The two researchers recruited 157 families with children who exhibited signs of externalizing behaviour, such as aggression, hyperactivity, and hostilely defiant behaviour toward authority figures. The families were randomly assigned to either a test or control group. Families in the test group underwent an intervention program Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn had developed.
Each family in the program received six home visits from female consultants called interveners. During these visits, the interveners observed how the family interacted, appraised their parenting strategies, and offered tips and suggestions for improved communication between parents and children. Each visit was themed, focusing on different skill sets, such as responding promptly to children’s signals, sharing emotions, and using positive reinforcement. The last two sessions were review, where interveners helped bolster previously learned skills. At the end of the program, parents received brochures filled with tips and exercises on the key issues of the intervention.
Meanwhile, the control group participated in a largely insubstantial program called a dummy intervention. Researchers contacted parents by phone and discussed parenting issues with them. Parents were encouraged to talk about their children’s development, but the “interveners” did no intervening whatsoever; they did not observe the participants’ parenting strategies, nor did they offer any tips on how to more effectively parent children with externalizing behaviour disorders. The entire point of the control was to make parents think they were participating in an intervention program without actually providing one. Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn met with both groups a year after the program’s completion and noted the change, if any, in children’s externalizing behaviours.
The results were, at first glance, lukewarm. As expected, 7-repeat children benefited from the real intervention, but the effect was marginal; 7-repeats who underwent the intervention program scored an average of 2.5 points lower on the externalizing behaviour scale than 7-repeats in the control group, who received the deliberately ineffective “dummy” intervention. Non-7-repeat children varied even less. Although 2.5 points is enough to be statistically significant, given the respectable sample size of the study, it is hardly earth-shattering. The intervention program seemed like a dud.
Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn were not to be dissuaded. Pushing the control group aside, they considered their data from a new angle. Perhaps, they thought, merely participating in the program wasn’t enough. A far more influential factor would be whether or not the parents who received this information actually did anything with it, or whether they promptly fell back into old habits after the intervention program concluded.
The two researchers set out to ascertain exactly that. They took parents who had participated in the real intervention, re-observed them interacting with their children, and broke them into two groups based on whether or not they had continued to follow the techniques prescribed by the program.
Suddenly, the intervention seemed far more promising. Among children with the DRD4 7-repeat allele, those whose parents took the program’s lessons to heart scored 6 points lower on the externalizing behaviour scale (meaning they were calmer, happier, and less prone to anger) than children whose parents chose not to follow the plan, a difference more than twice that between the intervention and control groups. Even among families in the dummy intervention group, those who had adopted a more engaged and interactive parenting style — be it through advice gleaned from a parenting book or the suggestion of a grandparent or simply by learning from their own experiences as parents — saw a precipitous drop in their children’s externalizing behaviour, with children scoring 4 points lower on the externalizing behaviour scale than those of less adaptive parents. The drops were less substantial in children without the DRD4 7-repeat allele, though even they showed a marked improvement.
Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn’s intervention was a rousing success, but not because it was a brilliant or life-altering program. Its power didn’t come from comprehensive lesson plans or advanced technology or extensive funding — in fact, it possessed none of these traits, just half a dozen chats with an informed third party and several pages of accessible parenting literature. Nurses or social workers or perhaps even trained parents could provide programs like this in our communities.
The true success of the program rested on the parents’ desire to better understand and relate to their children. Without that spark, the program meant nothing.[22]
Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., IJzendoorn, M.H.V., Pijlman, F.T., Mesman, J., and Juffer, F. (2008). “Experimental Evidence for Differential Susceptibility: Dopamine D4 Receptor Polymorphism (DRD4 VNTR) Moderates Intervention Effects on Toddlers’ Externalizing Behavior in a Randomized Controlled Trial.” Developmental Psychology, 44(1), 293.
In the insular, almost solipsistic world of infant development, small actions have big consequences. Young brains grow at a feverish rate, and their constant, relentless expansion makes them ravenous for stimuli. Everything they see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is gobbled up, pored over, processed, and neatly filed away for future consideration. Much of it will ultimately be discarded, but a surprising amount of it will be absorbed and incorporated into the child’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour. Minds, as mysterious and intangible as they may seem, are rooted in the physical world. They are built experience by experience and neuron by neuron, materials as real — and as crucial — as the bricks and mortar of a house’s foundation. Mislay the bricks or skimp on the mortar and the house stands crooked or crumbles to the ground.
Sounds scary, doesn’t it? And you know what, it is scary. Parenting is a hard job. It requires creativity, discipline, intuition, compassion, tenacity, and wisdom. It comes with long hours, tremendous responsibility, and no pay. It forces you to become the parent your child needs you to be, to adapt your responses, emotions, and behaviours to the benefit of your child. It demands the best of you at all times. It is tough. But it is far from impossible. Your parents did it, after all, as did your grandparents before them, and your great-grandparents before them. Trailing behind you to the distant horizon of human history is a chain of parents thousands of generations long. Some of them did a better job than others. Yet every single one of them, in their own way, succeeded at humanity’s most important endeavour. They kept the ball rolling for another generation. If they could do it, surely you can too. Think of all the advantages you have over your ancestors 10 generations back. You have clean water and family doctors and hand sanitizer. You have penicillin and daycare and the polio vaccine. You have freedom from famine and pestilence and war. You have knowledge, more than any generation that came before you.
We also have civilizations and governments that can afford to attend more to the needs of families, encouraging and helping parents to be the sensitive, attentive people their children need them to be. Parenting needs to be recognized as the cornerstone of greater public health and supported in as many constructive ways as possible. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. There is much more evidence still to come that will reveal the true scope of parenting’s influence on individuals, families, and the societies in which they dwell.
Scientific studies, with their complex behavioural scales and near-inscrutable graphs, can seem abstract and sterile. But beneath the tables and jargon and rhetoric lies a rich and ever-deepening pool of knowledge. We are the beneficiaries of a grand and storied tradition of scientific inquiry, but also of practical experience. It is at the crossroads of these two variables that our understanding of early child development is at its most lucid. And perhaps no field of study gets it better than attachment theory.
Chapter 6
The Eyes of a Child
In the wake of the Second World War, thousands upon thousands of children were left without parents. Six years of warfare on an unprecedented scale had caused a dramatic influx of orphans. Most were homeless, friendless, and hopelessly alone, their