The Social Animal (11 page)

Social scientists do their best to arrive at some limited understanding of human development. In 1944 the British psychologist John Bowlby did a study called
Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves
on a group of young delinquents. He noticed that a high percentage of the boys had been abandoned when they were young, and suffered from feelings of anger, humiliation, and worthlessness. “She left because I’m no good,” they’d explain.

Bowlby noticed that the boys withheld affections and developed other strategies to cope with the sense of abandonment that plagued them. He theorized that what kids need most are safety and exploration. They need to feel loved by those who care for them, but they also need to go out into the world and to take care of themselves. Bowlby argued that these two needs, while sometimes in conflict, are also connected. The more secure a person feels at home, the more likely he or she is to venture out boldly to explore new things. Or as Bowlby himself put it, “All of us, from cradle to grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures.”

Bowlby’s work helped shift thinking about childhood, and about human nature. Up until his day, psychologists tended to study individual behavior, not relationships. Bowlby’s work emphasized that the relationship between a child and a mother or primary caregiver powerfully molds how that child will see herself and the world.

Before Bowlby’s era, and even in the years beyond, many people focused on the conscious choices people made. The assumption was that people look at the world, which is simple, and then make decisions about it, which are complicated and hard. Bowlby focused on the unconscious models we carry around in our heads, which organize perception in the first place.

For example, a baby is born with a certain inborn trait, like irritability. But he is lucky enough to have a mother who can read his moods. She hugs him when he wants hugs and puts him down when he wants to be put down. She stimulates him when he wants stimulation and holds back when he needs tranquility. The baby learns that he is a creature who exists in dialogue with others. He comes to see the world as a collection of coherent dialogues. He also learns that if he sends signals, they will probably be received. He will learn to get help when he is in trouble. He will develop a whole series of suppositions about how the world works, and he’ll rely on these suppositions as he ventures forth and meets other people (where these suppositions will either be validated or violated).

Children born into a web of attuned relationships know how to join in conversations with new people and read social signals. They see the world as a welcoming place. Children born into a web of threatening relationships can be fearful, withdrawn, or overaggressive. They often perceive threats, even when none exist. They may not be able to read signals or have a sense of themselves as someone worth listening to. This act of unconscious reality construction powerfully determines what we see and what we pay attention to. It powerfully shapes what we will end up doing.

There are many ways to define parental relationships, but Bowlby’s protégé, Mary Ainsworth, figured that a crucial moment came when a child was separated from her attachment figure and compelled, even for a few minutes, to explore the world on her own. Ainsworth devised the Strange Situation Test to examine these transition moments between safety and exploration. In a typical permutation of the test, Ainsworth put a young child (usually between nine and eighteen months) and her mother in a room filled with toys that invite exploration. Then a stranger would enter the room. Then the mother would leave the baby with the stranger. Then the mother would return. Then the mother and the stranger would leave the baby alone. Then the stranger would return. Ainsworth and her colleagues closely observed the child at each of these transitions: How much did she protest when the mother left? How did she react when Mom returned? How did she react to the stranger?

Over the subsequent decades, the Strange Situation Test has been applied to thousands and thousands of children all around the world. About two-thirds of the children cry a bit when their mother leaves them in this test and then rush to her when she returns to the room. These children are said to be securely attached. About a fifth of the children don’t make any outward display when their mother leaves, nor do they hurry over to her when she returns. These children are said to be avoidantly attached. The final group doesn’t display coherent responses. They may rush back to Mom as she returns but also punch her in anger when she gets close. These children are said to have ambivalent or disorganized attachment styles.

These categories have the same flaws as all attempts to categorize human beings. Nonetheless, there is a mountain of research, known as attachment theory, which explores how different types of attachment are related to different parenting styles, and how strongly childhood attachments shape relationships and accomplishments over the course of a lifetime. It turns out that attachment, even at age one, correlates reasonably well with how people will do in school, how they will fare in life and how they will develop relationships later in life. The results of one test in infancy don’t determine a life course. No one is locked into any destiny during childhood. But they give an insight into the internal working models that have been created by the relationship between parents and child, models that will then be used to navigate the world beyond.

Securely attached children have parents that are attuned to their desires and mirror their moods. Their mothers soothe them when they are alarmed and play happily with them when they are gleeful. These children do not have perfect parents or perfect relationships. Children are not fragile. Their parents can screw up, lose their tempers, and sometimes ignore their children’s needs, and yet if the overall pattern of care is reliable, then their kids still feel secure in their presence. Another lesson is that there is no one right parenting style. Parents can deliver stern punishments, and as long as the child thinks the conversation is coherent and predictable, then the attachment will probably still be secure.

When parents do achieve this attunement with their kids, then a rush of oxytocin floods through their brains. Some scientists, with that special way of theirs, call oxytocin the “affiliative neuropeptide.” It surges when people are enjoying close social bonds; when a mother is giving birth or suckling her child; after an orgasm, when two people in love gaze into each other’s eyes; when friends or relatives hug. Oxytocin gives people a powerful feeling of contentment. In other words, oxytocin is nature’s way of weaving people together.

