What Should We Be Worried About?

WORRYING ABOUT CHILDREN

ALISON GOPNIK

Professor of psychology, UC Berkeley; author, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

Thinking about children, as I do for a living, and worrying go hand in hand. There is nothing in human life so important and urgent as raising the next generation, and yet it feels as if we have very little control over the outcome. British prime minister Stanley Baldwin once accused the press of having “power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Perhaps it’s appropriate that the prerogative of the mother is just the opposite of the harlots: We moms have responsibility without power, a recipe for worry if ever there was one. But as a scientist as well as a mother, I worry that much of our current worry about children is misdirected. We worry a lot about the wrong things, and we don’t worry nearly enough about the right ones.

Much modern middle-class worry stems from a fundamentally misguided picture of how children develop. It’s the picture implicit in the peculiar but now ubiquitous concept of “parenting.” As long as there have been Homo sapiens, there have been parents. Human mothers and fathers, and others as well, have taken special care of children. But the word “parenting” first emerged in America in the 20th century and became common only in the 1970s. This particular word comes with a picture, a vision of how we should understand the relations between grown-ups and children. “To parent” is a goal-directed verb. It describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to shape your child into a particular kind of adult—smarter or happier or more successful than others. And the idea is that some set of strategies or techniques will accomplish this. So contemporary parents worry endlessly about whether they are using the right techniques and spend millions of dollars on books or programs that are supposed to provide them.

This picture is empirically misguided. “Parenting” worries focus on relatively small variations in what parents and children do—co-sleeping or crying it out, playing with one kind of toy rather than another, more homework or less. There is very little evidence that any of this makes much difference to the way children turn out in the long run. Nor does there seem to be any magic formula for making one well-loved and financially supported child any smarter or happier or more successful as an adult than another.

The picture is even more profoundly misguided from an evolutionary perspective. Childhood is one of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings; we have a much longer childhood than any other primate. This extended childhood seems, at least in part, to be an adaptation to the variability and unpredictability of human environments. The period of protected immaturity we call childhood gives humans a chance to learn, explore, and innovate without having to plan, act, and take care of themselves at the same time. And empirically we’ve discovered that even the youngest children have truly extraordinary abilities to learn and imagine, quite independent of any conscious parental shaping. Our long protected childhood arguably enables our distinctive human cognitive achievements.

The evolutionary emergence of our extended childhood went hand in hand with changes in the depth and breadth of human care for children. Humans developed a triple threat when it comes to care. Unlike our closest primate relatives, human fathers began to invest substantially in their children’s care; women lived on past menopause to take care of their grandchildren; and unrelated adults—“alloparents”—kicked in care, too. In turn, children could learn a variety of skills, attitudes, knowledge, and cultural traditions from all those caregivers. This seems to have given human children a varied and multifaceted cognitive toolkit that they could revise and refine to face the various unpredictable challenges of the next generation.

So the evolutionary picture is that a community of caregivers provides children with two essential ingredients allowing them to thrive. First, adults provide an unconditionally nurturing and stable context, a guarantee that children will be safe and cared for. That secure base frees them to venture out to play, explore, and learn—to shape their own futures. Second, adults provide children with a wide range of models of acting in the world, even contradictory models of acting. Children can exploit this repertoire to create effective ways of acting in unpredictable and variable environments—and eventually to create new environments. This is very different from the “parenting” picture, where particular parental actions are supposed to shape children’s adult characteristics.

This brings me to the stuff we don’t worry about enough. While upper-middle-class parents worry about whether to put their children in forward- or backward-facing strollers, more than one in five children in the United States are growing up below the poverty line, and nearly half the children in America grow up in low-income households. Children, and especially young children, are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group. This number has increased substantially during the past decade. More significantly, these children face not only poverty but also a more crippling isolation and instability. It’s not just that many children grow up without fathers: They grow up without grandparents or alloparents either, and with parents who are forced to spend long hours at unreliable and low-paying jobs. Institutions haven’t stepped in to fill the gap. We still provide almost no public support for child care. We pay parents nothing and child-care workers next to nothing.

Of course, we’ve felt for a long time the moral intuition that neglecting children is wrong. But more recently, research into epigenetics has helped demonstrate just how the mechanisms of care and neglect work. Research in sociology and economics has shown empirically how significant the consequences of early experience can be. The small variations in middle-class parenting make little difference. But providing high-quality early childhood care to children who would otherwise not receive it makes an enormous and continuing difference up through adulthood. The evidence suggests that this isn’t just a matter of teaching children particular skills or kinds of knowledge—a sort of broader institutional version of parenting. Instead, children who have a stable, nurturing, varied early environment thrive in a wide range of ways: better health, less propensity to crime, more successful marriages. That’s just what we’d expect from the evolutionary story. I worry more and more about what will happen to the generations of children who don’t have the uniquely human gift of a long, protected, stable childhood.