzzling of the infant rat and monkey affect the expression of their genes, how their brains get wired up, how their hormones are balanced, their emotional states, their social bonds to others. Position in the social hierarchy, partly inherited from your parents, affects stress reactions, access to food, alliances with others the same age, reproductive success. How much your parents discussed other people's feelings with you when you were a small child – how often they explained that ‘nobody likes someone who snatches their toy’, ‘the baby really likes it when you hold him gently’, ‘would you have liked it if someone treated you like that’ – predicts whether you will develop a subtle understanding of other people's emotional lives. How much they read to you and talked with you and sang you nursery rhymes will predict not just your success in learning to read and all through school, but also whether the adults who know you think you have behaviour problems. How they help you deal with success and failure will affect your attitude to challenge and how confident you are. What comes through loud and clear from the basic science is that adults are crucial to the development of children. We can see this at the level of genes and of the endocrinological stress system, in the development of the brain, in the prenatal and postnatal development of the child, in evolution, in epidemiology. Children grow from parents’ bodies and parents’ behaviour.

But in every one of these influences, the parents are part of a network of other influences acting together – sometimes neatly adding together, sometimes cancelling each other out – over life from conception to the time when the outcomes is measured. Parenting behaviour is important, and you can see its effects all other things being equal. But it is not the only factor in child development. Most importantly, the child itself is an active agent with influence on what it experiences. Beyond that, other people get involved – friends, teachers, schoolfellows, employers, policy makers, and so forth.

Which gets me back to my big developmental psychology model, frames. Frames are ways of describing the parenting relevant to child development operating within the wider and deeper context of biological and social systems. We will see some parental framing that is essential, some that is better than the alternatives, some that should be avoided if possible. There is a lot of good natural history here – categories and descriptions derived from observations, using both biological and cultural contexts, making comparisons between different species. There are also a certain number of experiments – interventions in which parents (or others) did something differently, and there was a change in the children's behaviour from before to after.

There are always different ways to categorise complex phenomena such as parenting. What follows is a hybrid of different models.³ I've rchosen them because they rest on good science as I understand it; because they are current and influential; because there is strong evidence; and because I feel they work. Certain other models, which don't have so much supportive science or which don't feel right, I have ruthlessly ignored. In particular, you should note that I have not been prepared to tolerate theories involving blaming mothers – both self-interest and feminist principles came in here.

This is a very brief description, intended to be enough to ground the hard science chapters that follow. Just to note, I'm going to prefer to talk of parents, by which I mean whoever is doing the parenting – mother, father, grandparent, professional carer – without specifying their gender or their relation to the child except where that is very specific in the evidence.

The first sets of parenting frames centre on the child's need for protective care – for safety, nourishment, and comforting. These are universal in humans and apparent in many other species of animal. While an individual is immature, it may not be able to feed itself, protect itself from dangers, cope with stress. (Even when we are mature, we may benefit from help with these things.) Parents nurture their children, meeting their needs for nourishment and comfort, both physical and emotional. Parents feed their offspring, clean them, keep them warm, cuddle them, reassure them, try to keep them healthy. They protect children from harm, so far as they are able. They try to modulate their arousal, comforting the sad child, calming down the over-excited child, distracting the child who is doing something the parent doesn't want him or her to do, encouraging the child to be reflective and not give in to every impulse. Parents help or act as instruments, either doing for children things they cannot yet do themselves or modifying the wished- for activities or objects so that the child can achieve them – cutting up food, providing a hand to steady the child's step, giving the young adult an interest-free loan as a deposit for the purchase of a house. Analogous behaviours (except the loan for house-buying) have been seen in other species as well. For example even in the restricted range of this book we will see mother rats licking the pup they have been separated from and parent gulls regurgitating part-digested fish to feed their chicks. It may only be a matter of time before something equivalent to subsidising the next generation's mortgage is seen in a nonhuman species.

All of this nurturing is far from being a completely top-down process: both parent and child are active participants. Essentially, parents need to be responsive to their child, and preferably they should be proactive. In order to do what is most appropriate to deal with a child's need for nurturing, you as parent have to identify what it is. To do this, you use the situation and any clues it offers. There is history about what caused upset and what worked in the past. There is other people's advice. There are the child's own signals: babies use behaviours and features, such as an expressive face,⁴ or cries that rvary according to their needs, or patterned activity that the parent can fit in with, to signal what they need. Evolution has probably shown a preference for individual children who could communicate in these ways and for parents who could understand and act on these communications. You get patterned, coordinated behaviour building up. With success in this interaction, children develop further ways to ask for what they want, and they also learn about the possibilities of doing things cooperatively with their parents. As the child develops language skills and social skills, communication about need becomes more complex and more acculturated on both sides. If a history of needing, asking, and being given builds up, it allows and enhances communication and mutual understanding (intersubjectivity or mutuality). Again, there is evidence of some of this sort of thing happening in nonhuman animals who live in stable social groups with time to build up memories of other people's behaviour. These frames look like evolved behaviours.

Parents react to the child's expression of need, but they can also anticipate where the child is shortly going to be and get in there first. Are there signs of incipient hunger? Have food to hand. Is the tower of bricks about to topple down, hitting the builder on the way? Warn about it, steady the construction, be there to catch the bricks or to cuddle the hurt away. Is there conflict on the horizon about the teenager continually asking for money for clothes? Give the teen a budget which is under his or her control and is not topped up by parents – once it's spent, it's spent. A friend of mine said that being a successful parent included choosing your battles; being proactive and seeing what may be coming and preempting it is the same sort of good advice.

Ideally, protective nurturing of children works while still allowing them to do things that are not yet quite within their competence – the lioness crippling a small prey animal so that...