Why rats lick their babies and how to lick yours
Beginning in the 1980s, two psychologists, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, studied three groups of students: children of professional parents, children from working-class homes and those from welfare families in a city in America. The main finding of Hart and Risley was that what accounted for the difference in the children’s upbringing and other […]
Beginning in the 1980s, two psychologists, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, studied three groups of students: children of professional parents, children from working-class homes and those from welfare families in a city in America. The main finding of Hart and Risley was that what accounted for the difference in the children’s upbringing and other outcomes later in life(such as school performance) was only one thing: the number of words the children heard from their parents.
By age three, the children of professional parents had heard 30 million words spoken to them and this was later linked to a better performance at school. Within the same period, the children from poor parents had heard only 10 million words. This, Hart and Risley concluded, was partly responsible for poor children’s failure at school and in life. The take home lesson from this study, is that to develop the cognitive abilities of your child, you have to speak a good deal of words to them. That is, expose them to a large number of words and varied vocabulary. And don’t forget to stuff your house with books.
It is the result of studies like this that partly influenced me and my wife on child-upbringing. My wife, for example, started speaking to her two children when she was still pregnant with them. And we were not alone. Results from research focusing on developing children’s cognitive abilities gave birth to a billion dollar industry. Notable brands include: Baby Einstein, Teach Your Baby to Read, Baby Genius, etc.
Although results from Hart and Risley’s study – and similar cognitive studies – are still valid, many studies later put more stock on other constructs, especially on somenoncognitive skills.
For example, one of the factors that has a long term effect on how a child navigates his social environment is parental grooming. And the researcher who has done the most in giving us a background on how parental grooming helps develop well-adjusted children, is Michael Meaney of McGill University. Meaney is a neuroscientist who uses rats a lot for his studies, because rats have similar brain structure with humans.
Scientists who work with rats pick them up a great deal. And while doing that, Meaney and his team discovered a curious thing. Whenever they dropped the pubs – rat babies – after examination. Some mothers – called dams – run to lick their pubs and groom them. They discovered that handling the rats caused anxiety and released stress hormones. The mother’s licking countered that stress and calmed the babies down. Meaney also discovered that not all dams licked their pubs – some simply ignored their babies after they were handled by the scientists.
Meaney and his team wanted to know more and, so, set up a new experiment. They put dams and their pubs together and counted every instance of maternal licking and grooming. After 10 days, they divided them into two groups: those which licked and groomed a lot, called high-LG and the mothers which groomed and licked a little, called low-LG.
After 22 days, all the pubs were weaned and put together with their mates. After 100 days, when they were fully matured, the rats were subjected to a series of tests.
Two tests stood out. First there’s the one call open-field test where the rats were put in a large box to see how they will explore the area. The rats which were licked a lot immediately distinguished themselves. While thelow-LG offspring lacked confidence and only spent five seconds to explore the box, the high-LG offspring spent about 35 seconds to roam around the box, out of the five minutes they were all given.
In the second test that measured fearfulness, the hungry rats were put in another box and offered food for 10 minutes. Again while high-LG offspring started eating after only four minutes, low-LG offspring started eating after nine minutes. Also, the high-LG rats ate for two minutes while the other group ate for only a few seconds – showing that they were moreafraid.
That is not all. The researchers did more tests. Paul Tough, in his book, ‘How Children Succeed,’ commented on Meaney’s research:
“…on each one, the high -LG offspring excelled: They were better at mazes. They were more social. They were more curious. They were less aggressive. They had more self-control. They were healthier. They lived longer.”
Paul Tough’s comment carries the excitement that Meaney and his colleagues must have felt when they saw the astonishing results for the first time. More studies found that the effect went beyond the physiological and hormonal effects to something deeper.
The researchers found that the seemingly insignificant grooming got written into the rats’ DNA. Their genome sequencing found that groomingswitched on an area in the rats brain that controls the process of stress hormones in adulthood.
So what? What does this mean? The second part of this article will trace how studies like Meaney’s give us the tools to raise confident more adjusted children and how related research on character sheds light on developing character of our children at home and in schools. We will answer the following questions. What is the equivalent of licking and grooming among humans?
If poverty is correlated with poor outcomes in school and in life, cangood parenting of poor parents reduce the bad outcomes? What are the latest scientific studies on character and can the character of an individual be measured? How do we measure character? What is the character trait that predicts success better than IQ? Can we train our children to have good character? What are the scientifically confirmed strategies that we can use in school and at home? Are there tried and true metacognitive strategies we can teach our children to set goals and make decisions?