The Story of Childhood (13 page)

She goes back on the slide, and tries to crawl up it. She enjoys the daft backwardness of it. But when she attempts to go up the ladder that will return her to the top of the slide, a little boy pushes her out of the way. She turns in her mother's direction. ‘Push him back then,' Gloria calls from her squat on the grass verge, but Allana is cowed. The boy's mother scolds him in Turkish. The sun is passing in and out behind thick puffs of cloud.

Gloria has bought Ribena cartons and little packets of mixed sweets. Allana takes the straw for the juice out of its plastic and pops it in her mouth, sucking before she has even punctured the top of the carton. She drops a tiny jelly baby and a luminous yellow caterpillar without noticing. The sweets cause a stir back on the climbing-frame. The pushing boy wants some, but Allana isn't offering.

Gloria smokes a cigarette. A woman down the street drank a whole bottle of vodka last night and was taken away in an ambulance. Allana keeps asking her mum to buy a garden. It might even be a possibility if the family below them moves out, because the downstairs maisonettes open on to a green.

As the trio turn for home, they pass a gaggle of teenage girls gathered round a bench. They are passing a newborn baby between them like a parcel and it's impossible to tell
who he belongs to. There are high shrieks of derision when someone calls the infant ‘it' instead of ‘he'. They compete with each other for a turn of feeding with the bottle. Gloria worries about that baby. A week later she sees the same group helpless with laughter by the roadside, after inadvertently tipping their charge out of his pushchair and into the gutter.

Gloria doesn't like to see people not taking mothering seriously. It's not always easy to be patient, especially when you're on your own, but she wouldn't want to leave them with anyone else. Gloria got a lot more confident about looking after her girls when she went to the PEEP project. It taught her how important it was to talk to them and read to them, even when they were little babies. She liked the singing and the book-sharing, and she keeps in touch with some of the other mums she met there.

The Peers Early Education Partnership (PEEP) is not specifically a parenting class, though it is available to all parents of fives and under living in the area. The essence of PEEP is this: that parents are their children's first and most important educators, that children are competent learners from birth, and that everyday life offers the best opportunities for teaching. PEEP believes that young children don't need to be prepared like string beans before being thrown into the education pot, and that it is feeling secure about yourself and your relationships with other people that creates a disposition to learn.

Initially developed in the mid-1990s in the catchment area of a local secondary school, the project has now expanded across the country and is highly regarded. Initial evaluations have found that PEEP children made significantly more progress in their preschool learning and, more fundamentally, exhibited greater self-esteem than non-PEEP children.

Gloria has taken both Allana and Sienna to PEEP, and
she also studied there for an accreditation in child development. It was a lot more reading than she's used to, but she felt proud when she'd done it. The reason she liked PEEP best, though, was because it didn't feel like people telling you what to do.

The basis of PEEP, and other government-funded initiatives, is that parents can make a fundamental difference to their children's development. However, the independent psychologist Judith Rich Harris begged to differ when, in 1995, she arrived on the nature/nurture scene with an arresting new theory. A suburban grandmother, who had failed to complete her doctorate because of illness and was not affiliated to any academic institution, Harris had a paper accepted by the prestigious
Psychological Review
. In it she argued that parents do not make as much of a difference to children as people think, and that peers are more important to an individual's development.

Although doubters fixed on her lack of professional status, Harris was soon being championed by the likes of Steven Pinker at M.I.T., the poster professor of evolutionary psychologists. Harris later expanded her thesis into a book,
The Nurture Assumption
, which teased apart the way that human beings had come to understand themselves over a century of psychological inquiry. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do,' wrote the poet Philip Larkin, articulating a conviction that had launched a thousand analysts' couches. Not so, argued Harris.

She suggested that the correlation of good parenting with certain personalities was meaningless, because it did not distinguish between cause and effect. Are children who are cuddled a lot nice, or are nice children cuddled a lot? Harris believed that what developmentalists had assumed were parent-to-child effects were often child-to-parent effects.

Harris used the example of two children, five-year-old Audrey and seven-year-old Mark, who she encountered when her dog ran to the curb barking as they walked past with their mother. Despite the fact that the dog was barking in an unfriendly fashion, Audrey veered towards it, asking her mother if she could pet it. She was swiftly cautioned: ‘I don't think the dog wants you to pet him.' Meanwhile, her brother retreated to the other side of the street, and had to be encouraged at length by his mother to return to the group. ‘Come on, Mark,' she soothed, ‘the dog won't hurt you.'

Here was a parent who, depending on which child she was interacting with, could be seen as overprotective or permissive, argued Harris: ‘Their parents treat them differently
because
of their different characteristics. A fearful child is reassured; a bold one is cautioned. A smiley baby is kissed and played with; an unresponsive one is fed, diapered, and put in its crib.' A parent's treatment of a child was not a cause of their behaviour, but a reaction to it.

In addition, Harris posited, since children share 50 per cent of their genes with each of their biological parents, surely for genetic reasons alone children born with a predisposition to be timid are more likely to be raised by timid parents, and children born with a predisposition to be aggressive are more likely to be reared by aggressive parents.

Harris believed that the influence on children of peers, teachers, neighbourhoods and culture were too readily given second billing. So peers were considered important, but parental influence was seen as primary because early experiences with parents supposedly influenced later relationships with peers. Culture was similarly thought to have an impact, but the nurture assumption held that culture was passed on from parents to children.

