How attachment shapes your childs long term mental health

We see an increase in attachment disorders. Attachment disorders have to do with how we raise our children in the first three years. The longitudinal studies show that when a child has an attachment disorder at 12 months, they have an attachment disorder 20 years later. What is an attachment disorder? An attachment disorder is when we don't provide our children with the emotional security in the first three years that lays down the foundation for their mental health for life. That foundation of being there physically and emotionally to soothe them when they're in distress from moment to moment is critical. Basically, you're dealing with a neurologically and emotionally fragile infant who is terrified of the world. The world is a terrifying, overwhelming, scary place. The only thing between that child and the abyss is that mother or father. It is funny, right? If you watch any National Geographic thing, you'll see the animal in the wild, the baby comes out and gets right on its legs and runs, and yet our kids come out like plants, like blobs. That's exactly right. They should be marsupial. Think about it that way, that in other parts of the world, mothers carry their babies on their body, first on the front, then on the back, but they make skin-to-skin contact with those babies for the first year until they can't carry them any longer. Then they always have them with them wherever they go, whatever they do, when they're working in the fields, if they're working at the co-op, where they sell fruits and vegetables, or in a store, their children are always with them. The idea is they're always within reach of that child to soothe them when they're in distress. Yes, there are other members of the community that are there to play with them and entertain them and be with them, but when that child is in distress, they go back to their primary attachment object. You could think of it as it's not just attaching to a baby, it's also reassuring the attachment for the first three years. The first year forms the attachment. The next two years reassure them of that attachment. We're not doing that. We're really not doing that in this country. We're not keeping our children close. We're not taking enough time off. We don't have a system in this country. This is the most uncivilized country in the world, other than Papua New Guinea, the only country that doesn't have a paid maternity leave, for at least a year. I don't mean that mothers shouldn't work or fathers shouldn't work. Well, this is the obvious question that comes out of this, right? When my wife gave birth, you know, we had some maternity leave and a little bit of paternity leave, and then she went back to work for about six months. And then this was her choice. She said, Lauren, I can't do this. And so, she left her career for years. And that was her choice. But it's a really hard pill for people to swallow to hear someone say, if you have a kid, that's probably the best thing. Is that what you're saying? I'm not the first person to say it. I'm just the loudest right now. Penelope Leach said it many years before me. She said, you know, anybody can have a child, but to care for a child, and she said, if you don't want to care for your child, stop having children. And I'm not that harsh, but I would say that it's not the having the children, it's the caring for them, particularly in that first thousand days that is critical to forming that emotional security and that foundation for their mental health. That doesn't mean that if you're there, and you give them everything, and they're emotionally secure, that stuff's not going to happen along the way. Because the reality is there's going to be adversity that comes, but there's a greater chance if you build in that security, if you build that foundation, and that when the adversity comes, it doesn't blow down the house. And what is the biggest adversity that's probably going to hit those kids other than things that you can't predict, like divorce or death of a parent or abuse or trauma? I mean, these are obvious things that are storms in a child's life. Adolescence. Normal adolescence is the biggest adversity. So, there's two critical periods of brain development, zero to three, and adolescence, which is nine to 25. We know that it starts earlier and ends later than we ever thought before. Nine to 25. Nine to 25. Pre-adolescence is nine to 13, middle adolescence is 14 to 18, and late adolescence is 18 to 25. And we know in that period, the part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex does not finish developing until 25. I've heard this more recently. So, one question is, has that always been true? Yes. So, this is not something that has like, we've gotten a little more mush-headed because we're suspending adolescence because we're wealthy, and so, oh, now you're a kid until you're 26. Like, that's not what's going on here? This is brain development. We always knew it, but we couldn't prove it until we had technology. And what's the technology that's made it provable? fMRIs, where you can actually see the activity of the brain, and you can see the development of the brain, and you can see that the certain parts of the brain are discrepant in development in adolescence, meaning certain parts of the brain develop faster than other parts of the brain, and the part of the brain that really gives us emotional regulation and balance and helps us to deal with adversity and stress is the prefrontal cortex. And so, that's not fully developed until 25. And so, in these two critical periods of development, you'd say the first three years is what we call neurogenesis. Lots of cell growth. By three years old, 85% of a child's right brain is developed. And the environment is critical to that development. So, parents say to me, if I wasn't there in the first three years, it's all lost. And I say, no, but a lot happened in