a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In the Globe and Mail this morning, there is a report on deliberations in Ottawa about maternity and paternity leaves and how long they should be. For me, as an American, it is amazing to observe the terms of the debate.  Some controversial scientific research is being reviewed to consider whether parental leaves over the guaranteed time appreciably help infants’ developments. The guaranteed 52 week leave for mothers and fathers to divvy up between themselves is not in question. The research on benefits to children of longer leaves  “that has been done is inconsistent at best, and its largely because it’s very complex and challenging to assess,” says one professor. At the center of the discussion is a court case concerning a couple whose twins were born 5 weeks premature. Their parents received a year-long leave, their father  wants an extension so he can continue to help care for the little girls.

It is certainly noteworthy that this debate assumes that parental leave (and job security) for a year is  crucial and should be part of the government’s insurance scheme. And it assumes that reliable science has established the benefits of the leave now guaranteed. In America, we have not gotten to step one: realizing that reliable Child Development science exists. This is one of the main reasons why we have regular outbreaks of controversy over what infants and children need and no agreement at all about our society’s responsibility for helping to see that those needs are met  “in the best interests of children” and of their caretakers. The whole question of how children’s needs should be met, and whether by parents alone or by communities and governments, remains explosive, no matter whether we are in a period of expansive government or a period like the present one of rising hatred of government “interference” in family life. Amidst the explosiveness, people write books on parenting practices –like The Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother that I referred to in my last post—that are purely self-indulgent and partisan. They are either ignorant of the science or hostile to it .

Our American situation is deeply frustrating to our best Child Developmentalists, as it was in 1971 when the Comprehensive Child Development Act was vetoed by Richard Nixon. That is one reason why a summary of the existing science was offered in 2000, when Congressional conservatives, with President George W. Bush in the lead, were gearing up for the No Child Left Behind legislative push. The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have To Grow, Learn and Flourish was co-authored by America’s best known writer on child-raising since Dr. Spock, the neonatologist and child psychiatrist T. Berry Brazelton of Harvard University and Stanley Greenspan, a psychoanalytic clinician and founding president of the Zero To Three Foundation, which (as its mission statement says) “informs, trains, and supports professionals, policymakers and parents in their efforts to improve the lives of infants and toddlers.”  Through the preceding thirty years, both of these clinicians had worked in the psychoanalytic developmentalist tradition, which had been so influential in shaping the Comprehensive Child Development Act as well as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In their book, the authors were as literal as they could be about their “every child.”  Formulating seven needs that “every child” has and should have met by family and community, they ranged like anthropologists across child-raising practices all over the world, considering the diverse circumstances in which children are born and live. Although many of their specific recommendations were aimed at American two-parent families of the middle class, their framework draws on their world-traveler experience, on a huge store of data from others’ reports, and on their clinical experience to consider actual children growing, learning and flourishing. Their goal was to formulate generally –taking cultural differences and national histories into account–the range of practices and attitudes that have been good for children, meeting their developmental needs. With that reference, they considered prevention of the whole range of what is not good for children (including all kinds of child abuse).

For Dr. Brazelton, The Irreducible Needs of Children was a natural continuation of work he had done since the early 1970s when he and his Boston colleagues published The Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS), which is now used all around the world, in very diverse cultures, by trainees of the Brazelton Institute. The scale assumes that newborns universally, in any cultural situation, have basic developmental tasks that they need to be able to fulfill in order to get off to a good start on what Anna Freud called the  “developmental lines.”  To help children, mature adult caretakers need to be able to tune into the baby–in the first language the baby speaks, which is bodily. Each newborn is unique (and already at birth about nine months old and a going concern), able to make choices and communicate needs, so it is crucial for adults to be able to recognize and attend to each baby’s unique way of fulfilling a universal inborn maturational and developmental program. The children in this book are not passive lumps of clay to be shaped or blank slates to be written on or completely helpless beings to be handled and trained into robotic conformity.  Not property, not servants, they are also not in any way the empty, bad, wild, or originally sinful beings that childist projections and stereotypes have made them out to be.

The first of every child’s seven “irreducible needs” is for loving, attentive dialogue with its caretakers, which Anna Freud’s In the Best Interests of the Child had described as “unbroken continuity of affectionate and stimulating relationships with at least one adult.”  The second need is for physical protection, safety, and regulation.  Protection from child abuse and neglect is a specific need under this rubric. But the authors also write about protective regulation against all kinds of things that can constitute “chaos” in a child’s environment. They range from too much television viewing on to too many environmental toxins and too much exposure to domestic violence and war (or street war or culture war) conditions.  “Chaos” is a helpful general term that has the advantage of implying both quantities and qualities: it points to degrees on a continuum from too little to too much stimulation, while it questions which stimulations are appropriate and which not.

