The Myth of Normal 108

Where does a sense of security come from? Once again, warm, attuned interactions with caregivers are the key ingredient. A 2010 study from Duke University reported that “early nurturing and warmth have long-lasting positive effects on mental health well into adulthood.” The scientists examined nearly five hundred mother-infant pairs, noting how affectionate the moms were with their eight-month-old babies and assigning them categories such as “warm” or “occasionally negative” or “caressing” or “extravagant” in doting and tenderness. Most moms were rated as “warm,” and about 1.5 percent as “extravagant.” Over three decades later the grown children underwent a battery of mental health tests assessing their level of emotional distress and anxiety. Adults who had received the highest levels of maternal affection in infancy were shown to have the lowest levels of distress.[9] The lead researcher ventured that “maybe you can’t be too affectionate . . . From the policy perspective, it definitely adds to that body of research that we should be able to protect time for mothers and fathers to be affectionate to kids.” I consider it a sign of cultural lunacy that something so elemental, so essential, should be under such threat that we even have to exhort policymakers to “protect” it. For a long time, it was assumed that infants are impelled to bond with caregivers only out of their helpless dependency on food, warmth, and shelter. We now know that social and emotional needs are just as much encoded in our neural circuitry by evolution, and that our optimal development requires that they be met. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp termed the cerebral apparatus governing these needs the “PANIC/GRIEF” system because, like a car alarm, these are the emotions that become activated in the absence of secure attachment. The message: we are wired to attach, to connect with one another, which we are able to do by dint of our early bonding with our caregivers. Not only that, but the wiring goes both ways: infants are “born to cry,” in Dr. Panksepp’s words, precisely to activate the nurturing brain structures and affectionate behaviors of the parents—what he called the CARE system.[*] Pondering this information sent me back to my mother’s diary. Nothing to do with war or Nazis this time—just a woman of twenty-four trying to love