A+ for Responsive Parenting

It is no secret that parents and teachers impact children's lives. Some believe that their influences are distinct: parents are thought to take care of socializing children and teachers are assumed to be in charge of teaching kids academic skills. This somewhat crude meme illustrates this idea - but is it correct?

Could responding to your child's physical and emotional needs also influence his or her cognitive skills? A recent study by Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, and Lalonde (2015) supports this idea. The authors were interested if the type of attachment that children share with their mothers may relate to certain abilities that predict success in school.

You may recall that Mary Ainsworth and colleagues developed one way to study Attachment quality: briefly leaving toddlers in a Strange Situation and then reuniting them with their caregivers to observe how the children react. The majority of children got upset, but not hysterical, when left alone and were very glad when their caregiver returned: they ran to them; wanted to be held; and stopped crying almost immediately.

These children, like most American children, demonstrate a Secure Attachment relationship with their caregivers. This Secure style is associated with parents who notice when their children need something - physically or emotionally - and they respond to those needs in a prompt way. Children who share a Secure relationship learn to trust that their parents will come through for them.

In contrast, children may have an Insecure Avoidant relationship with parents who cannot be trusted to notice or take care of their needs. In this case the children don't want to be with the parents and do not rely on the parents for help.

Children can also share an Insecure Ambivalent relationship with parents who are unpredictable and unreliable at taking care of their needs. These children are always on edge because they don't know if today will be a good day or a bad day: they may be unusually clingy but also demonstrate a lot of anger toward their parents.

Finally, children raised in an abnormal environment of abuse and neglect, or by parents who are severely mentally ill, may just seem confused. This type of attachment relationship would be described as Insecure Disorganized.

We know that having a Secure Attachment relationship is associated with children demonstrating better social skills, emotional control, and improved behavior as they grow older. Bernier et al. hypothesized that this sort of attachment as a toddler would also be associated with better Executive Functioning skills during kindergarten. These Executive Functioning skills are largely regulated by the brain's prefrontal cortex and are very important for success in school. For example, relying on working memory, demonstrating the ability to plan and reach goals, and having control over your behavior are all requirements of kindergarten through college.

The authors considered 105 children who were tested at 15 months, two years, and when they were in kindergarten (age 5-6). At 15 months and age two, research assistants used a Q-Sort method to assess the attachment quality between the children and their mothers. The assistants came to each child's home and observed mother-child interactions. Based on those observations the assistants sorted 90 phrases into nine categories that ranged from "very unlike the child's behavior" to "very similar to the child's behavior." The resulting piles were compared with the piles we would expect from a Secure attachment relationship: if there was a strong match, the observed child would also have a Secure relationship with his or her mother. For example, children with Secure attachments would be rated as very similar to, "If held in mother's arms, child stops crying and quickly recovers after being frightened or upset," and rated as very unlike, "Child rarely asks mother for help" (p.1180).

At age 5 or 6, the same children were tested for general cognitive ability and specific Executive Functioning skills. General cognitive ability included an assessment with a delicious name, the Lollipop Test, which measures knowledge of colors and shapes, understanding of spatial relationships like "above" and "below," number knowledge, and letter knowledge.

Five assessments measured the children's Executive Functioning. Four of these directly tested the children's working memory, ability to follow rules, planning skills, and selective attention. Higher scores on these tests were associated with higher Executive Functioning skills. The children's kindergarten teachers completed the final assessment: they rated the children on 63 items related to problems with self-control, flexibility of thought, and metacognition (working memory combined with planning/organizational thinking). Thus, a low score on this rating was associated with higher Executive Functioning skills.

The results supported Bernier et al.'s hypothesis. Children who had earlier demonstrated Secure attachment relationships with their mothers scored higher on all of the Executive Functioning tests and received lower scores from teachers on problems with Executive Functioning. In other words, children whose parents had been responsive to their physical and emotional needs early in life were more likely to become kindergarten students with strong Executive Functioning skills. These skills in turn predict higher school success for these children.

Moreover, having a history of a Secure attachment was better at predicting good Executive Functioning skills than other factors known to have such influence. For example, attachment style predicted Executive Functioning skills better than predictions based on children's general cognitive ability scores. Likewise, attachment style's predictive powers trumped the children's ages, their families' income and education levels, and the amount of weeks that they had spent in kindergarten.

Although we cannot take these correlational results to mean that being a responsive parent or sharing a Secure Attachment relationship causes children to be primed for school success, they do imply that these things are likely to hang together. Returning to our meme, this research suggests that it is not solely the teacher's actions that will help children in school. If children are successful with the demands of kindergarten we can infer that they likely have a history of parents who wiped their noses, soothed their fears, and helped them regulate their emotions.

Further Reading:

The Bernier et al. (2015) journal article in Developmental Psychology can be accessed through your local college library.

If you are concerned that a child in your life has problems with Executive Functioning skills. Here is a resource from Understood.org: Understanding Executive Functioning Issues.

