Link archives

Spring 2000

CUTTING THROUGH THE HYPE

The inside scoop on child development

New parents are always being "born" and they want to know the latest research on infants, toddlers, grade-school children, and adolescents. As a result, mass media—newspapers, magazines, television news programs, publishers of popular books, and now numerous Web sites—have developed an insatiable appetite for information on child development and psychology.

Reporters and writers from around the country repeatedly turn to the college and its nationally ranked experts in these areas for information. College faculty and staff also work to spread their knowledge through public conferences and symposia, professional training, and other outreach with parents and professionals who work with children and parents.

"I think all the public attention to these issues has changed my teaching."
—Alan Sroufe, professor

Recently we gathered faculty, staff, and alumni of the college and University who work with children and families to discuss the struggle of making research findings available to child development professionals, parents, and institutions in the midst of mass media attention that colors public perceptions and sometimes creates misperceptions.

Examples of events or research attracting high media attention that were mentioned during the discussion included the Clinton White House conference on infant brain development in 1997 featuring several celebrities including Hollywood director Rob Reiner, and Judith Rich Harris’ 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption, which announced parents don’t matter very much.

The discussion quickly became focused on the need to use the knowledge generated in research to truly improve the lives of children and families. Frustration arises, the participants said, when the research gets misinterpreted in the press or hijacked for political purposes, or when systems and institutions have the knowledge about how to best serve children and families yet still in their attempts to do so.

"But I see a huge chasm between the information we have about how important these early years are and the ability of the professionals in the system to apply any kind of consistent strategies for taking care of these kids."
—Sandra Hewitt, child psychologist

Sitting in on the discussion were: Sandra Hewitt (Ph.D., ’81, school psychology), a child psychologist who works extensively in the court  system with custody and foster care cases; Charles Nelson, professor, whose research focus is infant brain development; Kirsten Schoenleber (Ph.D., ’88, clinical psychology), a child psychologist at Children’s Hospital in St. Paul; Susan Schultz (Ph.D., ’81, social work), a Minneapolis clinician whose professional focus is with very young children and their families; Alan Sroufe, professor, whose work centers on attachment issues; David Walsh (Ph.D.,’85, counseling), director of the National Institute on Media and the Family; and Christopher Watson, coordinator in the Center on Early Education and Development (CEED), who does statewide outreach with childcare professionals and others in the early childhood field.

Does the media help or hinder?

Susan Schultz: Even with the inaccuracies that can happen in the media, I think if these stories—about brain development or infant-parent attachment or whatever— cause parents to come to us with questions, even distortions, about the science part, at least it starts a conversation. That’s good. It allows us as professionals to correct misinformation and opens the door to provide accurate information.

David Walsh: The science that gets reported ends up reinforcing some basic, good parenting and good grandparenting that we’ve known for years. Yes, sometimes what’s being reported is presented in extreme ways, but I don’t really hear of too many parents believing those extremes or acting on them.

Christopher Watson: Anything that opens up the conversation is good. On the other hand, some of this media hype about infant brain development, for example, leads to ridiculous stuff. If I see one more "Baby Mozart" CD at the airport, I’ll probably scream.

Alan Sroufe: I think all the public attention to these issues has changed my teaching. I’m trying to convey that the reason very early prenatal development is so important is because basic structures are being laid out and if those structures get messed up, that infant is not going to develop properly. The same thing applies to development of the personality. Early relationships probably are so important because that is when some core features of what will become personality get laid out. I want my students to understand, why would that be?

Charles Nelson: Professionals are extremely interested in this information, too. I’ve had audiences who are social workers, mental health workers, lawyers, district court judges who hear child protection cases. I’m pleased with their knowledge level and educated questions. I’ve been remarkably pleased with how the media have portrayed all this over the past year or so. There have been some colossal problems, mostly with things like Rob Reiner’s Web site, but the establishment press have it right much of the time. If I was a parent reading many of these stories I’d say, "You know, this makes sense."

