Perry is no stranger to trauma. A senior fellow of the Child Trauma Academy, he has served as an expert witness on many high-profile cases in which children and adolescents were traumatized, including the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Texas, the Columbine High School massacre, and the Oklahoma City bombing. He stood on the front lines of mental health support during Hurricane Katrina and 9/11, assisting children and adults who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other emotional fallout. His research has informed our modern understanding of how young minds respond to violence, and the profound effect parents have on moderating, or exacerbating, this response.
Certainly, neglectful parenting has an adverse effect on children’s development. Our neural gardens need more than fresh soil to truly flourish. They need pruning and weeding and watering. An untended garden may grow thick and green if the sun is shining and rain comes often enough, but it will be a wild, chaotic patch of earth, fruitful perhaps, but also cluttered and choked with weeds. The same goes with young minds. Infants need more than food and warmth and safety; they need stimulation and interaction and play, and the more of it they get, the better they’ll be at thinking and reasoning and, above all, feeling. Emotional intelligence and intellectual intelligence (what we generally mean when we just say “intelligence”) are closely connected attributes, but they are not identical. Perry gives a chilling example of this point in his 1997 paper on the cycle of violence.
Six o’clock in the evening in inner-city Baltimore. A 15-year-old boy named William sees a classmate shooting hoops on the neighbourhood basketball court. It’s twilight and the city feels deserted. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks, no cars on the streets, no conversations drifting though open windows. The classmate dribbles his way up the court, the thwack of his ball on the pavement echoing off the nearby tenements. William’s eyes drift from the basketball to his classmate’s shoes. Air Jordans, their vamps and laces an immaculate white, the fresh rubber of their soles squeaking against the tarmac with each step. William approaches his classmate, who eyes him nervously.
“Hey,” the classmate says.
“Gimme your shoes,” says William.
“What? No way.”
William lifts up his jersey and pulls a handgun from the waistband of his pants. He’d been wearing the gun for no particular reason except that it felt good against his stomach. It feels even better in his hand, he notes. The classmate’s eyes go wide. He raises his hands, backing up slowly.
“The shoes,” says William.
“Y-yeah, okay, sure,” the classmate stammers. Very slowly, he bends down and unties his laces. He takes off the shoes and hands them to William, who takes them with an approving smile. He holds them up to his face and looks them over, the gun still trained on his classmate.
“Cool. Thanks,” he says, and pulls the trigger. The classmate collapses. Blood speckles William head to toe, staining the leather of his new shoes a splotchy red. He puts them on anyway, not bothering to wipe them clean. On his walk home, he tosses his old shoes over a fence.
The stains are what undo him. Them and the gun, which confirms the story his bloody shoes had already told. The police take William into custody, where a stone-faced officer questions him for an hour. Most of his questions concern what happened and why, but near the end of their interview he asks the boy something different.
“Son, if you could do it all over again, would you do anything differently?”
William thinks about it for some time. Finally, he responds.
“I would have cleaned my shoes.”
Consider William’s reply. There is regret imbedded in his statement, but it is of a purely intellectual sort. He regrets his actions because they led to him being caught, not because they caused the death of an innocent human being. In that respect, the boy couldn’t care less. He is capable of regret, an intellectual response, but not remorse, an emotional one. Perry’s story highlights this distinction. We are all familiar with the concept of mental retardation, but children can also suffer from emotional retardation, in which their capacity for empathy is stunted or missing entirely. And while mental retardation is often the result of genetic conditions, emotional retardation is almost exclusively learned. Just as a child raised by wolves never learns how to speak, a child raised without love never learns to form the emotional bonds necessary to empathize with other people.
Over the past few decades, we have blamed this problem on a large and shifting cast of bogeymen. Poverty, single parenthood, television, heavy metal music, video games: each has at some point faced the ignominious spotlight cast by the media as a rogue and a villain, the blood of uncountable children on its hands. And in truth, it’s unlikely that any of these factors serve to decrease problem behaviour in children. Being poor means more financial stress in the home, fewer opportunities for children to go to good schools or participate in extracurricular programs, and greater odds of living in a violent neighbourhood bereft of strong role models. Single parenthood doubles the burden placed on the mother (or father) and reduces the amount of time children can interact with them — somebody’s got to pay the bills, after all, and it’s a rare parent who can work productively and attend to their kid’s needs at the same time. And there is evidence that an overexposure to violent media can to a certain extent inoculate children to its horrors, making them, if not more violent, then at least less repulsed by the concept of violence. Yet all of these factors pale in comparison to the true root cause of emotional malnourishment: relational poverty. Not to be confused with poverty of the socioeconomic sort, relational poverty refers to a lack of supportive adults in a child’s life. Though a family may be well-off financially, their children can still suffer from emotional impoverishment if they have limited contact with parents, grandparents, and other friendly faces.
Children have in them a great capacity for resilience, but it is predicated upon the attention and support they receive from the adults around them. Parents act as a kind of psychological immune system, allowing children to deal with modest threats without suffering any long-term harm. Strip a child of this protection, and the smallest upset in her life — the emotional equivalent of a common cold — becomes a serious threat. Toxic stress is only toxic if children lack the means to combat it, just as a disease is only dangerous if a person lacks the necessary antibodies. Except with toxic stress, the antibodies are not internal. They come from outside of the child, delivered by the affection of parents, aunts, grandfathers, teachers, neighbours, and friends.
Parents are the conduits through which toxic stress must pass. This idea is both liberating and terrifying. On the one hand, it is comforting to know that a parent’s loving presence can supersede most any external hardship their children may encounter. Poverty, violence, mourning, disaster: all can be endured if the affected child has the support of his or her caregiver. But such responsibility puts a tremendous amount of pressure on parents. In the midst of a crisis, a hectored mom can add yet another worry to what is likely already a long and daunting list: don’t let stress trickle down to the children.
Still, Perry’s assertion isn’t something to fear. Good parenting doesn’t require a degree or tons of cash or a rigid adherence to any set rules. To quote Lennon and McCartney, all you need is love (though effort and a bit of common sense don’t hurt either). Happily, love is something that just about every parent has in abundant supply.
Bonding
In the grand sweep of human history, there is perhaps no force more powerful than the bond between parent and child. If you’re a parent, you’ve probably experienced it firsthand. The need to protect, nurture, and guide one’s offspring is deep, profound, and overwhelming, capable of circumventing even the most primal urges of self-preservation. Stories abound of mothers and fathers temporarily endowed with almost superhuman strength, speed, and endurance when their children are in peril, allowing them to lift up the back ends of cars with their bare hands and fight off violent criminals twice their size. Apocryphal and exaggerated many of these claims may be, but there is a grain of truth buried within them. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s not hard to envision why this would be. Any sexually reproducing organism that made no effort to protect its offspring would be far less likely to extend