Why rats lick their babies and how to lick yours (III)

(Continued from last week) Imagine having a fire station in your body. And let’s say there is a problem requiring a fire house intervention – such as a little fire. So the alarm goes off and the firefighters come with their machines to put out the fire. Normal. There’s nothing wrong here. That’s how God […]

(Continued from last week)

Imagine having a fire station in your body. And let’s say there is a problem requiring a fire house intervention – such as a little fire. So the alarm goes off and the firefighters come with their machines to put out the fire. Normal. There’s nothing wrong here. That’s how God created us: with many safety mechanisms to protect us. 
But imagine again that the alarms go off all the time and in each instance the firefighters come with their powerful tools to put out a problem even as small as a finger of smoke. With time, the system breaks down and then the alarm sounds even when there’s no danger in sight, still the fire men come to save the situation. Imagine again that all these boots, fighting, saving, trucks, siren and hosing happen in a human body every time that there’s a sign of anxiety. This is no longer normal.  The complex safety mechanisms no longer work optimally. This means the body is troubled and the body requires urgent intervention.
Poor parental care relationship can lead to this trauma called the firehouse effect.
So far, we’ve established that some children are not equipped to deal with stress. We also know that this problem can stem from the first year of a child-parent care relationship and can last a lifetime. Also, anxious attachment relationship with parents keeps bad company: Lack of confidence, anti-social behaviour, aggressiveness, lack of self-reliance, difficulty dealing with setbacks and general lack of character.  But a more disturbing finding is that mothers who had anxious attachment with their own mothers transfer that trait to their children. So when this happens, how do we help the victims? That is, can we help mothers to develop secure attachment with their mothers? And how do we help children with the history of anxious attachment?
These are the questions to which Sroufe and his colleagues (who improved Strange Situation studies) paid scant attention, or didn’t answer conclusively. Therefore, Alicia Lieberman and other scientists decided to find the answers.
Specifically, Alicia Lieberman pointed out these ideas:
One, it is difficult for some mothers to form secure attachment with their children: “Often, the circumstances of a mother’s life overwhelm her natural coping capacity,” Lieberman told Paul Tough. “When you are bombarded by poverty, uncertainty, and fear,” she continued, “it takes a superhuman quality to provide the conditions for a secure attachment.”
Two, parents can overcome their histories of anxious attachment. Although most of these parents need help, some of them can overcome poor attachment on their own.
These insights have led experts to design intervention programmes for at risk mothers and children that can last from weeks to a year. The interventions have been found to be very effective. Here’s a study of one of such interventions as Tough described it:
“In one study, Dante Cicchetti, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, tracked a group of 137 families with documented histories of previous child maltreatment; these were families, in other words, where children were at very high risk. Each family had a one-year-old child who was the focus of the intervention. At the beginning of the study, all the infants were evaluated in the Strange Situation procedure, and the results were predictably awful: just one of the 137 infants demonstrated secure attachment, and 90 percent of them were classified as having disorganised attachment, the most problematic type of anxious attachment. Then the families were divided randomly into a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group was given a year of Lieberman’s child-parent psychotherapy, and the control group received the standard community services provided to families reported formal treatment. When the children were two years old, 61 percent of the ones in the treatment group had formed a secure attachment with their mothers, while in the control group only 2 percent of the children were securely attached. Attachment-promoting parenting, Cicchetti had shown, can be nurtured in even the most troubled parents, and the benefit to both them and their children can be profound.”
Other studies reported similar findings.
Still, many experts and schools searched for the traits that improve or predict children’s success in school and life. Next week, when we conclude these series, we’ll look at the results of their efforts.