How do the stories we read in the media reflect real concerns among professionals and parents?

Christopher Watson: I’ve been at the University for about five years. The first thing I heard from childcare providers, which is a group I still do a lot of work with, is that they were witnessing younger and younger kids with more and more problems. Behavioral, emotional—the whole realm. And that is continuing to be the case. I think the enormous amount of coverage given to early childhood development in the media stems from our concerns about what we’re actually doing to kids, to the effects that we see in front of us with the rise in these kinds of problems.

David Walsh: I work with teachers and they’ll say, "The number of kids that I’ve got in my classroom that have serious problems that interfere with the learning process is greater than at any time in my career." If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a thousand times in the last year.

Alan Sroufe: Certainly there are more troubled kids. There have been enough decent epidemiological studies around for long enough that we can say there are more messed up kids than there used to be.

It makes sense if you think about the way that risk factors combine to predict problems. All you have to imagine is a variety of risk factors increasing just a little bit and it makes an astronomical increase in the number of conduct problems. Think about the risk factors for conduct problems—family discord, harsh treatment, poor monitoring, life stress. The list is long. Now try to think of any one of those that isn’t on the increase. What kinds of parents do you think these kids are going to be? The cross-generational stuff merits some examination.

Christopher Watson: Along with the risk factors is a reduction of protective factors. Increased mobility means less cohesive communities, less cohesive families. That leads to a loss of the social support that could be a mitigating factor for some of the risk factors.

Susan Schultz: When I go to a childcare center to consult with the staff, their whole environmental structure is often not conducive to having a relationship with that child, to really be able to work with something as complex as aggression, and intervene. The ratios are too high, there are too many transitions in the day, and the expectations for children who may have regulatory difficulties are not appropriate. It’s very hard to try to consult with a day care that’s set up that way.

David Walsh: That’s apparently at least part of the explanation of the rising rates of prescriptions for Prozac and Ritalin to children younger than six. I hear a lot of it’s being driven by day care. Parents are told if your child is not on something, we won’t keep him.

Alan Sroufe: That should be a felony. 

Christopher Watson: I think the kids are caught in a cycle. The childcare workers are low-paid. They go to workshops, try to learn how to be better professionals, but they don’t have a lot of formal education and I think all these things feed one another. On top of that, they have pressure from parents. If there is a biting toddler at a day care, that child’s parent and that teacher have a lot of pressure from other parents who don’t want their child bitten. I’m not defending the use of drugs, but offering some explanations from the provider’s point of view. Can you allow the other children to be harmed by an aggressive child who bites? And if you don’t have the resources, educationally, economically, to resolve the situation, it becomes a real issue.

Alan Sroufe: There’s a theme that runs through this discussion having to do with the issue right now in our society about what kind of care children need, and can we do it cheaply, quickly, and without any inconvenience. The medication issue is part of it, the regimented day care is part of it. Even the Mozart CDs are part of it in the sense that the parent is saying, "I don’t have time to have a relationship with my kids, so I’ll play a Mozart CD and their brains will develop and then he won’t need me." Judith Rich Harris’ book fits into it. She literally concludes in her book that what parents do or don’t do doesn’t matter, whether you spend time with your child or not doesn’t matter. Why was that book popular? Why did people grab onto it? There would be a lot of people for whom it would be convenient if we didn’t have to invest a lot in parenting and caring for children. It’s a lot of work; it takes a lot of time. And it should be the highest priority we have as a society. Day care providers should get decent pay so there is continuity of care without rapid turnover. And parents should know this isn’t something you can do quickly.

David Walsh: Are you all familiar with the one-minute bedtime stories that are being marketed? They are anthologies of bedtime stories that you can read in one minute. They are such great sellers, Alan, that there are now one-minute bedtime bear books, one-minute bedtime puppy books—it’s this whole idea that: "I know it’s good to read to my kids, this lets me take care of that in one minute, I can check that task off my to-do list, that’s really cool."

