Questions often asked are: What's the best way to bring up a child? What are some of the things I should do to make sure my son grows up healthy? How can I be sure my daughter will grow up to be reasonable happy? Well, it's clear that there can be no definite answers to such ponderous philosophical questions. A lot depends on what you want your child to be. Rich? Successful? Happy? Moral? Lawmaker? Lawbreaker? Law abider? Kind? Compassionate? Caring? Selfish? Anything at all? At a minimum one would want their child to be happy and healthy but children and people are far too complex and live in such intricate and weighty situations that detailed and specific answers are all but impossible to give without comprehensive understanding of a specific situation and all its ramifications. Even then woe to the man or woman who dares to give an opinion without considering an exit strategy. What works with one child may not work with another. However, there's been enough research and practical experience for some generalities to be offered as advice. Most of the recent published research that I am familiar with comes from the Department of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame, from the labs of Dr Darcia Narvaez. A lot of it may be surprising and of course there will always be the know-it-alls-and there are many of them in T&T-who will turn up their noses and whinge. They were probably brought up the wrong way.
Dr Narvaez has been able to show "a relationship between child-rearing practices common in foraging hunter-gatherer societies (how we humans have spent about 99 per cent of our history) and better mental health, greater empathy and conscience development, and higher intelligence in children." First of all, it begins in the first days of life. None of this "we'll start teaching you how to behave when you start big school" business. Small babies have been shown to have a very good sense and understanding of social interactions and respond dramatically to negative or positive influences. Dr Narvaez describes six characteristics of child rearing that were common to our distant ancestors and are advisable today in order to rear a child to be a happy, healthy adult. It starts off with natural childbirth which provides mothers with the hormone boosts that give them the energy to care for a newborn. It just seems that all of that pushing and moaning is needed if you want oxytocin to be immediately secreted in the amounts necessary to deal with a baby. A second key characteristic is prompt response to the baby's fusses and cries. You can't "spoil" a baby. This means meeting a child's needs before they get upset and the brain is flooded with toxic chemicals. "Warm, responsive caregiving like this keeps the infant's brain calm in the years it is forming its personality and response to the world," Narvaez says. The corollary of this is never be afraid to pick up the baby and soothe it. Trust is thus formed in the child's emotional makeup. There's far too much nonsense being advised in T&T today with young mothers being told to let the baby "cry it out."
How much harm this advice is doing to children and to their mothers remains to be seen but the suggestion is that we are creating a group of uncaring, undisciplined, self-centred monsters who have no empathy for anyone or anything. The follow-up to this is the third recommendation: touch, touch, touch the baby with nearly constant carrying, cuddling and holding. The easiest way to do this is to breastfeed, ideally for two to five years. A child's immune system isn't fully formed until age six and breast milk provides its building blocks as well as immunity to any disease that the mother has had.
A surprising finding to many but a welcome one is the fifth recommendation. A child should have, after the first months, several adult caregivers, people beyond the parents who also love and care for the child. Trust then moves from the home to outside. Of course this is exactly what used to happen in the "old days" when not only aunties and uncles and grannies and cousins used to be around the growing child but the very people in the street where the child lived would take an interest in what was going on. Finally, the importance of play, and not organised play but free play with different aged playmates. Free play is what we grew up on, roaming the streets and parks of Woodbrook, from sunrise to sunset, inventing things to do. Children who don't play enough are more likely to become depressed, anxious, have phobias, become aggressive and suffer more from ADHD. So if you want your child to grow up to be like some of my colleagues, happy, intelligent and with naturally curly hair or even no hair at all, you now know what you have to do and can't say you were not warned.
