ABSTRACT
Parents are continually told how difficult parenting is – ‘the toughest thing anyone faces in their personal life’, writes former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in the Sun newspaper (Blair 21 November 2006) – and how likely they are to mess up if they don’t seek expert advice. During a stay at a Thai boxing camp in Thailand a fellow boxer told me he was put into care as a toddler. He wondered whether his mother’s alcoholism was likely to have damaged him, ‘because they say the first three years make you who you are, don’t they?’ Well, they do say that – but that doesn’t make it true. Infant determinism – the idea that who we are is determined by
experiences in the first years of our lives – is all-pervasive. Back in 1997 Hillary Clinton, then First Lady of the United States, drew on developments in neuroscience to set the tone for the popular debate. At a White House conference she asserted that experiences in infancy are responsible for the development of ‘capacities that will shape the entire rest of their lives’, and will ‘determine how their brains are
wired’. Experiences in the first three years, said Clinton, ‘can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached parents themselves’ (Clinton 4 February 1997). In 2004 the psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt argued in her much feted
book Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain that there is no such thing as a ‘difficult baby’, there are only ‘difficult parents’, who are either ‘neglectful’ or ‘intrusive’. She warned that a lack of parental sensitivity in infancy will create problems when the child grows up – limiting the ability to respond to stress in adulthood, and increasing susceptibility to conditions such as depression, addiction and anorexia (Gerhardt 2004). Gerhardt writes: ‘There is something powerful about the earliest themes of our lives, which chaos theory may help to explain. It suggests that small differences at the beginning of a process can lead to hugely different outcomes’ (Gerhardt 2004: 15). And if, as we are constantly reminded, the world is full of neglectful
parents, the consequences are potentially disastrous. ‘Health workers on home visits frequently report seeing mothers with a baby in one hand and a mobile phone in another, or failing to make eye contact with their suckling infant because they’re simultaneously checking their e-mail or watchingOprah on TV,’ Sue Palmer writes inToxic Childhood (Palmer 2006: 111). Oliver James, clinical psychologist and media pundit similarly
argues in They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life that people are the victims of their childhood experiences (James 2002). Drawing on Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘This be the verse’ (‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you’) James argues that everything from addiction, personality disorder, violence and criminality, neurosis and hyperactivity can be traced back to the type of care received by a child between the ages of six months and three years. James’s book provoked something of a backlash, maybe because he
went a bit too far in attacking parents for most people’s liking. When the book was published, in September 2002, James ended up in a
bitter row with Steven Pinker, US neuroscientist and popular science writer. James accused Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, of promoting a ‘wicked’ argument by downplaying the impact of our upbringing on our lives, giving the ‘perfect excuse to be violent to children’ (as if there are all these people who are just waiting for the right excuse to beat their children). Judith Rich Harris, author of The Nurture Assumption, jumped to Pinker’s defence – pronouncing that James’s parents must have done a bad job in bringing him up, and that ‘certainly, he sounds fucked-up, like his book’. This must have been particularly wounding for James, who prides himself on the fact that his parents went through years of psychoanalytic treatment to ensure they were good enough to raise their kids. The crux of James’s argument is that our emotional attachments in
the first years of our lives shape all our future relationships, as well as our sense of self. The only way any of us can survive a less than perfect upbringing, he argues, is through years of psychotherapy or drug treatment. Not everybody agreed with that argument, either. In a British Medical Journal review of James’s previous book, Britain on the Couch: Why we’re Unhappier Compared with 1950 despite being Richer, Simon Wessely, Professor of Epidemiological and Liaison Psychiatry at King’s College School of Medicine in London, threw cold water on the wonders of drug therapy: ‘Despite James’s enthusiasm, his knowledge of psychopharmacology is somewhat superficial … [B]elieving that serum serotonin levels tell us anything about central serotonin is like watching the sky in London to guess the weather in Sydney’ (Wessely 1998: 83). James also argues governments have a key role to play in improving
family life. For a start, he argues, policymakers should replace the obsession with economic performance indicators with greater measurement of the effect of government policy on mental health: ‘Every two years there should be a nationally representative audit … by which the government should be judged. This audit would include an evaluation of how parenting is faring in the light of government policy’ (James, 2002: 300). For New Labour to set such targets would be entirely in character –
and there is certainly no shortage of government initiatives to try to
improve the nation’s parenting skills. One can only wonder whether a parent getting lower-than-estimated grades would have recourse to a re-mark. Although, how one could measure the ‘success’ in improving such an intimate aspect of life as family relationships is anybody’s guess. Much of James’s book is rehashed pop psychology: conjecture pre-
sented as authoritative fact. Take his claim that ‘offspring of families with five or more children are significantly more likely to be delinquent and to suffer mental illness’ (James 2002: 4). Why? Because there is not enough love to go round. That’s me (and my four siblings) screwed, for a start. Or take his claim that:
[A]t least as big a determinant as gender of the role in which your parents cast you in the family drama is your place in the family, known as birth order … [F]irstborn children are more likely to be self-assured, assertive, competitive and dominant compared with lastborns.
