Nature vs Nurture: Raising Difficult Children

You're Not the Cause, but You Can Be the Solution
Eight-year-old Jessica wasn't an easy child. A bossy, fussy girl with only a few friends, she frustrated and alienated even the people who loved her most. She threw tantrums over seemingly minor issues - "These socks hurt my feet!" or "This juice tastes yucky. I won't drink it!" She became angry when her parents tried to leave her with a babysitter, often throwing herself down on the ground and screaming furiously. At bedtime, she demanded that her parents stay with her. Her teachers reported that she seemed overwhelmed, unable to concentrate. After school, she came home complaining that "Katie and all the other girls hate me. And my teacher thinks I'm a dummy. I can just tell." Yet Jessica was bright and articulate. At times, she could be a warm, funny girl who loved to giggle at knock-knock jokes, cuddle on the couch with her mother or father, and indulge her passionate interest in horses. But most of the time she was an unpredictable "tyrant," said her weary parents.

The most frequent complaints I hear from parents fall into roughly five patterns, one of which is a personality like Jessica's, often described as "fussy," finicky, and oversensitive. The others, also described in depth here, are children who are self-absorbed, defiant, inattentive, and aggressive.

When confronted with one of these patterns, parents understandably may feel confused, overwhelmed, and, not infrequently, infuriated. What worked for an older child may not work now. Advice from friends, family, and parenting books often sounds good at first, but in the day-to-day battles it somehow loses its effectiveness. Talking out your feelings, finding compromises, and setting firm limits is easier said than done with a defiant four-year-old who has been screaming for a half-hour and screams even louder when you try to talk to him or help him quiet down.

Over the years, our thinking about children who face challenges in controlling their feelings and behavior has swung from one extreme to another. At one point, the accusing finger was directed at parents - somehow it was their fault that their children were impossible. If parents were more rigid, less rigid, more tolerant, or less tolerant (depending on the expert), then their children would be "good." This view didn't make sense to many parents, although it did provoke their guilt. Parents were further confused because they could see that their parenting worked for one of their children, but not for another. Many parents had an intuitive sense that one or another of their children was especially challenging, but they were stymied when it came to helping that child.

The pendulum then swung to the other extreme: experts came to believe that children are simply born this way. A great deal of recent research on "temperament" assumes that key personality traits are mostly fixed, grounded in biology. In this view, we are for the most part destined to be extroverted and confident or inhibited and introverted. Irritability, aloofness, aggressiveness, or fussiness in children is seen as part of one's nature, and parents, while an important influence, have no choice but to learn to live with such characteristics in their offspring. Adjusting their own behavior and trying to fit in with their child, so as not to make the situation worse, was certainly helpful, but this strategy left many families believing that they were limited in the ways they could help a child become more emotionally flexible.

Such extreme views polarized "nurture" (it's mostly the parents' doing) and "nature" (it's mostly biological). Not only are such views unable to account for all behavior, they are of little use to parents.

While many people studying child development recognize that biology and upbringing work together, this recognition has not been sufficiently applied in advice to parents. I would like to propose a potentially more optimistic way of thinking about dealing with challenging children. This new approach focuses on how "nature" and "nurture" work in tandem. It recognizes that even seemingly fixed characteristics, such as a child's tendency to be fearful when presented with a new stimulus, can be significantly altered by early, and even by later, caregiving experiences. Early care, in fact, not only can change a child's behavior and personality, but can also change the way a child's nervous system works. For example, we now know that certain experiences early in life can actually determine how some cells in the nervous system will be used - for example, for hearing, vision, or for other senses. In the same way, certain experiences can enhance a child's emotional flexibility, while others may increase rigid tendencies. We can look at a child's emerging personality traits and pinpoint, to some degree, the types of experiences each youngster may require. Children, in this view, can change. They can become more pleasant, flexible people. They can become easier to live with - less rigid, more trusting. Life with an initially challenging or "difficult" child doesn't have to be a perpetual battleground.

Why are some children more difficult than others? Our research, as well as research by many others, such as Jean Ayers, T. Berry Brazelton, Sybil Escalona, and Lois Murphy, has shown that children come into this world with individual differences in physical makeup. Some children, for example, have bodies that just don't feel comfortable, and so they tend to be fussy, irritable, negative, or withdrawn. Even in the early months of life, we have found, babies can reveal unique traits in specific sensory perceptions and in the workings of their motor systems. Contrary to the belief that all of us experience basic sensations similarly, we have found that children vary considerably in how they perceive sights, sounds, touch, odors, and movement patterns. A child may be overly sensitive and overreactive or undersensitive and underreactive to a given sense. One may be best at taking in and decoding information through a certain sense, while another may have difficulty in comprehending information through that sense. We have observed that some children are gifted in their ability to plan complex behaviors and movement patterns, while others find even the most elementary sequencing of motor acts, such as putting their fingers in their mouths, a most perplexing task.

Imagine driving a car that isn't working well. When you step on the gas, the car sometimes lurches forward and sometimes doesn't respond. When you blow the horn, it sounds blaring. The brakes sometimes slow the car, but not always. The blinkers only work occasionally, the steering is erratic, and the speedometer is inaccurate. You are engaged in a constant struggle to keep the car on the road, and it is difficult to concentrate on anything else. Needless to say, you would probably be irritable!

That's how some challenging children feel much of the time. Because their bodies may not work the way they're supposed to, they are constantly striving to keep their "car" on the road. They may feel out of control, frustrated. Let's look again at Jessica. As a baby, she was highly sensitive to touch, sound, and smell. Every time her mother stroked her, she squirmed and cried. It didn't feel good. When anyone tried to brush her hair, give her a bath, or change her diaper, it hurt. She didn't like new clothing because it felt too stiff. Wool sweaters felt too scratchy. Clothes washed with certain detergents had a chemical smell. She wanted only soft, old cotton clothes. Even sounds could be painful. Daddy's deep, melodic voice saying, "Hey, my little angel!" sounded like a fingernail on a blackboard.

What was her experience with the human world? Pretty unpleasant. Her reaction was to cry, as if to say, "Leave me alone!" These difficulties played out at every stage of her development. As she got older, she was at times inattentive and easily distracted because she was so sensitive to the array of sounds, sights, and smells coming her way. When she found herself in a busy classroom for the first time, where kids bumped up against her sensitive skin, startled her with yells and screams during recess, and sometimes intruded into the well-defined, protective space she had set out for herself, her reactions ranged from tantrums to fearful avoidance. Jessica, everyone agreed, wasn't an easy child.

While with Jessica and many other children, biology is important, it isn't destiny. We have found that how parents relate to their children can make a huge difference in how youngsters feel about themselves and respond to their world. Imagine, for example, that because of her sensitivities to touch and sound, baby Jessica was easily overloaded and, therefore, fussed much of the time. Her mother, having similar tendencies, reacted to Jessica's long tantrums with irritability and, more often, with anger and intrusiveness. When Jessica's mother was very frustrated, she sometimes withdrew emotionally. Jessica's father also felt frustrated. When his attempts at even gentle play overwhelmed Jessica, he began staying at work longer because he found it hard to face feeling so unsure of himself and his parenting skills.

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