Love, Attention, and Affection
I will never
forget the night when one traditional Jewish scholar spoke about the centrality
of love. While his students sat beside him ready to absorb that evening’s
instruction, their teacher lifted a worn volume of the Torah, opened it, and
began to read: “See that I [God] have placed before you life and good, and
death and evil; and I am commanding you to love...” The elderly scholar paused,
his eyes closed, deep in thought. Then, with his eyes still closed, he
repeated, “I have placed before you life... and I am commanding you to love.” He
brought the book closer to his eyes, squinted to see the tiny print, and read
from the eleventh-century commentary of the Spanish scholar, Rabbi Abraham Ibn
Ezra: “This verse teaches us that life is for love.” The Talmudic master closed
his eyes for a moment. Then he repeated, “Life is for love.” Every creature has
its purpose, and ours is to forge relationships, to create closeness.
Learning to Love
We all notice that newborn animals are far
more physically mature and independent than newborn children. A kitten is
ambulatory shortly after birth, as is a foal, but a newborn child does not walk
for almost a year. Children need another nine months of gestation, outside of
the womb, to achieve the maturity most animals possess at birth.
Traditional Jewish scholars see profound
meaning in this difference between animals and people. Gestation, they believe,
prepares a creature for its job in this world, but a person cannot be prepared
for his most essential job - loving - when he is alone in the womb. Preparation
for love must take place through contact with others, out here in the world
with other people. According to the 3,300 year old Jewish tradition, we are
meant to love, and we leave the womb early only to train for this assignment.
Psychologists recently discovered the same
truth. Dr. John Bowlby, the British psychologist and founder of Attachment
Theory, told members of the American Psychiatric Association in 1986, “The
propensity to make strong emotional bonds to particular individuals is a basic
component of human nature, already present in germinal form in the neonate and
continuing through adult life into old age.” In 1998, Dr. Michael Orlans,
founding executive board member of the American Psychotherapy Association,
announced findings that “human babies are born earlier in the growth cycle than
other mammals” and “extrogestation [out-of-womb gestation] lasts, on average,
the same amount of time as in utero gestation.” Dr. Orlans further explained
that the “significant brain development” of extrogestation occurs as a direct
result of “interactive routines between caregiver and infant.” Children
do their final “wiring” when we love them; and, minimally, love means providing
them with attention and affection.
Attention
The first step in loving a child is being
sensitive to his needs and attending to them. This is not an easy task. Indeed,
many new parents are shocked by how difficult it is to sustain sensitivity and
attentiveness throughout the day and night. We have no choice, however, since
attentiveness, and all the love it represents, is crucial to our child’s
development.
Cultivating Psychological Resilience
When we are attentive to a child’s needs, we
create a sense of security and confidence — what psychologists call attachment
- and this provides the internal strength children need to handle stress later
in life. “Secure attachments are a primary defense against the development of
severe psychopathology associated with adversity and trauma,” writes Dr. Terry
Levy, president of the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment
of Children. When researchers in New Jersey evaluated attachment
levels in one-year-old boys and then followed the children for several years,
they found that 40% of the insecurely attached boys showed later signs of
psychopathology, compared to only 6% of the securely attached boys. Studies
also demonstrate that securely attached children who break down under
extraordinary adversity tend to rebound and recover, while insecurely attached
children generally have difficulty healing psychologically.
Cultivating Self-Esteem
Research also links self-esteem to attentive
parenting. Moreover, not only do attentive parents produce sons and daughters
who enjoy greater self-esteem than other children, this positive self-image
persists up to twenty years later. In one study of women raised in Islington,
England, investigators found that children raised by more responsive parents
were twice as likely to have a positive self-image in their adult years as
those raised by less responsive parents. And children who feel good about
themselves have higher aspirations, do better in school, earn higher salaries
when they grow up, and handle stress more effectively than children with low
self-esteem.
Investigators differ over how attentive
parenting bolsters self-esteem. Some argue that children who are ignored feel
unworthy of their parents’ attention. Other researchers suggest that
children who are ignored feel overwhelmed by circumstances and slip into
helplessness, which in turn feeds low self-esteem.
Cultivating Security
Parents sometimes worry that attentive
parenting undermines independence and confidence. The opposite is true,
however. “Children who experience consistent and considerable gratification of
needs in the early stages do not become ‘spoiled’ and dependent,” writes Dr.
Terry Levy. “They become more independent, self-assured, and confident.” Professor
Donald Routh, director of clinical training at the University of Miami
Department of Psychology, similarly observes, “At least naively, we might
suppose that infants who are very closely attached to their mothers might grow
into excessively dependent children. Research points to the opposite
conclusion, however.” Children cry less frequently and for shorter
duration after their first nine months when caregivers respond promptly during
the child’s first nine months. Conversely, children who do not
receive enough attention early on tend to be clingy, suffer from separation
anxiety, and respond with panic when pushed to explore the world or when left
in the hands of an unfamiliar caregiver.
