Elizabeth is a beautiful baby, with soft, round cheeks and eyes of a deep, shimmering blue that beckon for attention. With her father, Elizabeth is all coos and smiles, but with Sophie, she is strangely listless and withdrawn. Playtime, to Sophie, is a frustrating experience, another duty doled out by despotic parenting experts. Try as she might, she can’t understand what Elizabeth wants or likes as easily as her husband can. If infants speak a language of giggles and cries, then David is fluent while Sophie can barely speak a word. And this language barrier works two ways. Elizabeth, faced with her mother’s garbled missives and begrudging attention, grows fussy and uncooperative. Sophie reacts to her daughter’s petulance by becoming increasingly frustrated and exhausted. The two of them enter a vicious circle of resentment and hostility.
Whatever she tries, Sophie cannot seem to understand her daughter’s needs. Her resentment turns to desperation, which turns to fear. It seems as if Elizabeth never stops crying, and nothing Sophie does can placate her. Sophie feels like a hapless peasant press-ganged into service by a tiny tyrannical captain whose language she doesn’t even speak.
Farther down beneath Sophie’s resentment and anger and fear festers a profound sense of guilt and inadequacy. She knew raising a child would be hard work, but she’d always been told that the rewards reaped far outweighed the effort sown. Instead, she feels as if she’s laboured over salted earth, her sweat and tears yielding nothing but a few scraggily weeds.
During the first few months of Elizabeth’s life, David stays home as much as possible. However, their tenuous finances eventually catch up with them, giving him no choice but to return to work full-time. He is reluctant to do so, considering his wife’s deteriorating emotional state, but they simply cannot afford to have him home any longer.
With David gone for long hours, Sophie’s old fears begin to resurface. Her family live in another city and she can’t turn to them for support. She feels utterly alone. Her insomnia returns. When David leaves for work in the morning, the sound of the door closing behind him slides like an ice pick into her heart. The walls of her house seem to contract. The air stiffens and she finds it hard to breathe. David senses his wife’s anxiety, but he’s powerless to do anything about it. He has to work, and every month his hours get longer and longer.
One day, while Sophie is preparing lunch, Elizabeth pinches her finger in a kitchen cupboard. She wails uncontrollably. Sophie picks her up, perfunctorily caressing her back and telling her everything’s okay in a voice that seems unsure and a little annoyed. Unappeased, Elizabeth continues to cry. Sophie feels her chest tighten. Elizabeth’s cries punch through her like a power drill, boring into the shell in which her fear and dread and pain had throbbed and festered, waiting for release. Their prison punctured, the bilious thoughts pour out, sweeping her away in a flood of self-loathing. She only just manages to set Elizabeth down safely before she collapses, knees drawn up to her chest, face contorted into a rictus of misery. She rocks silently back and forth to the sound of Elizabeth’s wailing. David finds her hours later when he returns home from work, still rocking, her eyes red and swollen.
Sophie seeks professional help. She is — belatedly — diagnosed with postpartum depression, an insidious and all-too-common condition affecting mothers (and, less frequently, fathers) during the first year of their child’s life. Through counselling and the support of her husband, Sophie manages to overcome her depression and eventually bond with Elizabeth. Thawed by therapy support, and introspection, Sophie’s heart finally melts in response to Elizabeth’s blue eyes, chubby fists, giggles, and first words. However, the scars of her childhood pain remain with her always and she worries about how she will cope if she has a second baby.
Such is the dark underbelly of resilience. Some children can escape abusive homes and lead successful, happy, productive lives, but few, if any, can ever completely escape their early childhood experiences. Werner and Smith, while commenting on the remarkable tenacity of some of their study’s participants, noted that resilient individuals often remain socially withdrawn. They struggle with depression or anxiety or bad relationships and fight an endless uphill battle with the ghosts of their pasts.
A troubled childhood pursues us indefinitely. It affects our relationships with our family, our co-workers, our spouses, and our children. It impacts our health, both emotional and physical, in a number of ways; studies have linked disadvantaged upbringing to conditions as diverse as obesity, heart disease, aggression, depression, substance abuse, and schizophrenia. It causes tremendous suffering, much of it silent, ignored, or denied. It is, above all, highly individual. No one can predict precisely how someone with a difficult home life will cope. Given sufficient data, we can speculate about a given child’s probability of developing a behaviour disorder, or getting pregnant at 15, or becoming an alcoholic. But prediction on its own does not mean prevention. Telling Sophie that her emotional outcome is among the highest percentile of success, considering her family’s behaviour and socioeconomic status, will do nothing to help loosen the icy fist clenched around her guts every time she faces stress, nor will it see her through long nights spent lying awake in bed and staring at the ceiling, cocooned by the radio, overwhelmed by her fears and a suffocating sense of personal failure. Statistics are public knowledge, but Sophie’s private, inner pain remains her own.
Even those statistics, blunted and impersonal as they are, make for troubling reading. As science continues to unravel the mysteries of human development, the importance of a nurturing, supportive environment has become increasingly clear. In the January 2012 issue of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report urging healthcare professionals and policymakers to address the threat of toxic stress — the presence of severe and chronic stress in infancy and early childhood — on health and development. Their technical report, drawing from disciplines as varied as genomics, developmental psychology, epidemiology, sociology, and economics, highlights the influence of early environments on how children develop. They provide evidence linking a number of adverse conditions — including heart disease, depression, liver cancer, autoimmune disorders, and asthma — to toxic stress. Similar reports have been made across the scientific community. Even a trait as seemingly deep-rooted in our genes as height can be affected by childhood stress! There is no longer any doubt that poverty, discrimination, and maltreatment greatly increase a child’s chances of becoming overly aggressive, engaging in criminal activity, being dangerously promiscuous, or suffering from ADHD, depression, and a host of other symptoms.
Though some of the examples in this book are extreme, the findings we discuss are by no means limited to the abusive and impoverished households banished to the fringes of our society. They affect all of us. Mercifully, Sophie’s home life is not the norm. But the fallout of her childhood — the anxiety, the postpartum depression, the compulsive people-pleasing — affects a distressing number of people every day. Parenting is not a binary of good and bad, but a complex network of actions and reactions, emotions and behaviours and relationships that play off one another to produce a unique individual. It is not our aim to judge or reinforce barriers between good and bad parenting, but to help parents understand how their genes, attitude, behaviours, diet, and home life influence the way their child fits into the world. In so doing, we hope to show you how parenting really is the most important job you will ever do. Your efforts shape an individual and help set the course of their lives. The lives of these many individuals combined affect and, indeed, reflect all of society.
To do this, we’ve cast a wide net, trawling the seas of biology, genomics, medicine, nursing, sociology, epigenetics, and psychology for the freshest and most illuminating research these fields can offer. Not content with the flotsam that washes up on the media’s well-trodden shores, we’ve dredged the murky depths of academic discourse, diving into laboratories and textbooks for treasures hidden from the light of day. We’ve snared some good theories in our efforts, wondrous bejewelled ones, slimy ones still wriggling in the hands of those who first discovered them. This book is an exhibit of our findings, each display neatly labelled so as to explain what we found and why it matters.
Is this a parenting book? Yes and no. It’s about parenting, surely, though it’s also about being parented,