those three years. We know that the environment is critical then, and then in the second critical window, the second critical window is a pruning stage. So, cell growth is as important as cell pruning. If you have too many cells, then you end up with a lot of problems. And so, these are the two periods where parents play a terrific role in that development. They help to architect the brain of their children just by their parenting styles, which is why I started doing this. Years ago, I worked in clinics, and I did therapy with families and children. I worked in a clinic with very poor families in Brooklyn, and all the therapy I was doing didn't seem to take. It was like throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it wouldn't stick until I started doing parents' psychoeducational parenting classes. And suddenly, the combination of helping parents to understand, well, understand what wasn't given to them that they needed to give to their children in combination with the therapy, that parent guidance piece, helped the spaghetti to stick to the wall. How did you know that? How did you know it wasn't sticking, and then it started to stick? They stopped showing symptoms and signs of stress. So, a lot of the disorders we see in children and adolescents are stress disorders. So, if you think about ADHD, there was a whole movement to take the D off of ADHD, because it's not a disorder. It's a stress response. It is the brain in fight or flight. It's the flight part. So, what we're seeing in very young children is that we're seeing increased aggressive behavior, which is the fight part, or we're seeing increased distractibility. Those are usually the first signs of trouble, either aggression in school or distractibility. And that's the first time that parents hear from the teachers in the school, there's a problem. They'll get a call from the school, and the school will say, your child is biting other kids. Your child is hitting or pushing other kids. Or they'll hear, your child is distracted and can't sit still. And so, that is the fight or the flight. Call it a stress response. So, instead of us as a society wanting to look at these children and saying, why is this child stressed? We just want to medicate them. We just want to medicate them and shut down their pain and not see their pain. Because in the end, for parents, it works because they don't have to look at themselves. The truth is that whenever a child has an issue, it is the parents that have the issue, with rare exception. That's hard to hear as a parent, right? It is. It is. I'm the parent of bad news. It's like, I don't want to. So, when my kid's suffering from anxiety, it's my fault? Is that what you're saying? It's not about fault. It's trying to understand the connections between things. Again, to understand the connections and to take responsibility is the only way you can help your child. There is no treating a child in therapy if you don't treat the parents as well. Without parent guidance, child therapy does not work. That's because if you treat a child and you send them back into the same environment, it does nothing for that child. You must change the environment. What about genetics? I understand that we're not born blank slates. I don't know any parent that could possibly believe such a thing. We are not born blank slates. We come with a genetic predisposition, but the whole field of epigenetics. So, my books integrate things like attachment research and epigenetics research. So, for anybody who likes research, it's research put into layman's terms, both books. But epigenetics is basically the idea that we're born with a certain genetic makeup, but then the environment plays a role in turning on those genes. So, there was a piece of research So, these are like default switches, basically? Yes. So, there was a piece of research that came out. Without that piece of research, I couldn't have written the first book. They found a gene for sensitivity to stress. There is no gene for depression and anxiety. No gene. There's a gene for schizophrenia. There's a gene for bipolar disorder. There's no gene for depression and anxiety. But there is a gene for sensitivity to stress. It's the short allele on the serotonin receptor. We need to be able to pick up serotonin in our brain to be happy, to feel joy, to feel balanced, right? Certain kids are born with a short allele, so they can't pick up the serotonin. So, the research found that when a child who's born with that sensitivity, and you know you have a sensitive child, and you certainly know if you have more than one child, because you'll say, oh, Jimmy was such a good baby, you know, never cried, was calm, was, you know, accepted the loving and the soothing. And then there was Bobby. And Bobby was, from the moment he came out, he cried all the time. He was hard to soothe. He had eczema on his skin. He was, right, he was very clingy. So, Bobby was more sensitive than Jimmy, right? That genetic sensitivity, the research showed that when Bobby was given sensitive empathic nurturing and had the emotional and physical presence of his primary attachment figure in that first year, Bobby had as good a chance of developing as a healthy little boy as Jimmy did. But if Bobby, who was sensitive, was denied that sensitive empathic nurturing, then Bobby would go move towards mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and attentional deficit. So, we can see there is evidence to show that epigenetics plays a role. You can be born with a genetic temperament, but if the environment counters that, if it's a sensitive empathic nurturing environment, it can actually even counter the genes you're born with. If you like this clip, you should check out the full video and all the other great content we've got at Dad Saves America. So, be sure to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring that bell so you won't miss our new stuff as it drops each week.