Talking about the past

In my latest Psychology Today blog post, I pick up on the theme of memory development to examine the role played by conversations about the past in the organization of children's memories. This includes a look at some new research which shows that mothers' style of talking about the past with their preschoolers shows its influence even into adolescence. You can read the new post here.

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The anti-parenting thing

Last week on Psychology Today I posted a 'manifesto' for a new approach to parenting. The post has been tweeted about quite a lot, and I've had a couple of interesting comments on the post. See what you think - you can read the post here.

Also, just a reminder that tickets for the Royal Institution event are on sale now.

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The science of parenting

Image by 12 : 00 ♥ via Flickr

I've been thinking a lot about parenting this week. I've been helping to devise a new course on parenting for the School of Life, and that's involved reading lots of the research on how different parenting styles and practices are associated with different developmental outcomes. One impression that has been confirmed for me is that there is very little solid scientific evidence in this area. There are far more people out there willing to offer advice on parenting than there are people willing to test these ideas scientifically.

So I was pleased to rediscover a website called Parenting Science, which promises information on the science of parenting with full scientific back-up. The website is run by an anthropologist, Gwen Dewar, who cares about making sure that ideas about parenting are founded in properly referenced scientific findings. I'm sure that Gwen and I would disagree on a few things, but her site is a welcome antidote to the opinion dressed as science that parents are constantly being fed. Tear up your parenting books and get yourselves over there.

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Feeding ourselves

Image by kingary via Flickr

Have you ever fed a baby? Put a mental camera on yourself while you do so. If you're anything like me, you'll find that you're instinctively making your own mouth do the things you want the infant to do. Open wide, that's it; wrap those lips around the morsel; close them up and swallow. In fact, I would defy you to keep your own mouth closed while meeting this abiding challenge of parenthood: getting some nosh down your little one's gullet.

What's the explanation? Some evolved mechanism for automatically modelling eating actions, to ensure that those who depend on us are well fed? Something to do with mirror neurons? In acting out the eating, I am configuring my own facial muscles in the way I want the toddler to do. That means that, at some level, I must be mapping the features and actions of my own body on to his. Generally I think mirror neurons are a little overrated (I do not see, for example, how they can be anything more than a useful platform for social cognition and theory of mind) but here's something they could be helping out with.

I've noticed that the reflective feeding effect generalises, too. When you are helping a toddler to brush her teeth, you will probably find that you are sometimes contorting your lips in the way you want the child to do. The problem with the 'modelling' theory is that it suggests that this behaviour is intentional; that we parents are doing this for a purpose, to show the child how the thing should be done. It could be something much more reflexive, unconscious and automatic: a by-product of evolution, psychological development, or both.

Then, the other day, I noticed Isaac doing the same thing. He was feeding me a bit of ice lolly and mouthing the grateful acceptance he wanted my mouth to show. He's five, but he too was unable to suppress this instinct to model the feeding process. It's not only parents who can't keep their own selves still. My hunch is that the effect is specific to actions that involve the face and mouth, but I could well be wrong about that. What do readers think?

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• Mirroring Behavior (scientificamerican.com)

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Sticky people

Image via Wikipedia

The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is interviewed in the New York Times about her new book on cooperative parenting. Babies call out social responses in us, and are themselves amazingly responsive to those reactions. Coupled with humans' neoteny, or extended period of immaturity, that means that human mothers rely on sharing out the work of parenting to conspecifics who are not family. In Hrdy's view, many features of our social cognition evolved in response to the pressures of being cooperative breeders. If you're going to hand your baby over to your neighbour, you need to be sure what she is thinking.

That's why babies are cute, the evolutionary psychologist would say. It's not enough for there to be trust on the part of the mother; there needs to be some inherent attraction in the idea of taking over someone else's childcare. The system wouldn't work unless babies called out the right social responses. Watch any social gathering in which a newborn is being handed around, and you'll see the frenzy for yourself. Many would have suspected it anyway, and here is a new scientific perspective on the phenomenon: infants are the glue that holds society together.

(Click on the carousel at the bottom right to see more about Hrdy's book.)

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Robot abuse

Two BBC journalists have posted an intriguing video of an informal experiment carried out in what I guess is their journalistic HQ. The film shows them acting as mum and dad to a kind of robot dinosaur called a Pleo. I'm not sure what AI wizardry makes the Pleo's behaviour so lifelike, but it is certainly convincing. Of most interest to me, though, is the contrast the film draws between two parenting styles. The Pleo's manufacturers claim that the robot forms a personality on the basis of its early experiences, much as a human infant is thought to do. Under a loving, indulgent parental regime, the robot seems well-adjusted and contented. Under a harsh, abusive regime, it ends up lethargic and depressed. 

Plenty of interesting things emerge from this piece. Firstly, I'm struck by how good these journalists—we're not told whether they are parents themselves—are at playing the part of good parents. Instinctively, it seems, they do exactly what good parents everywhere do. We see evidence of motherese in their conversational styles: higher-pitched voices with exaggerated intonation. The Pleo gets gentle tactile stimulation and plenty of mind-minded linguistic input, concerned with the robot's emotional and cognitive states of mind. The 'parents' are keen to take the Pleo outside to expand its experiences. There is even a suggestion that these positive strokings give the Pleo the 'confidence' to go out and explore its environment: a hallmark of secure attachment behaviour. 

