by Peg Streep
What’s extraordinary about the results of the “Visual Cliff” isn’t just that one-year-olds seek out and react to the emotions their mothers express, but that they rely on them sufficiently to override their own sensory perceptions about what is safe and what is dangerous. That’s called total trust; after all, the baby doesn’t know the drop isn’t real.
This and other experiments revealed that an infant is hardwired to use her mother’s expressions, tones of voice, and behaviors as her lodestar for navigating life, long before she understands words or the complexity of the world. It’s a process that appears to begin even before birth: One study showed that the heart rates of near-term babies in utero increased when tapes of their mothers reading poems were played and slowed when they were played a tape of a stranger’s voice. Babies are born recognizing their mothers’ voices, can distinguish them from other female voices, and can identify their mothers by smell. Infants as young as five days old undergoing a neonatal heel pinprick can even derive comfort from smelling the scent of their mothers’ breast milk. They have been shown to self-soothe faster and cry less than babies exposed to the scent of a stranger’s breast milk or formula undergoing the same pinprick. Another experiment showed that a mother’s voice calmed and stopped agitated motor movements in babies one to four days old.
Because it takes a human infant so long to reach maturity and take care of herself—compared to a newt or duckling or fawn, say—evolution has assured that she is exquisitely sensitive to her mother, adept at “reading” her cues in the most subtle ways. That is not, as we’ll see, always a bonus, since evolutionary adaptation is focused on aiding survival in times of stress, not necessarily on fostering psychological wellbeing. Adaptation, it turns out, is a yin/yang thing.
Notably, there’s no parallel evolutionary development of responsiveness in human mothers; there’s only the reproductive equipment to bear a child and produce breast milk, a mix of hormones, but not an innate ability to nurture or love. In truth, elephants are more instinctually suited to mother well than humans. This is perhaps unnerving news for most people, who like to believe that being a “good mother” is something that comes naturally and automatically.
In fact, some infant and toddler behaviors appear to have evolved with the absence of hardwiring of mothers’ love taken into account. To make sure that mothers don’t forget their babies—either in the fields during hunter-gatherer times or at the mall or in a car seat today—the infant’s cry is pitched in such a way to get the attention of the adult brain. That’s why you can’t sleep through that baby’s wail on a crowded plane—even though it’s not yours and you may not even be a parent. A study by Katie Young and Christine Parsons showed that the more primitive parts of the brain were activated by the sound of an infant’s cry within 100 milliseconds—yes, that’s one tenth of a second. Basically, that means that your brain is on high alert before you’ve even consciously registered the cry. And if you’re wondering, none of that happens when adults sob, dogs bark, or cats meow.
And it gets even more interesting. Consider whining, for example. Why whine, scientists asked? Why not grunt or wheeze or yell? Like that high-pitched infant cry, the pitch and modulation of the whine are much more effective than other sounds in terms of intruding into and penetrating a mother’s consciousness. In fact, the whine—as shown in a study by Rosemarie Sokol Chang and Nicholas S. Thompson—was the most effective way of distracting participants so that they couldn’t even perform the simplest of subtraction tasks.
So babies are not just hardwired to need their mothers’ attention and love but also come equipped with behaviors that make it hard for their mothers to ignore them; you can think of infants as heat-seeking missiles, in search of love, protection, and attunement. This is why, if your connection to your mother has been fraught, difficult, or downright damaging, a very big part of you still wants and needs her love, no matter what. There doesn’t appear to be an expiration date on that need either.
More than half of the time, children get what they need to thrive and to explore the world with a reliable person—their mother—as a safe home base. This is called “secure attachment,” a psychological construct first proposed by John Bowlby and later expanded by his student Mary Ainsworth. It was Ainsworth’s experiment, the “Strange Situation,” that shed new light on the mother’s power and influence, and her ability to shape how her child connected to the world at large, not just in childhood but also throughout life.
APPRECIATING THE “STRANGE SITUATION”
Ainsworth’s line of inquiry went beyond the automatic responses supplied by evolutionary hardwiring and looked at how the infant’s experiences with her mother shaped her innate responses. What she discovered would revolutionize not just the understanding of the extraordinary and lasting influence a mother has on her offspring but would also shine a bright light on why some individuals are able to forge close and sustaining emotional connections and others aren’t.
The “Strange Situation” was a series of staged encounters, beginning with the mother and child coming into the unfamiliar lab room. The mother would sit back as the child played and explored the room. Then a stranger would enter, speak to the mother, and approach the infant; while the baby was distracted, the mother would leave the room. The child would realize her mother was gone, and the stranger would interact with the child. Afterward, the mother would return and comfort the child, while the stranger left. The mother would again exit, and the child would be alone in the room. The stranger would enter and respond to the child. Finally, the mother would return, pick up the infant, and the stranger would exit inconspicuously.
Ainsworth hypothesized that, deprived of her mother, the child would go through reliable stages of response—that her mother’s presence would make her feel safe enough to explore an unfamiliar place, that distress and protest would be the response to her mother’s disappearance, that she’d show predictable wariness of the stranger when she was alone with her, and that she’d be calmed by her mother’s return. And that’s precisely what happened with more than half of the babies.