In their third chapter on “Experiences Tailored to Individual Differences,” the authors make a case for avoiding standardized or over-ritualized child-rearing and educating. For example, they make a strong, politically courageous objection to the standardized testing and standardized education that have now become normal in American schools, supported most recently by the No Child Left Behind educational policy that passed over their objections and is now up for renewal. “Simply doing more of what has not been working will not prove helpful, nor can you teach a child simply by testing him.”

Raising the crucial question “is testing in the best interests of children?” the authors answer that it is not because testing is about failing and being tracked according to failure. Children are shamed by such an approach, not encouraged. Standardized testing does not aim at what the authors call “mastery,” which would point a child in the direction of improvement and indicate what individualized help the child may need to improve. So they urge schools, teachers, and parents to meet each child’s individual way of actively relating to the world and learning with calm guidance and modeling to address both the child’s strengths and weaknesses.

In their chapter on the fourth need, “Developmentally Appropriate Experiences,” the authors argue that adults should provision each child with an emotional and intellectual environment that is appropriate to the child’s developmental stage. They get quite specific: recommending, for example, that for healthy development of their brains, children under three should not be allowed to be in front of a television for any more than half an hour a day, as school children should not be asked to spend so much time on homework that they are not able to enjoy family activities, to play with their peers, or to get involved in sports activities, and so forth. The specificity of their recommendations can certainly be debated, but the principle is clear:  children should not be presented with only one kind of activity, especially not one inappropriate to their developmental stage, isolating them from others, and promoting passivity. This is the basic developmental reason why schooling needs to be diversified and why child labor, particularly in mono-task sweatshops, was and still is so bad for children.  It should never be the case that a country abolishes child labor only to replace it with child schooling-labor.

In “The Need for Limit Setting, Structure, and Expectations,” the authors take another strong and courageous stand when they encourage good parental modeling and discourage corporal punishment.  “Physical discipline, such as hitting or spanking a child is no longer an acceptable alternative to discipline. Discipline means teaching, not punishment.” Good modeling can only be offered by parents who are calm and not harassed or exhausted –much less ill, addicted, or desperately poor-and who are not trying to produce trophy-children. So Dr. Brazelton recommends, for example, that those who are working parents set up and consistently maintain a daily routine of spending time with their children as soon as they get home. “I feel strongly about recommending to working parents that they set up a homecoming ritual in which everybody gets close all over again. Then they are ready to play a disciplinary role. But not until then.”  Children should be encouraged to participate in family limit-setting to the degree that they are developmentally able to. As Dr. Greenspan says: “When families brainstorm together on what the consequences are going to be for not doing what you are supposed to do, then everyone becomes a participant in setting down the rules. An atmosphere where there are expectations, structure, and limits appropriate to a child’s age and level is necessary for … basic security…”

“Stable Communities and Cultural Continuity,” the sixth need, asks parents to take a larger part in school and community governance, but it also acknowledges that parents themselves need the support of communities (including the support of child support, income and safety nets of the sort the Canadians have set up).  The authors are quite clear that children should not be asked to parent their parents, going against the natural order of care-taking. Parents should get their needs for being helped and supported met in the community, by other adults. Parents, teachers and child services workers –all who care for children–must co-operate, help each other, and neither compete nor shift blame onto each other for any problems that arise as a child grows up and moves among the arenas that the various adults oversee.

These six needs are set in the context of the seventh and most general need articulated in The Irreducible Needs of the Child, which is for  “Protecting the Future.” Adults are asked to keep in mind not just their own children, or their community’s children, or American children, but all children–the “every child” of their title. “Throughout the world future generations of children and families will be much more interrelated. In order to protect the future for one child, we must protect it for all.” They do not explicitly articulate the Aristotelian principle that adults must prioritize or make paramount the needs of their children over their own needs, the needs of the future adults over the needs of the present adults, but the principle is implicit in what they do say.

With the kind of broad cross-cultural developmental framework offered in The Irreducible Needs of the Child, parenting practices as well as policy proposals and specific pieces of legislation can be evaluated in terms of whether they meet these developmental needs or not. The child’s best interest can be defined as “to get these developmental needs met as well as possible.” Both in terms of political and legislative process and in terms of preventive public health policy, the positive goal is clear.

I’ve offered this book report on The Irreducible Needs of the Child because I think the parenting wars and the more general cultural war in which we live now, which is so destructive to our political culture, often induce the despairing idea that we have no principles over which we might come together. Principles are meeting places where particular decisions and practices can be discussed and debated and on-going research and thinking brought up for rational consideration.