The Unmentionable Reason Human Wellbeing is on the Rocks

The collapse of wellbeing in the USA continues. The reports year by year show a downward trajectory of wellbeing, especially for those under age 65. In comparison to members of all other advanced nations, USians of all ages and lifeways are at a health disadvantage, mentally and physically. And this was true even before the pandemic. Give thanks if you are over 65.

What happened in the last half century? Many sources for the decline are mentioned— single parent families; the breakdown of social trust; the “Western” diet of processed food; gun proliferation that leads to the highest source of child death; drug addiction and overdose; stress from racism; lack of support; overwork; a spotty, unjust health care system; environmental racism; toxins in foods, water, soil, air, consumer products. The list is long and each likely contributes to the decline in wellbeing.

But a deeper source of illbeing typically goes unmentioned: the mismatch between what babies need for optimal normal development and what is provided to them. Babies (0-3 or 3.5 years) must be distinguished from children because of babies’ incredible vulnerability and malleability—towards wellbeing or illbeing.

Why babies? Because that is when and where each person’s health trajectory begins, in the shaping of the immune, endocrine, respiratory, stress and other systems from the interaction between innate maturational schedules for these systems and baby’s experiences. A plethora of studies are demonstrating the effects of prenatal and early postnatal experience on brain development and lifelong health.

Some awareness of the lasting effects on health of self-reported adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are starting to penetrate the public’s awareness (e.g., abuse). But babies’ adversity is often minimized. You know the drill: “If you respond to a baby, you’ll spoil them. Don’t let the baby manipulate you. Babies must be taught independence. They won’t remember.” Myths all.

Babies’ 24/7 needs for calming companionship are unmentionable among most adults because it is considered disrespectful of parent choice and, god-forbid, “mom shaming”—as if mothers are responsible for everything that happens to a baby. Not.  Of course, the reasons that babies are undercared for have to do with the priorities of plutocracy (keep feeding the superrich with the sweat of the poorer), patriarchy (control women and mothers by isolating them in nuclear families), capitalism (make investors happy), racism (‘I don’t want healthcare for all because they THOSE PEOPLE will have it too’), and the dog-eat-dog ideology that comes across our screens and airways every day. There is no alternative (TINA). “Get yours while the getting is good!”

The aforementioned socio-political structures were spread through conquest by the Roman empire and by subsequent colonizing empires. We think these ways, based in trauma, are normal and necessary. Not. They are contrary to our 99%, the millions of years spent in egalitarian bands (still in existence as models) with everyone sharing and the wellbeing of all maintained, with no coercion but integration with the ecological community. There is no sacrificing of anyone’s needs over another’s.

Importantly, in hunter-gatherer civilization, babies’ needs are a priority.

Just like other animals, humans evolved a developmental system to optimize normal development, a nest. Evolved nests foster wellbeing in the young. When the early life nest is disrupted, it undermines wellbeing for the long term, whether you are a puppy or an elephant or a human. Separating puppies or kittens too soon from their mothers leads to an anxious, dysregulated individual. Rats, who are intensively studied by researchers, have nests that involve a lot of touch and breastfeeding. Rat pups who are undernurtured in the first 10 days of life, a fifth of their lifespan, ever after cannot control anxiety without drugs. Anything new freaks them out because the sensitive period for turning on genes that control anxiety did not receive the care needed to turn on those genes. Like Harlow’s monkeys who were deprived of their mother’s touch, they can’t get along in a species normal manner.

Human infants are even more immature at birth than the animals whose needs we recognize, resembling fetuses of other animals until about 18 months of age. Thus, human infants need much more nurturing than other animals and for longer. After all, it takes decades to reach adult maturity. In our ancestral context, hunter-gatherer civilization, adults are wise and convivial with humans and non-humans.

The human genus has been around for around two million years and homo sapiens for perhaps 300,000 years. During all that time and until recently across the world, the same type of child raising practices were common. Only in the western world, primarily in the last few thousand years have these practices degraded, made worse with industrialization, religious manuals advocating breaking a child’s spirit and behaviorist psychology promoting the same, along with the rise of scientism* applied to child raising.

We have to look across the sciences and across time and place to perceive what is missing in the lives of babies, adolescents and adults today and why it matters. We must understand our species-normal capacities, including our egalitarian and democratic tendencies, and how they can be thwarted in early life. We will examine these things.

But, what then? How do we heal from our own experiences of ‘undercare’ in early life? We’ll address that too. The overall aim is to help one another become our best selves to face the mega-crises that unhealed, but rationalized, trauma has created.

Meanwhile, check out the Breaking the Cycle film (6 minutes) for a quick overview of some points I’ll delve into in the future.

*Scientism refers to the shapeshifting belief that only through experiments can we know anything true. It is “shapeshifting” because those who support it apply it unevenly and, for example, don’t behave as if they need experiments to know how to live their lives. Unfortunately, many experimental studies done with babies are flawed and mislead naïve readers. The populace can also be misled by parenting advocates who mistakenly or purposefully ignore study flaws—it takes some knowledge to assess good/poor methods. A basic flaw for most studies involving baby experiences and their effects is that they do not use our evolved baseline for how to treat a baby, the evolved nest.

 

Kindred Resources

Learn more about Babies and the Rights of Babies

Discover the Baby’s Bill of Rights Poster

REFERENCES

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