Using science to freak out parents

Following the fall of the Ceausescu regime in Romania in 1989, hundreds of orphanages were discovered where children lived in appalling conditions. Isolated, starving, cold and medically uncared for, the children displayed evidence of considerable physical and mental problems. Many of the children lacked language and other cognitive skills and they engaged in repetitive, stereotyped behaviours such as rocking and biting themselves as well as more serious aggressive and disruptive outbursts. In Beyond the Sling, Bialik refers to the experience of these children as ‘accidental experiments’, providing, ‘concrete proof that children must have their needs responded to in order to flourish and reach their fullest potential’.

She goes on to argue that what the Romanian experience demonstrates is that children need a cognitively and emotionally rich environment in their first few years in order to develop into healthy adolescents and adults: ‘All of the psychological imprinting that goes on, all of the patterns they experience, the rhythms they move to, and the feelings they have even before they can speak, these are what makes your children the people they will be at 5, 10 and even at 15, 25 and 35.’

Bialik is certainly not the first commentator to draw sweeping and general conclusions from the plight of the Romanian orphans. Bruce Perry, for example, has also detailed the conditions in Romanian orphanages before stating that ‘recent inadvertent impacts of technology have spawned declines in extended families, family meals and spontaneous peer interactions’, which, he suggests, are ruining children everywhere (1). A raft of booklets and papers from the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child, including The Science of Early Childhood Development, make similar arguments. In the UK, there have been a slew of reports arguing for the importance of the first five years, using the dramatic examples from Romania as support. (See, for example, Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings, which features the brain of an orphan next to the brain of a normally raised child on its front cover.)

However, comparing the plight of Romanian orphans with the everyday experience of a typical infant is truly pernicious and dishonest. Placing an infant into a barred cot without access to any kind of toys, books, television, radio, another human being or any kind of stimulation beyond the immediate bars of the crib and bedding for 23 hours or more per day is not comparable to the day of a typical infant in a typical family. Evidence of emotional and cognitive problems in children deprived of emotional and cognitive input for most of every day for most of their first five years might be expected. Several reports confirm that children raised in such conditions have global cognitive impairment; several have severe behavioural problems and observable abnormalities in brain function and connection (2,3). But it is simply incorrect to imply that if severe deprivation causes severe problems then more benign neglect will cause less severe problems or to suggest that an enriched environment will provide benefits.

Take the development of memory as one example. Very young infants (less than three months) have almost no representational memory. That is, if you show a young infant an interesting toy and then hide it, the infant will not show further interest in the toy by gazing or reaching towards it. This lack of behavioural interest after the toy vanishes implies that the toy is not stored in memory. Beyond about three months, however, the infant starts to show behavioural interest and, as he matures, the infant will sustain a behavioural interest for longer. This implies that the infant is able to hold a stored representation of the toy (a representational memory) and that representation can be gradually sustained for longer (the memory store improves).

Anne Diamond and Patricia Goldman-Rakic carried out repeat testing of representational memory in young infants to track the development of representational memory (4). What they found was that infants who received repeat testing could sustain a memory for about 1.5 seconds longer compared with infants who were not repeat tested. The gain for the repeat-tested, or ‘enriched’ infants, was small and was not sustained past the first year of life – the infants who were not repeat tested caught up. Diamond and Goldman-Rakic concluded that memory develops at approximately the same rate regardless of ‘enrichment’.

Language development provides another example. It is known that newborns can detect and discriminate the basic sounds (phonemes) found in all human languages. By 10 months, however, infants respond preferentially to the phonemes particular to their native language. The necessary verbal input to generate this preference is unknown but one to two hours per day is generally considered sufficient and there is no evidence that using flashcards at three months of age or any other kind of enrichment provides any advantage in language development (5).

The comparison of orphaned infants with typical developing infants is also pernicious in another way. While it is true that the Romanian infants suffered extreme social deprivation, they also suffered extreme physical deprivation in the form of malnutrition, hypothermia and lack of adequate medical care. The malnutrition alone is sufficient to retard normal brain development, resulting in a smaller brain such as illustrated on the front cover of Early Intervention: Smart Investment, Massive Savings. It is likely that even with adequate cognitive and emotional care, but without sufficient food, warmth and medical care, the Romanian orphans would still have expressed cognitive and emotional deficits. To put that another way, the ‘accidental experiments’ from Romania did not include enough conditions for us to be sure of what caused what to happen. It could be that the infants suffered cognitively and behaviourally because they suffered physically.

Finally, the focus on children raised in such extreme conditions is pernicious in a further way: it implies that problems of development can never be rectified in later life. Many children from the Romanian orphanages were adopted into Western families. At the time of adoption, 70 to 90 per cent of the children had impaired cognitive ability and other serious developmental delays. Several years after adoption, however, those figures dropped to between 14 per cent and 36 per cent and almost every adopted child showed evidence of catch-up. That is not to say that all problems were overcome – many of the adopted children continued to have severe problems – but the extreme negative view that neglect, even the severe neglect experienced by Romanian orphans, cannot be overcome is not justified.

And if severely deprived children can catch up there is no reason to believe that typically developing children cannot overcome any minor neglect they may face in their early years. In 2011, a report was published demonstrating that 40 hours of video game playing can restore visual acuity in adults who had infant amblyopia (‘lazy eye’) (6). This finding was particularly exciting because it overturned the long-held belief that the adult brain lacks the plasticity to restore normal sensory function if that function was disrupted in childhood. And if basic sensory processing can be improved, then there is every reason to expect that cognitive and emotional function, which is inherently more plastic and adaptive, can improve and change as well.

Contrary to Bialik’s assertion, the first five years do not dictate the sort of person you will be at 10, 15, 25, 35 or any other age. Variation in parental outlook and methods – whether anxious or carefree, reading a lot or reading very little, permissive or authoritarian, and so on – is not a useful guide for how a child will turn out (7). And anyone can make positive changes in their life by learning a new language, working abroad, volunteering, etc, and discover aptitudes and skills they never had before. Regardless of what happens in the first five years of life, there are always opportunities and possibilities for further development. In short, Bialik does not provide a scientific case for attachment parenting because there is no scientific case for attachment parenting or any other type of parenting. Bialik does not use science, she abuses it.

Stuart Derbyshire is a reader in psychology at the University of Birmingham. He is co-producing and speaking at a session for the Battle of Ideas festival called Trust in Science.