Happy Ever After by Paul Dolan

Author:Paul Dolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241284452
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

YOUR KIDS’ HAPPINESS

Once you have children, how should you bring them up to give them the best shot at being happy? Well, the short answer is that we don’t have reliable data to know for sure. Carrying out randomized controlled experiments with families is almost impossible. There is a strong narrative that a child ideally has both a mum and a dad, but especially a mum. What evidence there is shows significant advantages to maternal care in the early years of a child’s life, but researchers often fail to compare this with only a father being present in these early years, therefore failing to distinguish a mother as the superior caregiver.35 There is a wealth of evidence supporting the importance of the father’s involvement on positive child development.36 In addition, a recent review of existing studies on child outcomes conducted in Melbourne has shown that children of same-sex parents do just as well as other children on a number of well-being measures.37 The idea that women should devote their lives to childcare makes sense if the alternative is neglect. But if, in a mother’s absence, the child receives high-quality care from others, then positive outcomes become more likely.

The way in which you interact with your children is crucial to their development. And here social class plays a big part. In the early years, it’s all about communication. One study in the US assessing the household communication of forty-two families with kids found that over the course of one week, kids from middle-class backgrounds were exposed to 215,000 words, compared to 62,000 words for kids from working-class backgrounds.38 By age three, class-related factors accounted for 36 per cent of the variance in vocabulary. Moreover, the middle-class mothers tended to communicate for the purpose of prompting conversation with their children whereas mothers of low socio-economic status tended to communicate for the purpose of directing behaviour. This further widens the ability gap between children from middle- and working-class backgrounds.

Research also suggests that how a mother interacts with her child can alter the development of serotonin functions, which are associated with empathy.39 People who report being neglected by their parents as children have been shown to exhibit decreases in central serotonergic neurotransmission as adults, which is thought to make them less empathetic towards others.40 Animal studies employing stringent experimental methods have demonstrated similar findings; that is, separating newborn babies from their mothers influences serotonin receptor expressions.41

Parent–child interaction can also influence your subsequent romantic relationships. This is what Attachment Theory, formulated in the late 1960s by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby, posits. According to Bowlby, we belong to one of three attachment styles that we display as children: secure, ambivalent and avoidant.42 These were categorized according to how two-year-old children react when their mother leaves the room and then returns. Securely attached infants typically experience distress when their mothers leave the room but seek them out on their return and are easily comforted. This attachment style is representative of most of the population. Ambivalently attached children

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