But significant numbers of children—more than 30 to 40 percent of them—behaved in ways that were highly unexpected. Some of the babies derived no comfort from their mothers’ presence in the unfamiliar room and didn’t try to explore. Some didn’t react when left alone with the stranger and displayed little affect when their mothers returned. Others showed distress when their mothers left, but then either ignored their mothers when they came back or actively pushed them away. Still others cried and fussed even after their mother came back, wailing as they clung to her.
What made the quality of these connections so different? What, if anything, had taken place between mother and child in the past so that the behaviors typical of the securely attached were supplanted by other patterns? What happens when a baby doesn’t get what she needs?
If you’re reading this book because you are an unloved daughter (and the odds are good that you believe you are), you already have emotional knowledge of what not getting what you need from your mother feels like. But few of us understand the full impact an unloving mother has. To recover from the wounds of childhood, we have to be able to see them first. To start, let’s look at the science that explains, in part, how you were affected by your experiences in infancy and early childhood.
NAMING THE PROBLEM
I spent my childhood and most of my early adulthood trying to get my mother’s attention. I was an only child, but you can forget that coddled, fussed-over thing. My mom ignored me literally. I tried everything I could to please her and get her to see me, but she never did. She still doesn’t .
~Lydia, 37
Ainsworth began to see consistent patterns in maternal behavior that produced relatively reliable responses in their infants, and called these children “insecurely attached.” Within that grouping, she distinguished between those who were “avoidantly attached” and those who were “ambivalently attached”; her student Ma
ry Main later added a third category, “disorganized attachment,” which results from physical abuse and extreme neglect. These categories aren’t the result of hardwiring but of experience, and they influence the child’s development in profound and lasting ways.
The interactions between the infant and her mother shape the infant’s developing brain and her ability to self-regulate and calm herself; it’s a dyadic dance as the responsive mother reads her child’s cues—her facial expressions, her vocalizations, her movements—and gives her what she needs in the moment. The securely attached child has her needs reliably and regularly answered; she is comforted when she’s afraid, held when she feels lonely, fed when she’s hungry, soothed when she’s overtired, given space when she needs to calm down, and feels safe enough to explore a room away from her mother’s side. She seeks proximity when she needs it, but as she gets older, she also becomes confident in herself. Her mother is attuned to her and she, in turn, will become attuned to the changes in her mother’s expressions and gestures.
This interaction shapes behavior and the development of the infant’s brain. The latest neuroscience confirms that brain development is both a function of programming and of environmental influence, the most important of which is the mother/caregiver relationship to the infant. When a mother is attuned and the child is securely attached, development proceeds in an optimal fashion.
But insecure attachment produces different results in infant behaviors, the brain, and the ability to self-regulate. Unless the mother’s early behaviors are caused by something temporary—she initially suffers from postpartum depression from which she recovers, she has an illness that affects her behavior, which is then treated—they are likely to remain consistent. What begins in her daughter’s infancy continues through her early and middle childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood, unless there is some kind of therapeutic intervention or change in awareness .
Remember that the child comes with the heightened ability to sense her mother’s reactivity; we can thank evolution for that, since the baby’s survival depends in a very literal way on this one person. Avoidant and ambivalent attachments are the baby’s way of dealing with a mother who is either never emotionally present or attuned, or sometimes there and sometimes not, but never in the right balance. Rather than experience stress every time her mother doesn’t respond to her or overresponds to her, the baby distances herself by either avoiding contact with her mother (this is avoidant attachment) or responds ambivalently because her mother’s responses have, in the past, been unreliable.
Do babies experience stress? You bet. Another famous experiment—this one called the “Still Face”—demonstrates not only how desperately a baby needs her mother’s love and attunement but also the cascade of emotions and efforts released in the baby when her needs aren’t met. Originally conducted more than 40 years ago by Edward Z. Tronick and his colleagues, the results have been successfully replicated many times over by different experimenters and make it clear how truly stressful it is for a baby not to get a response from her mother.
When it was first published in 1978— accompanied by a then novel video of the interaction—this experiment made quite a splash, demonstrating that an infant, even as young as four or five months, could be an active participant in interactions, instead of existing solely as a small being on whom the mother projected feelings and responses. In the video, the experimenters first have the mother interact with the child, making eye contact, smiling, and talking; the child responds with smiles, vocalizations, wiggling in her seat, and pointing her finger at various things in the room. She is thoroughly and deliciously engaged. Then the mother turns away and the baby looks up to see a frozen, impassive, unsmiling face. At this point, the baby is still game, and she starts doing all the things Mommy normally reacts to—smiling, waving her arms, pointing, vocalizing—but the face stays the same.
