The Myth of Normal 147

Chapter 13 Forcing the Brain in the Wrong Direction: The Sabotage of Childhood There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children. —Nelson Mandela[*] “Do you ever get accused of mother-blaming?” I asked the Harvard-based pediatrician and researcher Jack Shonkoff. “I worry about that a lot,” he said. “If we talk about how influential the environment of relationships is, you can end up on a slippery slope, with people saying, ‘Parents are doing a bad job —it’s their fault.’” Dr. Shonkoff, whose work has illuminated much of the science of early development, then summed up the core dilemma faced by anyone who tries to engage with these issues honestly: “You can’t say that parents are incredibly important in the lives of their children, yet if there’s a problem it has nothing to do with the parents. But the truth is, parents don’t raise their children in isolation from society.” A wiser view requires a wider lens. Yes, parents are responsible for their children; no, they did not create the world in which they must parent them. Our cultural ecology does not support attuned, present, responsive, connected parenting. As we have seen, the destabilization begins with stress transmitted to infants still in the womb, with the mechanization of birth, the attenuation of the parenting instinct, and the denial of the child’s developmental needs. It continues with the increasingly intolerable economic and social pressures on parents these days and the erosion of community ties,