a researcher’s perspective, the brain’s willingness to respond to its external environment is pretty frustrating. Individual complexity is muddled in cultural differences, complete with their very own value systems. On top of that, families in poverty have very different problems from those of upper-middle-class families. The brain responds to all of this (poverty can influence IQ, for one). No wonder this stuff is so hard to research.
2. Every parent is different
Kids raised in two-parent households are confronted with not one parenting style but two. Moms and dads often hold different parenting priorities, a source of great conflict in some relationships. A combination of the two styles guides the child.
Here’s one example:
I go nuts watching my brother and sister-in-law with their kids. She parents occasionally, from the couch. So he overcompensates by yelling at them for EVERYTHING. From the outside perspective, it looks like the reason the kids don’t behave is that they have NO IDEA what the rules are; they just know they’ll get in trouble no matter what they do and they stop trying to behave.
Two styles indeed. This argues for 100 percent cooperation between father and mother about how their children will be raised. That, of course, is impossible. Child rearing in two-parent households will always be a hybrid proposition. Eventually, the children begin responding back to the parents, which will influence future parenting behavior. All of these changes complicate the research.
3. Kids are influenced by others
Life gets even more complex as a child grows up. School and peer interactions play an increasingly powerful role in shaping children. (Anybody out there have a horrible high-school experience you still think about?) One researcher has gone on record saying that peers—especially of the same sex—shape a child’s behavior much more than parents do. As you might suspect, this idea has met with a great deal of skepticism. But not outright rejection. Children do not live in an exclusive social ecology dominated by parents and nobody else.
4. We can say “linked to” but not “causes”
Even if all brains were wired identically and all parents behaved in a cookie-cutter fashion, a great deal of current research would still be flawed (or, at best, preliminary). Most of the data we have are associative, not causal. Why is that a problem? Two things can be associated without one causing the other. For example, it is true that all children who throw temper tantrums also urinate—the association is 100 percent—but that doesn’t mean urination leads to temper tantrums.
The ideal research project would be to (a) find the behavioral secret sauce that makes smart or happy or moral kids who they are, (b) discover parents who were missing the secret sauce and give it to them, and (c) measure the kids 20 years later to see how they turned out. That sounds not only expensive but impossible. This is why most research we have about parenting is associative, not causal. But these data will be shared in the spirit that the perfect should not be the enemy of the good. The other frustrating and wondrous thing is this:
Human behavior is complicated!
We can look simple and calm on the surface, like a glassy sea, but below that you find craggy canyons of emotion, murky ruminations, and floating, barely rational motivations. Occasionally, these characteristics—different ones for each person—will bubble to the surface. Consider one common emotional reaction to a toddler:
Well that’s it, it’s official. I have not one drop of patience left. The well is dry. My two-year-old son has managed to use up my lifetime supply of patience, all before the age of 3. It’s gone, and I don’t see how it might be replenished to its original depths without concentrated effort … i.e., a week in the Caribbean w/ an endless supply of mai tais.
As a brain scientist, I can count at least eight separate behavioral research issues in this woman’s short paragraph. She is responding to stress, and the way her body does that was carved out long ago on the plains of the Serengeti. How she loses her patience depends in part on her genes, events while she was in the womb, and how she was raised as a little girl. Hormones are involved too, as are the neurological signals she uses to perceive her recalcitrant toddler. A memory of relief is also apparent—perhaps she is recalling a cruise?—as is her desire to escape. In only five sentences, she has taken us from the African savannah to the 21st century.
And brain researchers, from evolutionary theorists to memory specialists, study all of it.
So there are some solid things researchers can say about raising kids. Otherwise, I would not have plopped down my own contribution to the pile of 40 gazillion books for parents. It has taken many good researchers many years to mine these nuggets of information.
Relevant for kids through age 5
Brain Rules for Baby encompasses brain development in children ages 0 to 5. I know you’re likely to inhale parenting information when you’re pregnant, and you’re less likely to return later for more. So the title of the book is intended to catch your attention early on. But what you do in your child’s first five years of life—not just the first year—profoundly influences how he or she will behave as an adult. We know this because a group of researchers had the patience to follow 123 low-income, at-risk preschoolers for four decades, until their 40th birthdays. Welcome to the HighScope Perry Preschool Study, one of the most extraordinary studies of its kind.
In 1962, researchers wanted to test the effects of an early-childhood training program they had designed. Kids in Ypsilanti, Michigan, were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first attended the preschool program (which eventually became a model for other preschool programs nationwide, including Head Start). The second group did not. The differences between the two groups powerfully illustrate the importance of a child’s early years.
The kids in the program academically outperformed the controls in virtually every way you can measure performance, from IQ and language tests in the early years to standardized achievement assessments and literacy exams in the later years. To cite just one example (performance on the 1970 California Achievement Test), kids in the program scored far better than the controls: a whopping 49 percent vs. 15 percent. Among girls, though not boys, more graduated from high school (84 percent vs. 32 percent).
As adults, those who had been in the program were less likely to commit crimes and more likely to hold steady jobs. They made more money, more often had a savings account, and were more likely to own a home. Economists calculated that the return on society’s investment in such a program was 7 to 10 percent, higher than what you’d historically get in the stock market. If each tax dollar was invested from age 4 through 65, it would return “in present-value terms $7 to $12 back to society,” one analysis said.
Seed and soil
The HighScope study is a prime example of the importance of environment in raising children. But nature plays just as large a role. Often, they are tough to separate, as in this old joke: A third-grade boy comes home and hands his father his report card. His father looks at it and says, “How do you explain these D’s and F’s?” The boy looks up at him and says, “You tell me: Is it nature or nurture?”
I was once at a lively, noisy science fair with my own third-grade son, and we were touring some of his classmates’ efforts. Several experiments involved seeds, soil, and growth curves. One memorable little girl took great pains to explain to us that her seeds had started with identical DNA. She had planted one in a nutrient-rich soil and watered it carefully. She had planted the other in a nutrient-poor soil and watered it carefully, too. Time passed. The seed nurtured with terrific soil made a terrific plant, which she proudly let me hold in my hands. The seed nurtured in poor soil made a pitiful, withered plant. She let me hold that, too. Her point was that the seed material provided identical growth opportunities for both plants, but that an equal start was not enough. “You need both seed and soil,” she explained to me—nature and nurture—to get the desired results.
She’s right, of course, and it’s a metaphor I use in this book to organize the research on raising smart and happy kids. There are some factors parents can’t control and some they can. There’s seed,