Childhood Experience and the Expression of Genetic Potential: What Childhood Neglect Tells Us About Nature and Nurture

The attachment bond has several key elements: (1) an attachment bond is an enduring emotional relationship with a specific person; (2) the relationship brings safety, comfort, soothing and pleasure; (3) loss or threat of loss of the person evokes intense distress. This special form of relationship is best characterized by the maternal-child relationship. The maternal-child attachment provides the working framework for all subsequent relationships that the child will develop. A solid and healthy attachment with a primary caregiver appears to be associated with a high probability of healthy relationships with others while poor attachment with the mother or primary caregiver appears to be associated with a host of emotional and behavioral problems later in life. More than 85% of children removed from their parents for abuse or neglect have disturbed attachment capacity, for example (Carlson et al., 1989). The relationships between disordered attachment and increased risk for violent and aggressive behaviors are well documented (see Perry, 2001a[28]).

THE MODERN WORLD AND NEGLECT OF SOCIO-EMOTIONAL GROWTH

Healthy attachment capacity is not enough to create healthy socio-emotional functioning. Attachment is only one form of the many kinds of relationships we form to create a healthy productive life. Certainly a securely attached child will have an easier time forming friendships, relationships with teachers, coaches, siblings and, over time, in the work place and larger community. As the brain organizes and develops in response to patterned, repetitive experience, the nature, timing, intensity and quality of an array of other relationships in the developing child's life will make a difference in the development of complex socio-emotional development. Yet without the opportunities to have friends, teachers, coaches, grandparents, neighbors, team mates and the many other kinds of relationships of childhood, these capabilities remain unexpressed. And if a child starts with attachment problems and has few opportunities to develop other relationships, they will have very poor or even pathological socio-emotional functioning.

Figure 3. Decrease of number of persons living in a "household" in Western societies: From hunter-gatherer to the modern era. For more than 90 percent of human history we have lived in bands, clans or extended families of roughly 40 persons. In the West, by 1500 the average household had decreased to 20 persons; by 1850 to ten; in the United States to less than three persons in the average American household by 2000.

Our brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of generations in hominid and pre-hominid social groups. In these small hunter-gatherer bands a complex interactive dynamic socio-emotional environment provided the experiences for the developing child. At equilibrium in a group of fifty, there were three or more adult caregiving adults for every dependent child under age six. And there was little privacy. A dependent child grew up in the presence of the elderly, siblings, adults — related and not. There was a more continuous exposure and wider variety of socio-emotional interactions. The child in this situation had many opportunities to form relationships and, in a use-dependent way, develop the capacity to have a rich array of relationships. The genetic potential for healthy socio-emotional functioning — to be empathic, to share, to invest in the welfare of the community —is better expressed in children living in hunter-gatherer bands or extended families or close-knit communities in comparison with our compartmentalized modern world.

In this modern era, we separate from each other in many ways. The number of people we live with has shrunk (Figure 3); fewer than three people live in the average American household. And in our own homes, we have our own rooms. We rarely eat family meals.We spend thirty percent of our available time watching television — certainly not allowing for any use-dependent expression of an underlying genetic capacity for socio-emotional functioning. Our children are segregated with same age children for hours a day. In healthy homes the time a parent spends with older children is counted in minutes. We think a healthy ratio of adult caregiver to dependent child in our child care settings is one adult for five children — 1/16th the ratio in a hunter-gatherer clan. We have over-scheduled our children and they have little time for spontaneous social play with peers.