The debate goes on over whether a child develops better under a parent’s singular care and when day care is a worthy substitute. As it turns out, mother knows best — sometimes. So does father, but maybe in a different way. Finally, day care is good, depending on its quality.
A study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concluded somewhat ambiguously in the late 1990s that day care “in and of itself was found neither to adversely affect nor to promote the security of infants’ attachment to their mothers,” according to a 2002 article in the Psychologist magazine by developmental psychologist Howard Steele of New York’s New School for Social Research.
Few researchers, however, dispute the notion that an infant’s social and emotional core is greatly influenced by the environment in which he is raised. It’s nurture over nature nearly every time, say scientists engaged in the study of human development.
With advances in technology using such tools as MRIs, scientists are beginning to see how the physical structure of a person’s brain is affected by the kind of nurturing a child receives in the first few months of life. They are especially interested in the right hemisphere, the part of the brain that analyzes nonverbal information, communicates emotion and is critically important in the months before a child begins to speak — possibly, some believe, even while in the womb. The right brain, in this view, evolves before the left brain, which is associated with verbal and sequential reasoning.
“Attachment experiences shape the early organization of the right brain, the neurobiological core of the human unconscious,” writes University of California at Los Angeles psychoanalyst Allan Schore in a recent issue of the Clinical Social Work Journal. This view, known as the attachment theory, is an outgrowth of pioneering studies by British psychiatrist John Bowlby many decades ago. Interdisciplinary work done since then — bringing together the realms of neurology, psychology, biology and genetics — “has pushed the knowledge forward,” Mr. Schore says in an interview.
The tricky part is having the caregiver not only “sensitively read baby’s emotional language” but also understand “her own reactions to him,” Mr. Schore explains. These are key points that put the focus less on the child’s awareness of the world — his cognitive state — than on his earliest relationships in it. Good so-called attachment mechanisms, he adds, “are tied directly into certain other attributes, such as capacity for empathy [and] ability to resonate with another human being. These lead to the problem of morality and ability to regulate stress for oneself and others — essentially all the most human of qualities.”
“Hard evidence,” he adds, shows that “pre- and postnatal factors are also essential to a predisposition to physical disorders — diabetes, heart diseases and the like.” People who are prey to syndromes such as post-traumatic stress disorder, he suggests, might be those whose brains weren’t properly “imprinted.” In cases of mistreatment, in which people develop what clinicians refer to as “pathology,” corrections can be made later in life, although with greater difficulty over a longer period of time.
“The brain is plastic and can change over time,” says James A. Coan, director of the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Virginia’s Department of Psychology. “A common analysis is that it is like a great big cruise ship you can’t turn on a dime, but can coax … gently to change function. By and large, it is about conditioning and shaping.”
“Something like an attachment behavior system exists not only in human organisms, but in other animals,” Mr. Steele says, crediting experiments under way with rhesus monkeys by Stephen Suomi, chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda.
“And the system is activated when we are threatened by separation or fear or loss, and in those circumstances we engage in certain evolutionary strategies, typically flight or fight,” he says.
Rhesus monkeys have 95 percent of the same genes as humans, “with a similar sequence of brain development, and live in a complex social world,” Mr. Suomi says. He has found certain genes more likely to yield aggressive behavior in monkeys, but “[a monkey with] the same gene raised in a nurturant setting basically turns out normal. … You can’t change genes, but you can change experience.” The challenge, he says, is “understanding exactly what mechanisms are at work” and “the degree to which patterns of parenting are passed on to the next generation.”
An equally great challenge is getting policy-makers to act on knowledge gleaned in child-development research, says Nathan A. Fox, distinguished university professor in the Department of Human Development at the University of Maryland.
“Unfortunately, children are not exactly high priority in terms of [human] social history,” he says. This may be changing, he suggests, pointing to a Web site — www.developing child.net — named for a council begun by a pediatrician at Harvard University to work to inform state legislators “to close the gap between what we know and what we do.”
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