Gabor Maté | Parenting, Attachment Styles, Mother Child Bond | Ep. 164

The environment that we raise kids is so much different than it was in times of the past where there was a community, there was elders, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, there was a whole community. And so now you get one or two, hopefully, people that are imprinting or projecting their own patterns onto you and what they think is good or normal. And in the past, there used to be 20. How big of a problem is that? Well, you just summarized several chapters of my book. So there's a story I like to tell that I read recently. In my book, The Myth of Normal, I quote a psychologist, her name is Darcia Narvaez, and she now retired as a professor at Notre Dame University. And she studied hunter-gatherer groups and indigenous people, how they parent. And they parented exactly the way you described. In communities, children had many parents. I mean, they knew their biological parents and had a special relationship with them, but they were really parented by the whole community. So they felt very safe, very contained, very connected. That's how you evolved as human beings. And we lived that way for hundreds of thousands of years. Almost a blink of an eye, really. In modern society, the separation is getting worse and worse and worse. Darcia has just written a new book, which will be published next year, for which I wrote the foreword. And it's called The Evolved Nest. And The Evolved Nest is the context in which we evolved as human beings. And she compares us to other animals. So the story that I love in her new book, which is out next year, you know, when an elephant mother gives birth, you know what happens? This is incredible. So when the mother elephant goes into labor, all the other mothers stand in a circle. And when the newborn hits the ground, they all stroke the newborn with their trunks. So birth itself was a communal experience. And that's certainly meant to be the way it is for human beings. So in the book, I have a chapter on prenatal experiences. We know already that stresses on pregnant women translate into stress on the baby in a way that changes the baby's physiology and brain development affects it in negative ways, in ways that you can trace decades later. Now, how well do we look after pregnant women? I mean, as a physician, I was trained to do the blood tests and the ultrasounds and the physical examinations, maybe talk about nutrition. Nobody ever suggested that I talk to a woman about her emotional states and how stressed she was, and what kind of support she's receiving. Then there's the birth process. And again, you know, I delivered a lot of babies as a physician. Thank God for modern obstetrics. So I'm not here to militate against the, you know, the miracles of modern medicine, but we've carried it way too far. We approach birth as a disaster waiting to happen. And we interfere with it, mechanize it, and lights and machines and noise. And we're actually interfering with the natural process that's meant to help the infant and the mother bond. And with our interference, we're actually already interfering with the mother-infant bond. Then there's the fact that in the United States, where we're speaking right now, I'm Canadian, but in the U.S. here, 25% of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. But that amounts to a massive abandonment of infants. So that infant, physiologically and emotionally, needs to be with their mom for much longer. We create the separation right from the beginning. Culture and society just honoring, working hard and sacrificing and just prioritizing everything other than, you know, children and well-being and mental health. It's all about status and money, keeping your job, getting a promotion. Well, my friend, I don't know if you know him, his name is Rafi. He's a children's singer. He's a world-famous children's troubadour. He sang at the first Clinton inauguration, and he's just a world-famous children's singer. Generations of kids have grown up singing his songs. And he was telling me that he was lying there in bed at night, maybe 10, 15 years ago. And all of a sudden, he sat up bolt upright, and his thought, child honoring, came into his head. And he said, what if there's a society that honors children? If we just ask ourselves, what does it take to create a world that honors the real needs of children? We would do everything differently. The foods we sell kids or the products that, you know, we wouldn't be pushing addictive devices on them at an early age. We wouldn't be separating from mothers at two weeks of age. Just that very question of what would it take to create a world that honors the needs of children. Turns out, that's how Aboriginal people, Indigenous people actually lived, is they lived in a way that honored children. Well, I know you've spoken so much about children and holding them when they're crying and taking care of their needs. So what is it that creates a securely attached child? Sure. Well, I think you told me you have dogs. Is that right? I do. What does it take to create a secure attachment to the dog? I just, yes, I actually just had something come through last night that was just honor what they want to do. Honor what they want to do. If she's picking my hand up, just pet her. If she drops the ball in front of me, throw the ball. Like, those are her loves and that's essentially her language. Well, so there's certain brain circuits that we share with all mammals, including dogs. Okay. Now, and those brain circuits, that's our biological, psychological nature, they dictate that children have certain essential needs, what I call irreducible needs, needs that if they're not met, they lead to a distorted development and lack of health. So what are the irreducible needs of children? They're not that different from the irreducible needs of other mammals. First of all, an attachment relationship with parents is absolutely secure, where the child is welcomed, that you are the person that we want. You are the person we want in this world. Secure attachment, unconditional. You don't have to be pretty. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be compliant. You don't have to be cute. You don't have to be clever. You're the one we want. That was the first one. The second point is within that relationship, the child has to be able to rest. By rest we mean, or I mean, or my psychologist friend who gave me this concept means the child shouldn't have to work to make the relationship work because the relationship should be unconditional. In a lot of homes, parents love their kids. It's not a question of do they love them, but if the parents are having stresses and problems, the child will very often take on the responsibility of trying to make it better by fitting in, by being nice, by being compliant, by suppressing their own feelings. This is typical in homes where there's alcoholism, by the way. The child will work to make the relationship work with the parent. So children need rest where they don't have to work to make the relationship work. The third need I have already mentioned, which is the freedom to experience all of our emotions and be held through those emotions. A lot of parents in this society, there's a lot of behavior psychologists and parenting so-called experts who tell parents when a child is angry, give them a timeout. In other words, what you do is you threaten the child with the loss of what's most important to them, which is that attachment relationship. And you say to them, this attachment is conditional. If you have emotions that I don't like, and if you manifest those emotions, you're going to be deprived of me, which is your biggest need. So then the child is in this dilemma. Okay, I'm a two-year-old frustrated, little angry little kid, as kids often are. But if I'm in my anger, my parents will reject me. That's not what the parent intends to do, but that's the effect of the timeout. So the child will then suppress themselves, disconnect them from themselves in order to maintain the relationship. So the third need is the freedom to feel all our emotions. The fourth one is what you mentioned about dogs. We have a need to play spontaneous, free play out there in nature. That's wired into our brains. Play, it turns out, according to all the research, is much more important for brain development than cognitive learning. So there's all this stuff with baby Einsteins and teaching kids, all this stuff early and video games to promote brain development. It's all nonsense. What promotes brain development is healthy, spontaneous play. That's why animals play. That's why your puppies play. That's why bear cubs play. In our society, we've almost totally deprived kids of spontaneous play. So when you say what it takes to develop a healthy child, meet those four conditions, and you'll have an emotionally healthy, balanced, connected, grounded, confident child.