Attachment & resilience, the antidote to toxic stress

Last week we talked about how deleterious unmanaged stress, particularly in childhood, affects people’s long-term health and outcomes. This week, some proven interventions and rats.
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Attachment & resilience the antidote to toxic stress

Strong attachment bonds with caretakers and a fostered sense of resilience can improve kids’ outcomes even in stressful situations. It’s like how a wave pool goes from terrifying to fun with the addition of a floaty.

What is attachment? One place to start answering this question is an example with the aforementioned rats. Always with the rats….

Michael Meaney’s lab found themselves staring at rats for hours on end. This in an era before cell phones (You’d be a meanie too if you stared at rats all day…).

They noticed that some rat moms did a lot of licking and grooming (let’s call this LG because we’re going to refer to it a lot), particularly after a baby rat had gone through a stressful situation like being taken out of the cage and forced to run a maze by its overlords. Other momma rats acted like zombies and did very little LG. They started to notice performance differences between the two groups of offspring, how bazaar.

Thus, they studied high and low LG rats 100 days out, with the now mature rats from high LG mothers. The kiddos were much more adventurous, better at mazes, more social, less aggressive, and lived longer than the low LG group. We’re also pretty sure they’re nicer to baristas, but the science on that is pretty sketchy. In a follow-up experiment, Meanie’s group took babies from low LG moms and gave them to high LG moms. You know what, those kids had better outcomes. And theeeennnnn…when they looked inside their little rat brains, there were biological differences down to the DNA level on how the hippocampus processes stress hormones in adulthood. All that licking and grooming impacted gene expression (as evidenced by the adoption experiment). L to the G.

Piles of experiments show something similar in kids. Without the cage and mazes, though…plenty of cheese, we’re guessing. So, let’s change LG to attuned because LG would just be weird at this point.

Attuned parents have securely attached kids who fare better in the short-run (more adventurous and able to cope with setbacks). Resilience abounds, yielding better long-term outcomes. In one experiment, researchers looked at the attachments of infants (securely or anxiously attached). Years later, when in elementary school, researchers asked their teachers to evaluate the students (teachers did not know who was in which group). Those with secure attachments were significantly more likely to be described as: competent, better at engaging with peers, and more able to form close friendships. Those labeled as anxiously attached were more likely to be described as mean, anti-social, and immature.

This summary by Paul Tough has really stuck with me:

“I spent a lot of time…mulling over…what it might mean to be a high-licking-and-grooming human parent. Those high-LG [rats], I realized, were not helicopter parents. They didn't hover anxiously. They weren't constantly licking and grooming their pups. They did their LG-ing mostly in one very specific situation: when their pups were stressed out. It was almost as if the dams were trying to teach their pups, through repetition, a valuable skill: how to manage their inflamed stress systems and restore them to a resting state. The equivalent skill for human infants, I think, is being able to calm down after a tantrum or a bad scare…if there is a human equivalent to high-LG parenting, it involves a lot of comforting and hugging and talking and reassuring…[kids] need something more than love and hugs. [They] also needed discipline, rules, limits; someone to say no. And what [they] needed more than anything was some child-size adversity, a chance to fall down and get back on his own, without help.”

Way more on attachment in two weeks. And some on resilience shortly.

Alicia Lieberman asks us to consider, “How difficult is it for parents in poverty to have secure attachments? Living with uncertainty, poverty, and fear requires a superhero to provide secure attachment. A mother’s own attachment history makes it even harder. If a new mother had insecure attachment as a child (regardless of class), it would be exponentially harder to provide secure attachment.”

But the hopeful take: parents can break the cycle. Some can do it on their own, but most need help.

How to break the cycle? Several attachment interventions are helpful. For example, just ten home visits from a social worker taught caregivers how to respond calmly, attentively, and warmly to infant queues. With this limited intervention, the children's cortisol levels were indistinguishable from normal. Results show that attachment can be nurtured by even the parents who struggle most. Results can be profound. Early childhood interventions show a 7-12X return on investment; that is, for every dollar spent on the program, $7-12 was created in things like higher participant incomes and lower costs associated with social services.

If you’re looking for help healing your own attachment injuries, or leveling up your attachment game, two recommendation: Seed and Sew or Whole Hearted Parenting.

How fortunate are we that folks stare at rats all day so our kids' lives can be more fulfilling! See you next week!