Such emotional learning begins in life's earliest moments, and continues throughout childhood. All the small exchanges between parent and child have an emotional subtext, and in the repetition of these messages over the years children form the core of their emotional outlook and capabilities. A little girl who finds a puzzle frustrating and asks her busy mother to help gets one message if the reply is the mother's clear pleasure at the request, and quite another if it's a curt "Don't bother me—I've got important work to do." When such encounters become typical of child and parent, they mold the child's emotional expectations about relationships, outlooks that will flavor her functioning in all realms of life, for better or worse.
The risks are greatest for those children whose parents are grossly inept—immature, abusing drugs, depressed or chronically angry, or simply aimless and living chaotic lives. Such parents are far less likely to give adequate care, let alone attune to their toddler's emotional needs. Simple neglect, studies find, can be more damaging than outright abuse.8 A survey of maltreated children found the neglected youngsters doing the worst of alclass="underline" they were the most anxious, inattentive, and apathetic, alternately aggressive and withdrawn. The rate for having to repeat first grade among them was 65 percent.
The first three or four years of life are a period when the toddler's brain grows to about two thirds its full size, and evolves in complexity at a greater rate than it ever will again. During this period key kinds of learning take place more readily than later in life—emotional learning foremost among them. During this time severe stress can impair the brain's learning centers (and so be damaging to the intellect). Though as we shall see, this can be remedied to some extent by experiences later in life, the impact of this early learning is profound. As one report sums up the key emotional lesson of life's first four years, the lasting consequences are great:
A child who cannot focus his attention, who is suspicious rather than trusting, sad or angry rather than optimistic, destructive rather than respectful and one who is overcome with anxiety, preoccupied with frightening fantasy and feels generally unhappy about himself—such a child has little opportunity at all, let alone equal opportunity, to claim the possibilities of the world as his own.9
HOW TO RAISE A BULLY
Much can be learned about the lifelong effects of emotionally inept parenting—particularly its role in making children aggressive—from longitudinal studies such as one of 870 children from upstate New York who were followed from the time they were eight until they were thirty.10 The most belligerent among the children—those quickest to start fights and who habitually used force to get their way—were the most likely to have dropped out of school and, by age thirty, to have a record for crimes of violence. They also seemed to be handing down their propensity to violence: their children were, in grade school, just like the troublemakers their delinquent parent had been.
There is a lesson in how aggressiveness is passed from generation to generation. Any inherited propensities aside, the troublemakers as grown-ups acted in a way that made family life a school for aggression. As children, the troublemakers had parents who disciplined them with arbitrary, relentless severity; as parents they repeated the pattern. This was true whether it had been the father or the mother who had been identified in childhood as highly aggressive. Aggressive little girls grew up to be just as arbitrary and harshly punitive when they became mothers as the aggressive boys were as fathers. And while they punished their children with special severity, they otherwise took little interest in their children's lives, in effect ignoring them much of the time. At the same time the parents offered these children a vivid—and violent—example of aggressiveness, a model the children took with them to school and to the playground, and followed throughout life. The parents were not necessarily mean-spirited, nor did they fail to wish the best for their children; rather, they seemed to be simply repeating the style of parenting that had been modeled for them by their own parents.
In this model for violence, these children were disciplined capriciously: if their parents were in a bad mood, they would be severely punished; if their parents were in a good mood, they could get away with mayhem at home. Thus punishment came not so much because of what the child had done, but by virtue of how the parent felt. This is a recipe for feelings of worthlessness and helplessness, and for the sense that threats are everywhere and may strike at any time. Seen in light of the home life that spawns it, such children's combative and defiant posture toward the world at large makes a certain sense, unfortunate though it remains. What is disheartening is how early these dispiriting lessons can be learned, and how grim the costs for a child's emotional life can be.
ABUSE THE EXTINCTION OF EMPATHY
In the rough-and-tumble play of the day-care center, Martin, just two and a half, brushed up against a little girl, who, inexplicably, broke out crying. Martin reached for her hand, but as the sobbing girl moved away, Martin slapped her on the arm.
As her tears continued Martin looked away and yelled, "Cut it out! Cut it out over and over, each time faster and louder.
When Martin then made another attempt to pat her, again she resisted. This time Martin bared his teeth like a snarling dog, hissing at the sobbing girl.
Once more Martin started patting the crying girl, but the pats on the back quickly turned into pounding, and Martin went on hitting and hitting the poor little girl despite her screams.
That disturbing encounter testifies to how abuse—being beaten repeatedly, at the whim of a parent's moods—warps a child's natural bent toward empathy.11 Martin's bizarre, almost brutal response to his playmate's distress is typical of children like him, who have themselves been the victims of beatings and other physical abuse since their infancy. The response stands in stark contrast to toddlers' usual sympathetic entreaties and attempts to console a crying playmate, reviewed in Chapter 7. Martin's violent response to distress at the day-care center may well mirror the lessons he learned at home about tears and anguish: crying is met at first with a peremptory consoling gesture, but if it continues, the progression is from nasty looks and shouts, to hitting, to outright beating. Perhaps most troubling, Martin already seems to lack the most primitive sort of empathy, the instinct to stop aggression against someone who is hurt. At two and a half he displays the budding moral impulses of a cruel and sadistic brute.
Martin's meanness in place of empathy is typical of other children like him who are already, at their tender age, scarred by severe physical and emotional abuse at home. Martin was part of a group of nine such toddlers, ages one to three, witnessed in a two-hour observation at his day-care center. The abused toddlers were compared with nine others at the day-care center from equally impoverished, high-stress homes, but who were not physically abused. The differences in how the two groups of toddlers reacted when another child was hurt or upset were stark. Of twenty-three such incidents, five of the nine nonabused toddlers responded to the distress of a child nearby with concern, sadness, or empathy. But in the twenty-seven instances where the abused children could have done so, not one showed the least concern; instead they reacted to a crying child with expressions of fear, anger, or, like Martin, a physical attack.
One abused little girl, for instance, made a ferocious, threatening face at another who had broken out into tears. One-year-old Thomas, another of the abused children, froze in terror when he heard a child crying across the room; he sat completely still, his face full of fear, back stiffly straight, his tension increasing as the crying continued—as though bracing for an attack himself. And twenty-eight-month-old Kate, also abused, was almost sadistic: picking on Joey, a smaller infant, she knocked him to the ground with her feet, and as he lay there looked tenderly at him and began patting him gently on the back—only to intensify the pats into hitting him harder and harder, ignoring his misery. She kept swinging away at him, leaning in to slug him six or seven times more, until he crawled away.