The support system

An infant's dependence of the caregiver tends it self to make him/her susceptible to a rewiring of his/her nervous system depending on the external interaction perceived by the baby. This chapter dealt with how the family-based interactions affect a child's development.

4 most important sources of family-based dissatisfaction, after having the first baby:
sleep loss
social isolation
unbalanced workload
depression

Babies seek safety above all
It was Harry Harlow who discovered the idea of infant emotional attachment. By performing studies on babies of rhesus monkeys, Harlow discovered that it was not the presence of food that mean reassurance to the little babies, it was the presence or absence of a safe harbor that determined how the baby monkeys reacted.

Human babies are attuned to the feelings of safety and not to the availability of food, or help with other activities.

An interesting observation by a psychologist Andy Meltzoff: A baby who is 42 minutes old was able to imitate Andy's act of sticking out tongue. Imitation by a 42 minutes baby is really amazing as it involves many high level understandings by babies, from discovering that other humans exist in the outside world, that babies have functional body parts as other humans they see. Pretty awesome!

Human babies can create hypotheses, test them, and then appraise their findings with enthusiasm of an adult. They are happy and quick learners. Children are constantly observing their parents and are influenced by what they observe.

Bonding with parents provides safety

During the baby's attachment (to parents) period, a baby's brain intensely monitors the care giving it receives. It is constantly asking questions like" am I being held, am I being fed?, who is safe?

If the baby's requirements are being fulfilled, the brain develops one way; if they are not being fulfilled, it develops another way. There is a time window of several years during which babies strive to create the bonds with their parents and establish a feeling of safety. If it does not happen, they can suffer long-term emotional damage. In some extreme cases, they might be scared for life. The above statements were understood from the study of children from Communist Romania, during 1990s.

In 1966 Romania's dictator Nicolae Ceausescu policies resulted in an increase in the number of babies being born and often abandoned due to limited resources of parents. Such abandoned children were taken into state orphanages (in thousands of numbers). With limited resources, the orphanages were not good for children. In these orphanages, children were never held or given any sensory stimulation. Many were tied to their beds, left alone for hours, they stared into space and were silent for long hours. Some of these children, in later years were adopted by Canadian families. As these children grew up, researchers could differentiate these children based on their interactions. One group seemed remarkably sable and indistinguishable from healthy Canadian control group. The other group seemed troubled. The troubled group had eating problems, got sick more often, had aggressive antisocial behaviors. The independent variable was the age of adoption of children.

If the children were adopted before the 4th month of life, they acted like every other happy kid. If they were adopted after the 8th month of life, they acted like gang members. The inability to find safety through bonding, by a specific age in infancy, clearly resulted in immense stress to their growth. This stress affected the children's behavior during later years also. They were out of the orphanages for long time but were actually never able to erase their childhood experiences.


Babies response to stress
If a baby regularly experiences an angry, emotionally violent social environment, his/her developing stress responders turn hyper-active to cause a condition called "Hypercortosolism". On the other hand, if a baby is exposed to severe neglect, like the Romanian orphans, it causes "Hypocortosolism".

What happens when parents throw emotional punches
Even if the above happens on regular basis, it is capable of hurting a baby's development. Such affects are reversible, if infants are taken from severely traumatized environments and placed in nurturing environments, if younger than 8 months, can show improvement in their stress-hormone regulation.

Changes baby's behavior
babies in emltionally iunstable environments are less able to respond to a new stimuli, calm themselves and recover from stress. They find it difficult to regulate their own emotions. The stress hormones can interact with hone mineralization and affect the leg development. Such environmentally-raised children statistically are more likely to display antisocial behavior, aggression in school, cannot focus their attention very well, have less idea of pacifying themselves.

Effect of parental divorse is present in several years later after the divorce. Children from divorced households are 25% more likely to abuse drugs by the time they are 14, become pregnant out of wedlock, twice as likely to get divorced themselves, get lower grades than children in stable households, less likely to receive college education support.

In non-divorced households, research has shown that the time spent in household disturbance (happening in front of child) is less damaging than the lack of reconciliation kids observe. Many couples avoid reconciliation in front of their children and it skews child's perception as they are unable to appreciate the act of reconciliation. The act of reconciliation before children gives them an opportunity to learn about how to make-up after a disagreement.

Being Empathetic is essential
Empathy not only matters, it is the foundation of effective parenting - Gottman
 
Choosing to empathize with each other is another act that can assist in the development of children. Empathy as defined by research literature has following components:
- Detecting a change in the emotional state of someone else.
- After detecting the emotional state of another person, an individual transports what he observes (in other person) onto his/her own thinking. A person "wears the shoes" of the other person and observes how he would react to similar circumstances.
-Being aware of the boundary that the person who is observing and empathizing is not in reality experiencing what he/she observes.


Learning to empathize
-Observe and describe the emotional changes of others
-Try to figure out the reasons that caused the observed emotional changes in others