What happens next is both amazing and heartbreaking in its own way: The infant starts to fret, turning away from the still face, protesting with her arms, and finally beginning to wail. If you watch the video, you witness a meltdown in progress, as the baby literally slumps in her chair. Only at the end, when the smiling mommy reappears—this is an experiment, after all—does the infant begin to calm down. She doesn’t return to her earlier level of connection, though, so it appears she hasn’t forgotten. If she were able to talk, she might say, “Yay, my mommy’s back! Boy, that was scary. I don’t know if it will happen again, but I hope it doesn’t.”
But imagine if this were the baby’s daily experience, a pattern of either a mother with a consistently still face, one who ignored her baby’s cues consistently, or one who switched back and forth from lack of response to intrusive responses. (Yes, one pattern yields avoidant attachment and the other ambivalent.)
In one of his articles, Edward Tronick has us imagine a game of peek-a-boo as played by an attuned and loving mother who is watching her child’s responses. She’ll understand when the play gets too intense and the baby pulls back—averting her gaze and sucking on her thumb—that she’s trying to self-regulate. That mother pauses for a moment, allowing the baby space, looking at and talking to her, and then, when the baby’s ready, continuing their play. On the surface, this is just a game of peek-a-boo, but in fact, this is an ongoing conversation and a teaching moment in which the mother enables her child to begin to regulate emotion. “Too wound up?” her gestures ask, and then she provides the solution: “That’s okay. Just take a moment.” These interactions, as we’ll see, provide the lay-down for neural patterns in the infant’s brain and are the building blocks for what will, over time, become mental models of how relationships work, as well as the first seeds for the growth of emotional intelligence.
In contrast, there’s the unattuned mother who initiates the game and then, seeing the baby withdraw, moves her face closer to the baby’s face and starts clucking her tongue, trying to get the baby’s attention even as she is turning away. The baby starts fussing, and may even push the mother away with her hands, but the mother doesn’t stop; she’s not paying attention to the infant’s cues. The more the mother intrudes, the more the baby retreats, physically and emotionally, and by the end, the baby is staring out into space. This isn’t just a failed game of peek-a-boo but a failure of communication that, if it is a consistent pattern of interaction, will have a real impact on how the daughter develops.
The “Still Face” experiment, in all of its variations, gives us insight into how both the mother and her baby participate in these early communications, and how formative they are in terms of the baby’s development. Of course, only one person in the dyad has the power to change the interaction and, yes, that’s the mother, not the so-called “cranky” or “unresponsive” baby.
Most important, the “Still Face” experiment permits us to see why some children become avoidant or ambivalent in their attachments. Of course, it’s not possible for a mother to be “on” and attuned all the time, no matter how loving she is. These interactions aren’t scripted, humans are decidedly imperfect, and yes, exchanges can get messy at times. But as Tronick and others assert, it’s the mother’s ability to repair mistakes in the interactive process that matters.
Here’s an example, adapted from Tronick, which has special resonance for me because my own daughter was an inveterate hair-puller and, boy, it not only hurt but it was a true test of my own ability to manage my emotions. Imagine me on the floor playing with my baby. Suddenly, my daughter leans forward, grabs a hunk of my hair, and pulls hard. My reaction is swift and reactive: I scream, “Ow,” my face contorts in pain and anger, signaling a threat to my little girl, and I unthinkingly swat her hand away. My daughter lets go and puts her hands in front of her face, as if ducking a blow. I rub my scalp, then look back at my baby, and start the work of repair—reaching out to her, making soothing sounds, coaxing her to reconnect. It takes a few minutes—there’s been a breach in communication, after all—but my daughter begins to smile and move ba
ck toward me.
But what I took pains to do isn’t the only possible scenario, of course. Imagine the mother totally losing it—growling and screaming at the baby or, even worse, hitting her or pulling her hair “to teach her a lesson.” The mother gets up off the floor, still angry, and pays no attention at all to the baby’s reactions. There’s no effort at repair.
In the course of a day, a week, or a month, there are many opportunities for mother-child interactions to go slightly awry or totally off track and, equally as many opportunities for reunion and reattunement. The power to fix things, though, remains totally in the mother’s hands. Lest you think that there’s a certain amount of reading-in on Tronick and his colleagues’ part—infants can’t tell us what they’re thinking or feeling, after all—it’s useful to look at another experiment involving the “Still Face,” this time conducted with toddlers who were two and a half. Developmentally, these children were light years ahead of the babies, aged two to twelve months, originally studied; not only did they speak but they knew about standards of behavior—how they and other people are supposed to act.
The responses of toddlers to the “Still Face” were variations on the theme seen with much younger infants, validating the earlier findings and quelling criticisms that the researchers were projecting emotions onto infants. Confronted with their mothers’ unresponsive faces, these toddlers tried various strategies—addressing Mom in a louder and louder voice (maybe she isn’t answering because she didn’t hear me?), waving a toy or object in her face (Mom, are you awake?), even tugging at her in frustration. And like the infants, when all of their efforts to get things back on track failed, the toddlers turned their backs on their mothers, choosing to avoid contact rather than experience the cascade of negative feelings that ensues from being shut out. It’s in this way that avoidant behavior becomes the default setting when a mother is unresponsive.