Securely attached children tend to cope with stressful situations well. A study by Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota found that when you give a shot to a fifteen-month-old who is securely attached, he will cry at the pain, but the level of cortisol in his body will not rise. Insecurely attached children may cry just as loud, but they may not reach for their caregiver and their cortisol levels are more likely to shoot up, because they are accustomed to feeling more existential stress. Securely attached children tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. In school, they know how to use teachers and other adults to succeed. They don’t feel compelled to lean against and be near the teachers at all times. Neither do they hold themselves aloof from teachers. They come and go—establishing contact and breaking away. They also tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less of a need to lie to puff themselves up in other’s eyes.

Avoidantly attached children tend to have parents who are emotionally withdrawn and psychologically unavailable. They don’t communicate well with their children or establish emotional rapport. Sometimes they will say the right things, but their words are not accompanied by any physical gestures that communicate affection. In response, their children develop an internal working model in which they figure they have to take care of themselves. They learn not to rely on others and preemptively withdraw. In the Strange Situation Tests, they don’t protest (at least on the outside) when their mothers leave the room, even though their heart rate goes up and internally they are all worked up. When left alone, they tend not to cry, but continue with their solitary play and exploration.

As they get older, these children seem, at first blush, astonishingly independent and mature. During the first weeks of school, their teachers rate them highly. But gradually it becomes clear that they are not developing close relationships with friends and adults. They suffer from higher levels of chronic anxiety and are unsure in social situations. In the book
The Development of the Person
by L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson and W. Andrew Collins, there is a description of an avoidantly attached child as he walks into a classroom: “He walked in a series of angles, like a sailboat tacking into the wind. By approximation, he eventually wound up near the teacher; then, turning his back toward her, he would wait for her to contact him.”

Adults who are avoidantly attached tend not to remember much about their childhoods. They may describe their childhoods in generalities, but there was little that was emotionally powerful enough to lodge into recall. Often they have trouble developing intimate commitments. They may excel at logical discussion but react with deep unease when conversation turns to the emotions, or when asked to reveal themselves. They go through their days within a narrow emotional range, and are most at ease when alone. According to work done by Pascal Vrticka of the University of Geneva, adults who were avoidantly attached show less activation in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. They are three times more likely to be solitary at age seventy.

Children with ambivalent or disorganized attachment patterns tend to have parents who are inconstant. They are there one minute, gone the next. They may be overly intrusive one hour, and then coldly aloof. The children have trouble developing consistent working models. They feel a simultaneous urge to run toward Mom and Dad and run away. When they are placed on the edge of a scary incline, even as early as twelve months, they don’t look toward their mothers for help, the way secure babies do. They look away from their mothers.

Later in life, these children are more fearful than other children. They are more likely to perceive threats, and to have trouble controlling their impulses. These kinds of stresses can have long-term influences. Girls who grow up in homes without a father tend to have their periods at earlier ages, even after controlling for other factors. They tend, in general, to be more promiscuous in adolescence. Children with disorganized attachment patterns tend to have higher rates of psychopathology at age seventeen. Children from disorganized homes have smaller, less densely connected brains because the traumatic shocks of their childhood have retarded synaptic development.

Again, all this is not to say that early attachment determines a life course. Adult outcomes do not rigidly follow attachment patterns. That’s in part because some people seem to have tremendously resilient temperaments that allow them to overcome early disadvantages. (Even among people who are sexually abused as children, roughly a third show few serious aftereffects in adulthood.) And it’s in part because life is complicated. A child with a poor attachment pattern with his mother might meet a mentor or an aunt who will teach him how to relate. Some children have the ability to “use” other people, to attract attachment figures even if their parents are not doing the job. But these early parental attachments do open up a pathway; they foster an unconscious working model of how the world works.

Many studies have traced how early attachment patterns influence people over the course of their lives. They’ve found, for example, that Germany has more avoidant babies than the United States, and Japan has more anxious ones. One of the most impressive studies is based in Minnesota and summarized in
The Development of the Person
by Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson and Collins.

Sroufe and his team have followed 180 children and their families for over three decades. They began testing about three months before the children were born (to evaluate the personalities of the parents), and they have observed, measured, and tested them in myriad ways since, in all aspects of their lives, and always with multiple rigorous independent observers.

The results of this study do not overturn common sense, but they do reinforce it in impressive ways. The first striking finding is most of the causal arrows flow from parent to child. It’s obviously true that irritable or colicky children are harder to attach to and calm and sunny children are easier to attach to. Nonetheless, the key factor is parental sensitivity. Parents with communicative, interacting personalities tended to produce securely attached children. Parents with memories of good relationships with their own parents also tend to produce securely attached children. Sensitive parents can securely attach to difficult children and overcome genetic disadvantages.

Another striking finding is that people develop coherently. Children who were rated securely attached at one age, tended to get the same rating at another age, unless some horrible event intervened, like the death of a parent or abuse at home. “In general, our study strongly supported the predictive power of childhood experience,” the authors write. Sensitive early care predicted competence at every subsequent age.

Third, attachment patterns correlated well with school performance. Some researchers think that, if they measure a kid’s IQ, they can easily predict how well the kid will fare academically. The Sroufe study suggests that social and emotional factors are also incredibly powerful. Attachment-security and caregiver-sensitivity ratings were related to reading and math scores throughout the school years. Children with insecure or avoidant attachments were much more likely to develop behavior problems at school. Kids who had dominating, intrusive, and unpredictable caregivers at six months were much more likely to be inattentive and hyperactive by school age.