Kirsten Schoenleber: To a certain extent, I think we need to recognize that parents are confused. They don’t know what to focus on. If you go to a preschool conference for your child, the focus today is on whether or not your child knows his letters and his numbers rather than on whether or not this is a happy child, a nice child who gets along with others and has friends.

Susan Schultz: One of the worries parents I talk to have about the schools is that there is such a focus on cognition, cognitive development, passing tests, achievement levels, without an understanding that relationships and connection really facilitate and drive learning for kids. I see teachers bombarded with what the children have to learn and given less room to really connect.

Kirsten Schoenleber: Teachers are frustrated and stressed. I do think that most of them really want to do the right thing, want to be open to suggestions.

Susan Schultz: I think it’s the rare teacher who doesn’t care. They do care.

Christopher Watson: Yes, I think a fair number of professionals in many fields are aware of these things, but they’re not sure what their exact role is. I think it’s particularly true with educators at all levels. I’ve heard a huge amount of frustration from elementary teachers, for example, who say, "I know these kids have issues, but there’s nothing in my preparation that prepared me to deal with these issues at this level on this scale."

Sandra Hewitt: There’s been a lot of media attention around the zero-to-three age group, and where I’m working—at that interface with child protection where there are a lot of termination of parental rights or kids who are in foster care and need intensive evaluations—I see a real hunger among the professionals for more information about this research. But I see a huge chasm between the information we have about how important these early years are and the ability of the professionals in the system to apply any kind of consistent strategies for taking care of these kids. You have very young children coming into a system and there is no one saying, "How do we apply what we know to make this better for the children?" How do you even begin to apply some of this research to a system like child protection that really does not have child protection as its focus at all?

Alan Sroufe: And this is one thing we know is harmful to children—this constant moving around from placement to placement in foster care. It’s hard to imagine why a system would function this way when it’s demonstrably harmful to children to bounce around like that.

Hope for the future

Charles Nelson: We’re working on some new research that could be very promising. Soon we may be able to distinguish between those problems that kids are having as strictly behavioral versus those that may, in fact, have underlying neurological causes. The earlier we can make this distinction, the better we can create an intervention routine to treat the problem. But sometimes I wonder about all this, sitting in the academic environment. I wonder if the work we’re doing, which to me is so exciting, is getting out there. Do people know about it, and are they able to use it in a way that impacts how you deal with kids and families?

Kirsten Schoenleber: Here’s a concrete answer. In a hospital setting it used to be that premature babies were put in isolation and nobody touched them because we were very concerned about keeping the environment sterile. But research informed us that we really need to touch these babies and now we do.

Alan Sroufe: That’s a sign that it takes longer for things to change than we sometimes realize. Because it’s been known since about 1970 that holding your baby was very important, that stimulating premature babies was vital.

Kirsten Schoenleber: But it’s nice to know that things have changed, so maybe we shouldn’t get too discouraged.

Alan Sroufe: It just may take a while. And for us in the academic world, we know it today and we’re frustrated because it doesn’t show up in practice for five or 10 years. 

David Walsh: Let me tell you about something that has been pretty dramatic for me in terms of how this brain research has had an impact. We have a project with the Minneapolis schools in which we’re working with teenage mothers who have so many risk factors going they can’t even function in the school-based teenage mother program. We’re talking with them about media and how to use media. So in talking with these kids, we started to explain some basic information about the brain, how it works, what kinds of things impact their babies’ brain development. And it captures their interest—even these kids who have all these risk factors, who have failed most of their school experiences. When you talk to them about what is going on in their babies’ brains, their level of interest just skyrockets. So it’s not just the educated parents that can take this information and use it to make their kids’ lives better. Even these 12- and 13-year-old mothers say, "Well, if that’s what’s going on inside my baby’s brain, I better do this" or "I better not do that." It’s just amazing, the power of that information.