The Myth of Normal 140

an expression of her essential need. Shutting down our response to a baby’s distress may also weaken our own parenting instincts, with consequences that long outlast the child’s infancy. In 2006 I wrote a newspaper article titled “Why I No Longer Believe Babies Should Cry Themselves to Sleep,” pointing out that leaving small infants alone stresses their brains, with potential negative effects. It also hurts a mother’s heart. I quoted my late mother-in-law, Monica, who had a painful memory of being a young mom in the late 1940s and early ’50s and following medical counsel to ignore her infants’ cries. “It was torture for me to do it,” she told me. “It went against all my motherly emotions.” Some years later the paper’s website republished the piece, which was quickly shared over eighty thousand times, drawing many responses. One of them was priceless: “This article is nothing more than prefrontal lobe BS. There is no way an infant’s brain patterns are permanently psychologically damaged at such a young age. There is no way that your prefrontal cortex will permanently adopt patterns that will translate into adulthood. No way. If that would be the case, then the last 3 generations to rule this earth (boomers, preboomers, Generation X) would have all been emotionally unstable and plagued with psychological issues.” “Well, then,” I thought to myself, “I rest my case.” Why Parental Stress Matters Especially in infancy, but throughout childhood, the young human uses the emotional and nervous systems of the caring adults to regulate her own internal states. The interpersonal-biological math is elementary: the more stressed the adult, the more stressed the child. Extensive research has demonstrated that when stressed, parents are less patient and more punishing and harsher with their young children. Stress impairs their capacity to be calm, responsive, and attuned. As a recent review by leading researchers pointed out, “In more stressful environments for parents, children not only experience less protection from environmental stressors but also are more likely to have stress-inducing relationships with caregivers.”[18] Another study showed that, while elevated stress induced