The pandemic of parenting terror has become so deeply entrenched in our lives, it is almost taken for granted. It takes the form of hysterical consumerism (two words: diaper warmer) and overwrought news reports (a recent ABC headline: DOES DAY CARE MAKE KIDS BEHAVE BADLY? STUDY SAYS YES), as well as an insidious anxiety among parents that no matter what we do, our children will be screwed up and we'll be found to be failures. Within this lies the very heart of our terror. As adults we're haunted, for good and bad, by the experiences of our youth. But as parents, we become the authors of the stories that will dwell in our children throughout their lives. This is the perpetually defining cycle of humans—at once knowable and mysterious.
Alison Gopnik, a leader in the field of children's cognitive development and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, vigorously explores this circular relationship in her new book, The Philosophical Baby (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). She looks at recent research on the developing minds of babies and finds that they have a lot more going on in their bald little heads than we thought. But she does not mean to strike fear in the hearts of vulnerable parents everywhere. Gopnik's learned voice of reason is a familiar one. Her last book, The Scientist in the Crib (HarperPaperbacks), similarly illuminated how children perceive, learn, and develop throughout early life. Here, though, she goes one step further and details the astonishing ability of children to adapt—and overcome—in the course of a lifetime. It is possible, Gopnik says, to escape the circumstances of our childhoods.
I followed this particular message with great personal interest. In my own suggestible youth, my family went through a series of destabilizing experiences. Some highlights: affairs and divorce (my parents); a mental hospital (my sister); fat, adolescent unhappiness (me); and a rehashing of it all in novels and stories (all of us). Such upheavals have left me worried in two ways: As a grown-up, I have a general anxiety that was instilled by this history, while as a mother, I nervously hope my son will experience a more wondrous and innocent childhood than the one I knew.
As it turns out, Gopnik's book serves as a useful reality check for these concerns. We often assume a straightforward equation for parenting: If I do X (pick anything from "let my baby cry it out" to "get a divorce"), my child will become a wreck of an adult. But the variables—genes, temperament, environment—are too unwieldy to be straitjacketed in this way. Furthermore, as Gopnik makes clear, children survive far worse circumstances than the relatively common chaos of my upbringing. I was not, for example, abandoned in a Romanian orphanage during the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu—a scenario that Gopnik describes in her book—lying alone in my crib, without any attention, for weeks at a time. And I have a steady adulthood now, so how much do our young selves really inform our adult selves, anyway? Gopnik reveals that, amazingly, by the time those Romanian orphans were 6 years old—after having been adopted by British families and raised by them for two or three years—they had largely caught up, emotionally and developmentally, with other, more fortunate children in their community. Which is to say, a later positive influence can reverse some of the supposedly determining sorrows of early life (in my case, a happy marriage; in the Romanians' case, a loving adoptive family).
The good news, then, according to Gopnik, is that bad childhood experiences reach only so far; it is possible to imagine and enact different lives later on. (Though there is evidence that the longer we suffer early on, the greater the challenge: The Romanian orphans left behind longest lagged developmentally and had more problems later.) "We aren't simply determined by either our genes or our mothers," she argues. "Instead, our childhood experiences guide the way we create our own lives." So while we are certainly genetically and temperamentally inclined one way or another, we are only influenced, not bound, by the families in which we grow up.
In describing how we learn to love from our families, Gopnik once again emphasizes our ability to alter our inheritance. She characterizes the various attachment styles adopted by babies based on their learned expectations—"secure attachment" babies (who believe their caregivers will make them feel better), "avoidant" babies (who think that expressing distress will only cause more unhappiness), and "anxious" babies (who are inconsolable, not trusting that comfort from a caregiver will help them)—and posits that much of this behavior is gathered from parents and other influential figures. For example, a mother—or a nanny—who expresses distress instead of nurturing is more likely to raise an anxious baby. Such babies, in turn, might grow up to fear, as Gopnik theorizes, "that they will always need more love than they will receive, that their love is far more likely to be rejected than returned."
But just as these perceptions of intimacy can be carried from infancy to adulthood, it is also possible to reshape them as a grown-up. Researchers found that people who had reflected on their difficult childhoods and come up with their own clear perspectives were able to realize ways that they'd like to do things differently and had steadier relationships with their own children. (Conversely, those who glossed over their childhoods perfunctorily were less likely to raise "secure children.") So despite news headlines to the contrary, it seems it's going to take more than simply putting our kids in day care to ruin their chances at happiness.
Still, Gopnik does not allow these findings to downplay the importance of offering stability and love to our children. "There is a kind of immunity about a happy childhood," she writes, "not an immunity from the disasters and catastrophes that may, that almost certainly do, lie ahead, but an intrinsic immunity. Change and transience are at the heart of the human condition. But as parents we can at least give our children a happy childhood, a gift that is as certain, as unchanging, as rock solid, as any human good."