But if that was really the case, Harris asked, then why do
children of immigrant families quickly acquire and feel more comfortable using the language of their peers? Telling the story of Joseph, the son of Polish parents who arrived in the United States at the age of eight, she observes: ‘He categorized himself as just a kid, a second-grade boy, and adopted the norms of behaviour appropriate for that social category. The norms included speaking English.' Parents do not have to teach their children the language of their community, she wrote: ‘In fact – hard as it may be for you to accept this – they do not have to teach their children any language at all.'

In a paper responding to criticisms of her book, Harris noted: ‘Every published report of a correlation between parental behavior and child outcome now contains a disclaimer admitting that the direction of effects is uncertain and that the correlation could be due in part to what I call a
child-to-parent effect
, a type of evocative gene – environment correlation. It is never admitted, however, that the correlation could be due
entirely
to the child-to-parent effect and that the parent-to-child effect could be zero, even though that possibility cannot be rejected because neither effect has been measured.'

This is a theory of parenting that must hold some appeal for those confounded by the babble of child care ‘experts' currently peddling their wares across the media, and by social policy determined to hold parents to account for their child's every transgression. Parents, and mothers in particular, are told regularly about the harm they can do their children, and seldom about the good. But Harris's theory does have one serious ramification: if parents believe they have a minimal effect on their children's psychology, are they not potentially more likely to maltreat their offspring?

On the other hand, the heart of Harris's thesis may be interpreted as profoundly pro-child. She asserts that the
nurture assumption ‘has turned childhood into parenthood'. Children are not interested in becoming like their parents, she argues, but want to be successful children. In viewing peers as major facilitators of children's development, she can be argued to be presenting childhood as an end in itself, rather than as a training for adulthood.

But Harris, unwittingly or otherwise, has been corralled into the ‘nature' camp. Steven Pinker relied heavily on her thesis in his book
The Blank Slate
, which put forward a gloomy, neo-Hobbsean view of human nature as a set of inherited instructions.

Railing against the ‘corrupting dogma' of the develop-mentalists' tabula rasa, Pinker argues: ‘The mind was forged in Darwinian competition and an inert medium would have been outperformed by rivals outfitted with high technology – with acute perceptual systems, savvy problem-solvers, cunning strategists and sensitive feedback circuits. A malleable mind would quickly be selected out.'

Pinker contends that developmentalist dreams of perfectability have been used in the service of the greatest travesties of the twentieth century. It is no coincidence, he writes, that Mao said, ‘It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.'

Yet Mao was co-opting a theory to suit his own ends, just as Hitler misappropriated the findings of Darwin. Understanding our fundamental drives is a worthwhile project, not least because it might allow us to become masters of rather than martyrs to them. But, as the philosopher Mary Midgley wrote in an essay on the subject, although genetics is a physical science, applying it to human behaviour is complex. Different ways of classifying behaviour express different attitudes, which in turn suggest very different conclusions.

‘The reason why “the gene” has now become a household
word is not that we have all suddenly begun to understand genetics,' Midgley cautioned. ‘We haven't. What has brought the word to public notice is the metaphor linked with it – selfishness – a metaphor that seemingly claimed to resolve long-standing debates about motivation.'

Coming back to nurture, recent findings from the field of neuroscience suggest that the responsiveness of the primary carer to their child, especially in the first year after birth, does have a direct physiological impact on the formation of babies' brains.

Surveying this research in her book
Why Love Matters
, the psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt makes the case for how a loving and attentive parent can stimulate development of the ‘social brain' – the pre-frontal cortex, a part of the brain that develops almost entirely postnatally. Here, key emotional responses like empathy, self-restraint and the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues are organised – the neurological rules according to which we will govern relationships for the rest of our lives. Put simply, says Gerhardt, love facilitates a massive burst of connections in this part of the brain between six and twelve months. Neglect or rejection during this period can greatly reduce the social brain's development.

Gerhardt also details how a baby's stress response – the production of the hormone cortisol by the hypothalamus – is set like a thermostat, usually within the first six months of life. Babies cannot regulate cortisol production at birth, but they learn to do so through repeated experiences of being comforted when distressed. If a caregiver expresses resentment or hostility towards a crying baby, or leaves him distressed for longer than he can bear, the brain becomes flooded with cortisol and will go on to over or underproduce the hormone in future stressful situations. Excess cortisol production is linked to depression and insecurity.
Too little can result in aggression and detachment.

The concept of early calibration of emotional responses reflects the work of the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who developed his ‘attachment' theory after reporting on the mental health of children who were evacuated and orphaned during the Second World War. He argued that during the first three years of life ‘maternal deprivation' for any extended length of time caused irreparable scarring of babies' ‘psychic tissue', creating an ‘affectionless' child who would at best go on to become an inadequate parent themselves.

Drawing on studies of higher primates, Bowlby argued that attachment behaviour may have served the evolutionary purpose of protecting the helpless young from predators. He believed that human infants developed specific attachments between the ages of nine months and three years. The mother, or other primary care-giver, provided a secure base from which the child could navigate her surroundings, so attachment and exploration were reciprocal behaviours.

Bowlby identified a sequence of responses induced by the removal of this attachment figure. First was outraged protest, followed by a period of despair, when the infant seemed apathetic. Finally, she became detached and, if separated from her mother for a sustained amount of time, no longer cared when she was again present.

Bowlby's formula was simple: ‘Healthy, happy and self-reliant adolescents and young adults are the products of stable homes in which both parents give a great deal of time and attention to the children.' Babies who enjoyed an intimate relationship with their care-giver learnt resilence, the quality of psychological flexibility that would allow them to tolerate challenge and set-backs as they grew up.