In a presentation to the psychiatric staff of the
Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Dr. John Bowlby summarized what we now know
about the link between attentive parenting and secure children:
Studies of adolescents and young adults, as well as of school children
of different ages from nursery school up, [indicate] that those who are most
emotionally stable and make the most of their opportunities are those who have
parents who, whilst always encouraging their children’s autonomy, are
nonetheless available and responsive when called upon. Unfortunately, of
course, the reverse is also true.
Nighttime Care
Although our children always need our
sensitive responses, they especially need them at night. The combination of
drowsiness and darkness makes children feel particularly vulnerable. We have to
make special efforts to be attentive to nighttime distress.
The effect of ignoring children’s nighttime
cries was tragically illustrated during the only modern, cultural experiment in
which children were voluntarily secluded from their parents during sleeping
hours. Beginning in the 1930s, parents living on Israel’s secular
kibbutzim1 elected to sleep their children away from home in
communal children’s facilities. The small staff size at these facilities made
it impossible to attend promptly to every cry, but the early pioneers of the
kibbutz movement hoped that their children would adjust to the less attentive
arrangement.
The ill-fated trial produced horrendous results. A
barrage of studies found that the graduates of kibbutz children’s facilities
suffered disproportionately from a range of psychological disorders, including
attachment deprivation traumas, major depression, schizophrenia, low
self-esteem, and alcohol and drug problems. By 1994, more than half of all
children on Israeli kibbutzim exhibited symptoms and psychopathologies
associated with insecure attachment. Professor Carlo Schuengel, an investigator
from the University of Leiden, Netherlands, echoed the findings of many earlier
researchers when he identified the cause of the psychological disintegration
kibbutz children experienced: “Although collective sleeping may allow for sufficient
monitoring of children’s safety, it leaves children with only a precarious and
limited sense of security.
As data poured in revealing the damage that
had been done by children’s sleeping facilities, kibbutz leaders abandoned the
experiment. The last of the kibbutzim’s 260 children’s facilities
was finally closed in 1998. Professor Ora Aviezer, director of the
Laboratory for the Study of Child Development at the University of Haifa,
summarized the disaster:
Research results indicate that collective sleeping
arrangements for children negatively affect socio-emotional development in the
direction of a more anxious and restrained personality. Collective sleeping was
abolished as it became clear that it did not serve the emotional needs of most
kibbutz members. Its disappearance demonstrates the limits of adaptability of
parents and children to inappropriate child-care arrangements.
The “Modern” Cry-It-Out Sleep-Training Program
Frighteningly, some children in the West are
being exposed to just such inappropriate child-care arrangements today in their
own homes. The “cry-it-out” sleep-training program offers parents an effective
alternative to the hassles of nighttime childcare. Behavioral psychologists
behind the plan have demonstrated that infants whose nighttime cries are not
answered really do stop crying within as little as three days. Although the
program has been touted as “a new, revolutionary method for teaching children
to sleep through the night,” it constitutes no more than a revival of the disastrous
kibbutz experiment, and what it really teaches children is despair.
People are attracted to the cry-it-out
method for the same reason they are attracted to many other destructive
childraising techniques: It offers a quick behavioral fix. However, intelligent
educators take into account the long-term effects of every childraising
strategy. Ignoring a child’s nighttime cries might eventually produce quiet,
but it does not cultivate security. Thus, children trained with the cry-it-out
method were found to wake more often throughout the night, sleep less
efficiently, and walk around with more daytime tiredness than children attended
to by their parents. Moreover, children deprived of nighttime
comfort are at risk for all the psychopathologies discovered among children who
slept in kibbutz children’s homes.
An Attentive Sleep-Training Program
Training children to sleep through the night
in a healthy and safe fashion requires distinguishing between five different
types of cries:
- Occasional nighttime whimpers
can be ignored. All normal infants make such noises during the night and do not
necessarily need attention.
- Tantrums can also be
ignored. These cries sound more angry than distressed.
- If a child cries loudly
because he is afraid or lonely, then patting, massaging, or just lightly
shaking his crib is usually sufficient to ease him back to sleep.
- If a child cries hysterically out of distress,
he needs to be picked up and held for a period until he feels more calm, at
which point he can be nursed, patted, or massaged back to sleep.
- If the child is hungry he
needs to be nursed back to sleep. If he is wet he needs to be changed and then
nursed, patted, or massaged back to sleep.
A child might need to consistently
experience this sort of attentive nighttime care for several months in order to
become secure enough to sleep through the night. Admittedly, an attentive
approach requires more parental energy than modern reincarnations of the
kibbutz system, but it also promises a more psychologically healthy child.
1 A
kibbutz is an Israeli communal farm.
The plural form is kibbutzim. Most of
Israel’s kibbutzim were organized by socialist emigrants from Europe.
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