The Extension office at Purdue University offers concrete examples of parenting that are associated with Secure and Insecure Attachment relationships. The good news is that Insecure relationships can become Secure ones if parents change their behaviors.

B.F. Skinner and Cry-babies

Because of our parenting practices, long periods of crying are considered a normal part of infancy in Western cultures. When babies cry they are communicating that something feels bad: they may have pain; be frightened or lonely; feel uncomfortable; or be absolutely starving. In addition to the compassion that crying evokes, hearing a baby cry is simply unpleasant - we react to it physiologically and are motivated to do whatever it takes to stop it. We pick up our babies, inspect them, rock them, sing to them, offer them food, or grab a favorite toy to distract them...

In B.F. Skinner's theory of Operant Conditioning the reaction, or reinforcement, after a behavior happens is what encourages or discourages it from happening again. This meme is an example of two kinds of conditioning, or training, that encourage behaviors to continue:  negative and positive reinforcement. Without meaning to, both the child and the mother are training each other to keep doing these things.

The child is using negative reinforcement to to train his mother to continue giving him a teddy bear. In negative reinforcement there is something that is ongoing and unpleasant - in this case crying - and it is removed only when the trainee does what she is supposed to do - give a teddy bear. Negative reinforcement encourages a trained behavior to continue in the future, so the little boy is increasing the likeliness of getting his teddy bear in the future.

The mother is using positive reinforcement, or reward, to train her child to cry. In positive reinforcement once the trainee does what he is supposed to do - in this case crying - he gets something pleasant as a reward - the teddy bear. Positive reinforcement also encourages a trained behavior to continue in the future, so the mother is increasing the likeliness of having her son cry in the future.

Skinner, like the other Behaviorists, was not interested in thoughts or feelings because those are not observable actions. Instead he saw this type of training as reflexive: contrary to our meme, the boy and his mother are not planning these behaviors instead they are reacting to the situation. Even so, their reactions increase the likelihood of the situation occurring again.

Operant Conditioning is a very old theory, but it still can be applied to parenting today. For example, Thompson, Bruzek, and Cotnoir-Bichelman (2011) designed a small experiment to examine how infant cries may negatively reinforce caregivers and train them to perform comforting behaviors. The authors were also interested in what happens when that training has occurred but none of the comforting behaviors works to stop inconsolable crying.

Thompson et al. had a very small sample size: eight female and three male undergraduates were observed as they interacted with a baby doll under directions to, "...do what comes naturally" (p. 297). Eight of the participants were asked if they had prior experience with babies and all of them did; the other three were not asked. Even with this curiously missing information, we know that the majority of participants had real life experience "doing what comes naturally" with an infant.

Tested one at a time, all of the participants experienced several Negative Reinforcement conditions: a recording of an infant crying played until the participant engaged in the desired behavior with the doll. These behaviors ranged from rocking, bottle feeding, and offering a toy. All of the participants showed signs of training: they learned to do the desired behavior to stop the recorded crying.

Eventually the participants were each placed into an Extinction condition: this time no matter what comforting behavior they tried, the recorded crying would not stop. The participants all tried the behavior that had previously worked to stop the crying in the earlier conditions. When it did not work nine of these undergraduates showed extinction of that training: they gave up trying to get the crying to stop. Two of the participants did not show an extinction: they persisted with the trained comforting behavior for 30 minutes as the crying recording played the entire time. Perhaps these participants had real-life experience with their own colicky babies and their behavior in the Extinction condition mirrored what they did for their own children: persisted in giving care.

The results support the notion that negative reinforcement teaches parents which comforting behaviors work to stop their babies' crying and thus encourages these behaviors to continue in the future. The results may also demonstrate how some parents could give up and stop any attempt to comfort their babies when inconsolable crying occurs. In the worst case, these parents might engage in neglect or abuse of these infants. The authors did note that these findings and their implications would be stronger with a larger sample and a more realistic test situation.

In addition, I would caution that we should not interpret this to mean that babies consciously manipulate their caregivers. To manipulate another person is a very advanced cognitive ability. It implies that one person is going to fake a behavior to trick another person into doing something that he or she really does not want to do. Young infants do not possess the ability to do this: instead they simply cry when they feel bad. As well, most parents want to care for their babies and are motivated to reduce their babies' distress - they do not need to be tricked into these behaviors. In the ideal situation babies learn that if they cry a parent will help them feel better, and parents learn how to best calm their babies' distress - or even better, how to avoid that distress in the first place.

Further Reading:

A pdf of the Thompson et al. article, published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, can be accessed for free online.

Here are some good ideas for comforting a baby who is crying inconsolably from Ask Dr. Sears. Dr. Harvey Karp has a combination of five comforting behaviors that can help even colicky babies stop crying: here is a video of that technique on WebMD.

In addition to learning their babies' early cues of distress, parents can REDUCE crying by carrying their babies MORE often. An article by Hunziker and Barr (1986), published in Pediatrics, supports this idea.