• September 23, 2024
• Center for Developmental Psychiatry

There is a great deal of medical evidence that the relationship between a child and their parent has a huge impact on their mental health.

One of the most important studies in this regard was the ACE study, where ACE stands for adverse childhood experiences. What this study found was that the presence of various adverse childhood experiences, such as physical or sexual abuse, incarceration of parents, or drug use in the home, dramatically increased the risk not only for mental health conditions such as depression and suicide attempts, but also for medical illnesses such as heart disease, COPD, and diabetes.

Other studies have looked at the effects of ACEs on the developing brain, finding that these experiences lead to a hyper-sensitization of the limbic system, the part of the brain that deals with raw emotion, such as the amygdala, and a lesser ability of the prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, to dampen and manage these strong emotions.

Said more simply, negative experiences in childhood can prime the brain the be overreactive to negative experiences and to be less able to process and manage these emotions. These changes lead to stronger emotions with less of an ability to dampen them, leading to emotional overwhelm or even a fight-or-flight panicky feeling.

Importantly, these same neurological findings are the very same that we see when we do neuroimaging studies of adults with depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder. In other words, the neurological findings in adults who have undergone adverse childhood experiences are very similar to those found in adults with depression, which may partly explain why adverse child experiences increases the risk for depression.

The corollary would seem to be that shielding our children from these negative experiences would be protective and give them the best fighting chance to develop healthy brains.

There is an age-old debate about nature vs. nurture. What I think is so profound about the above research findings is that they show that nurture actually becomes nature. In other words, a negative or positive childhood emotional environment can be biologically baked into a child’s brain, leading to either a healthy or unhealthy brain.

All of the above relates to the neurological aspect of mental health, but what about psychological development?

The child-parent relationship is also essential for psychological development.

Children are like psychological sponges – they are constantly absorbing their parents’ attitudes, principles, and beliefs about everything under the sun. In addition to concepts of morality and beliefs, children also absorb their sense of self from how their parents view them.

I often say that children see their reflection in their parents’ eyes. Have you ever gotten close enough to see your reflection in somebody else’s eyes? In a figurative sense, that’s how children learn to view themselves. If they see that their parents view them positively, they’ll develop positive self-esteem. If the child-parent relationship is strained by fighting, power struggles, and put-downs, then a child will absorb those negative attitudes about themself.

This is why it can be so important to break the cycle of negative behavior. Children act out their anxieties and anger, which elicits negative reactions from parents, which only leads to more anxiety, more anger, and worse behavior. Unfortunately, these negative interactions can be internalized into negative concepts of self and poor self-esteem.

The good news is that we as parents have the power to break the cycle and imbue our children with positive attitudes. Fortunately, we don’t need to be perfect – just good enough. A British pediatrician and psychoanalyst name Donald Winnicott coined the term, “The Good Enough Mother.” The idea of the good enough parent is that you don’t need to be perfect and to have positive interactions every single time. If a parent is merely good enough, that provides a mostly positive environment that will be sufficient to foster healthy development.

Here’s an actionable recommendation. Try spending some one-on-one time with your children. It can be going out to dinner one-on-one once a week, or once a month. Or it could be just a few minutes every day or two. But whatever it is that you do, it should include individualized attention and be purely positive. It’s so easy to get mired by the day-to-day negativity, but children are so desperate for positive attention and approval from their parents.

Life is busy for all of us, so I would recommend actually blocking off time to make sure it happens. I see it as an investment, for every hour you spend providing purely positive attention, you’ll save yourself another hour or two, or ten, that you would have spent embroiled in power struggles and fights.

Which brings us to the title of this essay. A hug a day keeps the psychiatrist away. If we focus on providing positive attention, praise, and approval to our children, we can do our part to foster healthy neurological and psychological development. The trick is not to get overwhelmed by the immense responsibility and consequences of our parenting and just to focus in on small, actionable steps to make things better.

Again, you don’t need to be perfect – just good enough.