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Last month I wrote about the assumption of continuity between animals and humans. This month’s blog addresses the assumption of continuity between the emotions and habits of young children and their derivatives in later years. John Bowlby was certain that an infant’s experiences with its primary caretaker during the first year created a secure or insecure attachment that was preserved indefinitely.
Cathryn Booth-LaForce of the University of Washington and Glen Roisman of the University of Minnesota challenge this idea. The classifications secure or insecure given to 18 year olds, based on their replies to the Adult Attachment Interview, were unrelated to their classification as securely or insecurely attached based on the standard procedure. Not surprisingly, the social class of the family predicted the adolescent’s answers to the interview. The insecurely attached 18 year olds who had been securely attached infants grew up in homes with less income and more life stressors.
Bowlby’s decision to award formative power to the experiences of the first two years continued a tradition that began in the eighteenth century when ministers told their congregations that the mother’s treatment of her infant and young child laid the foundation of their character. When Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson took up this theme they placed greater emphasis on the predictability and gentleness of the parent’s behavior. These commentators, all products of Western culture, assumed, without definitive evidence, that the first experiences had to exert a profound effect on the child’s future. Ancient Chinese scholars did not award such formative power to early experience, but insisted on the greater influence of the educational experiences of the later childhood years.
The infant’s brain turns out to be remarkably resilient. A team of Brazilian scientists discovered that the brains of the rare children who were born with no connections between the two hemispheres, called callosal agenesis, eventually established alternative connections between the right and left hemispheres. A study by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that adolescents who had been blind since birth showed dramatic improvement in their ability to solve varied problems after their cataracts were removed. Scientists at Wake Forest University deactivated a brain site in three week old kittens that contributes to the animal’s ability to move accurately toward a light. Although these cats were impaired when they were one year old, surprisingly, by age four, they had recovered the level of skill found in normal cats. Since the brain is the foundation of all psychological properties, and the brain can be changed by experience, it follows that most psychological properties are also vulnerable to change.
The maturational changes in the brain during the first 12 to 18 years are accompanied by new psychological abilities that can alter, or in some cases remove, the products of the experiences of the first year or two by altering the interpretation of an experience. It is the interpretation, not the experience as it appears on film, that is the primary cause of behaviors and moods. Infants and young children are incapable of the adolescent interpretations that precipitate distress.
Given the many discontinuities in nature, history, and lives it is reasonable to ask why some psychologists award so much power to the deep past, while trashing both the recent past and the present. One reason is the dislike of explanations that involve unpredictable events that cannot be specified. This bias helps to explain why some psychologists find it attractive to assume that parental behaviors with the young child explain why the adolescent engages in binge drinking, permissive sexuality, or anti-social behavior rather than recognize the influence of the internet, the media, and contraceptives.
On an April afternoon in 2013 a pair of brothers exploded two bombs at the Boston Marathon that killed three people and injured hundreds. I suspect that their actions that day could not have been predicted from knowledge of their childhoods. The important reason for their aggression was the recent radicalization of the older brother, which was exacerbated by his anger over being refused US citizenship by immigration officials.
If Herbert Hoover had not lost both parents as a child living in a small town in Iowa he would not have been sent to live with an uncle in Oregon. As a result he would not have met a high school teacher who suggested that he attend the recently established Stanford University. If he had not gone to Stanford he would not have met an influential faculty member who recommended Herbert for the position of manager of a new gold mine in Australia. Hoover’s acceptance of this assignment made him rich enough to retire when he was still young and vital. He decided to go to Washington and pursue a second career in governmental affairs. Without this sequence of unpredictable events over five decades Herbert Hoover would not have become a president of the United States.
If a psychologist had not turned down an offer to lead a project at the Fels Research Institute in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1956, I would not have been hired a year later to direct the project that resulted in the book “ Birth to Maturity”, which led, in turn, to an invitation to join the Harvard faculty. If I had not been a member of a NIH committee evaluating a proposal for research on nutrition in Guatemala I would not have studied development in the small village of San Marcos on Lake Atitlan and might not have changed my mind about the determinism of the infant years. And if a Boston political group had not stopped a research project on the effects of day care on African-American infants my colleagues and I would not have enrolled Chinese infants and I might not have initiated the productive work on human temperaments. If any one of these unpredictable events had not occurred my scientific career would have followed a different path. Peter and Rosemary Grant document the role of unpredictable events in altering the body and beak sizes in two species of finch living on the Galapagos island of Daphne Major. The initial body and beak sizes of each species did not predict their values 30 years later.
A second reason for the attractiveness of infant determinism is a deep desire for a few transcendental truths. The existence of God, the beauty of knowledge, and the sanctity of the marriage bond had this property in earlier centuries but these ideas have lost some of their sacred power. A belief in the sacredness of the bond between a biological mother and her infant is at risk for dilution as more mothers place their infants in surrogate care. The reluctance to give up the beautiful idea that the mother-infant bond possesses special power helps to explain the psychologist’s insistence that this relationship has great significance.
A giant pinball machine provides a metaphor for the life journeys that cannot be anticipated from the child’s profile on the second birthday. The size and weight of each ball symbolize the varied temperamental biases of infants; the location of each ball at the top of the machine stands for the class and cultural setting in which a child’s journey begins; and the many obstacles in the machine represent the sequence of challenges that will be encountered. That is why most parents, reflecting on the personality of their 25 year old son or daughter while recalling the traits they possessed at age two, would be frustrated by their inability to explain how the adult pattern emerged. If they had access to the changing interpretations their children imposed on the experiences that filled the 23 year interval their confusion would be muted.