In the neglectful scenario, the parents play their roles in an equally, and scarily, convincing way. They try to pass the baby on to each other, making excuses for why they can't look after him. The poor robot baby is shunted around the office in the hope that someone will give him some time. 'He's a more reserved robot than in the parallel happy life,' the caption tells us. It might seem odd to attribute such human characteristics to something that we know to be a lump of electronic circuitry, but the emotional impression is powerful. 

As with so much of developmental psychology, the adults' actions are of as much interest as the baby's. The Pleo, of course, has been cleverly designed to press all the emotional buttons that a human baby does, with cute squeaks and ET-like eye-blinks. It reminded me of the wonderful Kismet robot created by MIT engineers:

The point about is Kismet is that it calls out certain reactions in us, just by behaving in a human-like way. One puzzle that developmental psychologists have to contend with is how parenting can possibly make any difference when the object of parental love—the newborn baby—seems to have so little to make a difference to. Here's a creature that—very broadly speaking—cannot see clearly, process information effectively, remember past experiences, have consciousness of its own self and so on. How can it possibly be shaped by such sensitive and subtle parental behaviours? The robot work gives us a clue how. A creature that starts off as a blob of unconscious circuitry might become conscious, just because we take it as being so. If that is so, then the Pleo's parents' efforts might not have been wasted after all. 

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Lessons for Father's Day

I was asked by the Financial Times' Life & Arts section to write the weekly piece they call The List. With Father's Day tomorrow, the idea was for me to reflect on five things fatherhood has taught me. You can read the piece here. 

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Building a dream baby

In a recent interview I was asked whether a background in developmental psychology was of any advantage when it came to working out the right and wrong ways to bring up children. 'Far from it,' was the gist of my reply. The Baby in the Mirror is not a parenting book, not least because I have no idea what makes a good parent. I know what makes an abusive one, or a loving one, and I have a pretty good idea about what kinds of stimulation of children's minds can be beneficial at different ages. But to suppose that knowledge of the science is a foundation for training perfect parents is, to my mind, a dangerous way to go. 

Nowhere is this demonstrated more effectively than in Christina Hardyment's wonderful Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Ford. I read this book in its first, 1983 edition, and found myself wondering what Hardyment would have made of more recent attempts to construe parenting as a process that could be scientifically validated and enhanced. It was a pleasure, then, to see that the book was being reissued with additional material covering almost a quarter-century of new research. Hardyment's story starts with eighteenth-century attempts to turn Enlightenment ideas to use in child-rearing, guides us through a nineteenth-century fad for phrenology and the dawn of sustained scientific interest in developing minds, and concludes with a look at current oppositions between super-strict and ultra-liberal methods of baby control. By offering us such a broad historical sweep, Hardyment gracefully demonstrates how one generation's solemn orthodoxy becomes the next's flaky dogma. The long view points up the cycles and recurring patterns of thought on the subject, and inevitably makes us question how our own cherished beliefs about childcare will look from the perspective of the future. In her words, 'techniques of handling children have not made the steady progress towards improvement that some historians of childhood assert: they have always been tailored, sometimes attractively, sometimes unpleasantly, to suit the times.'

Of particular interest to me is Hardyment's tracing of the influence of certain key cognitive-developmental theorists. Alongside Freud, Hardyment rates the work of Jean Piaget as the greatest influence on the Spock-era baby manuals that held sway after the Second World War. As much as they were concerned with physical and moral development, parents were concerned that their charges should keep up intellectually, and Piaget had by far the most complete theory of cognitive development on offer. His views on the development of the object concept, for example, led to suggestions that object permanence could be trained by peekaboo games and other adventures in object occlusion. If intellectual development was a process, it was a process that could be speeded up. The flashcard parent was born. 

 

I have plenty of time for Piaget's theories, but translating them into childcare prescriptions misses the point of his claims about the logical ordering of certain cognitive advances. The developing brain requires stimulation, but it needs to be targeted (for a neuroscientifically sound attempt to sketch out what this might mean for parents, I recommend Lise Eliot's What's Going On In There? How the brain and mind develop in the first five years of life). Efforts to boost input beyond what is naturally available are likely to be fruitless, if not actually harmful. Science deals in generalities, while parents have to get to know particular children with their own particular combinations of personality traits and cognitive biases. There is also something profoundly unscientific in claiming that a certain technique for toilet-training or sleep control has 'worked', rather than having simply coincided with a developmental change which would have happened anyway. The truth is that the large-scale, scientifically rigorous studies that would prove the efficacy of such techniques have for the most part not been done, and may never be. All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why I was so concerned not to try to write a parenting manual. Such books often patronise parents, while playing on their anxieties about being seen to be active co-travellers in the miraculous journeys that their children are embarked on. If Athena and Isaac did turn out all right, it is not me who should be puffing up with pride.  

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