The Complete Parenting Collection. Steve Biddulph
him, but he will get over it. He knows he’s loved, and he will not want to displease the person at the centre of his existence.
Mum’s interest and fun in teaching and talking to him helps his brain to develop more verbal skills and makes him more sociable. Boys need more help than girls to ‘catch on’ to social skills (more on this later).
If a mother is terribly depressed, and therefore unresponsive in the first year or two of her son’s life, his brain may undergo physical changes and become a ‘sad brain’. If she is constantly angry, hitting or hurting him, he will be confused over whether she loves him. (Please note, this is constant anger we are talking about, not occasional rattiness that all parents feel and show. We aren’t supposed to be angels as parents – if we are, how would our children learn about the real world?)
Those of us who are around young mothers have to be careful to support and help them, to ensure they are not left isolated or overwhelmed with physical tasks. A mother needs others to augment her life so she can relax and do this important work. If we care for young mothers, they can care for their babies. Husbands and partners are the first rank of help, but family and neighbours are also needed.
What goes on between mother and baby boy?
Science has trouble measuring something like love, but it’s getting better. Scientists studying mothers and babies have observed what they call ‘joint attention sequences’. This is love in action, love you can see. Researchers filmed mothers and babies going about their day, and discovered that joint attention sequences happen between 50 and 100 times a day.
You will have certainly experienced this with your own child. The baby seeks out your attention with a gurgle or cry. You look towards him and see that he is looking at you. He is thrilled to make eye contact, and wiggles with delight. You talk back to him. Or maybe you are holding him or changing him, and you feel that closeness as you make eye contact and sing to or tickle him. He impacts on you, and you on him. The exchange goes on, a ‘prewords’ conversation – it’s delightful and warm.
Another kind of joint attention sequence is when a child is distressed and you croon, stroke or hold him gently, and distract him – you care for him based on your growing experience of what works to help him calm down. Or you engage with him just to enjoy seeing him become happy or excited. Soon your ‘joint attention’ might be directed at a toy, a flower, an animal or a noise-making object that you enthuse about together. You are teaching him to be interested in his world.
This is one of the most significant things a parent ever does for their baby. Inside baby’s little head, his brain is sprouting like a broccoli in the springtime. When a baby is happy, growth hormone flows through his body and right into his brain, and development blossoms. When he is stressed, the stress hormone – cortisol – slows down growth, especially brain growth. So interaction, laughter and love are like food for a baby’s brain. All this interaction is being remembered in these new brain areas: the baby is learning how to read faces and moods, be sensitive, and learn calmness, fun, stern admonition or warm love. Soon he will be adding language, music, movement, rhythm and, above all, the capacity for feeling good and being empathic with other people. Boy babies are just a little slower, a little less wired for sociability than girls, and so they especially need this help. And they need it from someone who knows them very well, who has the time and who is themselves reasonably happy and content.
BOYS AND EARLY CHILDCARE
What we are about to tell you next might cause distress to some parents. There are past readers of this book who have stopped reading right here, angry and confused. But the job of a psychologist is to tell you the facts, so here goes. If at all possible, a boy should be cared for by his parents or a close relative (apart from the occasional trusted babysitter) until about age three. Group care of the institutional kind does not suit a boy’s nature below this age. This doesn’t mean that boys put into long daycare at six months will all become psychopaths, but it does mean that they will be more at risk. And, thanks to a number of large-scale studies around the world we know that this ‘risk’ can take three forms. Firstly, increased misbehaviour, especially in the form of aggression and disobedience. Secondly, anxiety – to a degree that might even harm development (this is measured by using stress-hormone tests). And thirdly, their relationship with you may be weakened: studies have shown that boys are more prone than girls to separation anxiety and to becoming emotionally shut down as a result of feeling abandoned. They seem less able to hold in their minds that Mum (or Dad) loves them, and is coming back. Also, a boy of this age may deal with his anxiety by becoming chronically restless or aggressive. Experienced daycare staff talk about the ‘sad/angry boy syndrome’ – a little boy who feels abandoned and anxious, and converts that into hitting and hurting behaviour. He may carry this behaviour into school and later life.
But daycare isn’t all bad news. Good daycare or, even better, a preschool with trained teachers can certainly play its part when children are older or when parents need to work to survive. But you need to know the facts so as to make a balanced decision. Daycare is a pretty second-rate place for toddlers, it’s positively deficient for babies, and some children are really harmed by it in ways that are hard to see on the surface.
If the above is depressing news for you to read, we agree. The corporatised world is not kind to parents. Paid parental leave is really what parents need, and more and more countries are adopting it. Flexible work and guaranteed time off are being found to be helpful all around the world. But we always have some choices and some trade-offs we can make. If you can avoid or minimise daycare for your boy under three, you will never regret it.
The process keeps going right into little-boyhood. A mother shows delight when her child catches frogs or makes mud pies, and admires his achievements. His father tickles him and play-wrestles with him, and is also gentle and nurturing, reading stories and comforting him when he is sick. The little boy learns that men are kind as well as exciting, that dads read books and are capable in the home; and that mothers are kind but also practical, and part of the bigger world.
In short
To sum up, the first lessons boys need to learn are in closeness – shown through trust, warmth, fun and kindness. Under six years of age, gender isn’t a big deal, and it shouldn’t be made so. Mothers are usually the primary parent, but a father can also take this place. What matters is that one or two key people love the child and make him central for these few years. That way, he develops inner security for life, and his brain acquires the skills of intimate communication and a love of life and the world. These years are soon over. Enjoy your little boy while you can!
From six to fourteen: learning to be male
At around six years of age, a big change takes place in boys. There seems to be a sudden ‘switching on’ of boys’ masculinity at this age. Even boys who have not watched any TV suddenly want to play with swords, wear Superman capes, fight and wrestle, and make lots of noise. Something else happens that is really important: it’s been observed in all societies around the world. At around six years of age, little boys seem to ‘lock on’ to their dad, or stepdad, or whichever male is around, and want to be with him, learn from him and copy him. They want to ‘study how to be male’.
If a dad ignores his son at this time, the boy will often launch an all-out campaign to get his attention. Once I consulted in the case of a little boy who repeatedly became seriously ill for no apparent reason. He was placed in intensive care. His father, a leading medical specialist, flew back from a conference overseas to be with him, and the boy got