Jay Belsky and Terry Moffitt are two professors of human development and co-authors of the new book, The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life, a collection of insights gleaned from years of studies about childhood development. To begin our conversation, Jay and Terence discuss the longitudinal studies that they and their colleagues have used to track people over decades of their lives to show, among other things, how aggressiveness and shyness in childhood end up impacting adulthood. We then discuss the limitations of the famous marshmallow experiment, and what more expansive, more expansive longitudinal studies have shown about the importance of self-control in achieving a successful adulthood.
00:31:09.100We found that if, you know, if a child is going to have a poor adulthood with an antisocial
00:31:16.520lifestyle, it's almost always that started before they started school.
00:31:21.840So then there's another kind of a kid who gets involved with a little bit of delinquency
00:31:26.200and some testing the limits and, you know, drinking too much with peers and maybe having,
00:31:32.420you know, a car crash or something like that.
00:31:34.900That kind of thing is more like normative, normal adolescence.
00:31:39.100Kids who get involved with that kind of thing, it's a good way to break the apron strings.
00:31:43.660It's a good way to prove to the other kids that you're not a mama's boy anymore.
00:31:47.600You know, go out with some friends and get into a little bit of trouble.
00:31:51.260But because they had good performance at school, decent grades and warm relationships with their
00:31:58.940families beforehand, before they hit that crazy period of adolescence, they tend to be able to pull out of that again.
00:32:07.520They've got what it takes to have good, warm relationships when they become an adult.
00:32:11.900They've got what it takes to achieve in life and go on and finish their educations and succeed in the labor market.
00:32:19.620But there's a sort of just a period during adolescence where kids just will act out.
00:32:26.060And I don't think we should make too much of it.
00:32:28.100A lot of my research has been following kids through this adolescent period and pointing out that the vast majority of kids who break the law are not destined to be lifetime criminal offenders.
00:32:40.980They're just having a little too much fun.
00:32:43.580And therefore, that suggests that policing and juvenile justice system policies should take this into account.
00:32:52.760So, you know, our juvenile justice system was set up on the notion that you should just identify on the basis of the current crime and choose the punishment to fit the crime.
00:33:02.840But in fact, if you look developmentally back at the history of the child, you can differentiate between a child who has been doing everything wrong from the outset versus a child who has just recently kind of gone off the rails and made a bad mistake.
00:33:19.000And so now more and more justice systems have these policies in place and are working really hard in the courts and in the community policing as well to differentiate between these two kinds of kids and really divert those kids who have a good future ahead of them away from criminal charges, away from a criminal record, away from the courts, and certainly away from prison.
00:33:44.980So I think it's a real step forward in how we do juvenile justice.
00:33:49.000One of the longitudinal studies you were all taking part in or looked at here was daycare, kids in daycare, and like the effect daycare had on them later on in life.
00:33:57.160I know a lot of parents, when they start, when they have kids and they got to go back to work, that's something that they start, they kind of fret about, wring their hands, like, oh, what's going to happen if we put our kid in daycare?
00:34:09.320Well, I think in order to understand the research, we have to put it once again in context or at least development in context.
00:34:15.940Next, we live in a society here in America, in contrast, let's say, to a place like Norway, where I've also done some daycare research, where we don't really have a childcare system.
00:34:26.400It's up to every parent to figure out this problem for themselves.
00:34:30.260While we have paid parental leave for somewhat in California, we don't have it in other places.
00:34:36.380And so that's the first thing to consider.
00:34:38.560The second thing to consider is over the last 30, 40 years, a major change has taken place in how non-poor Americans raise their children.
00:34:47.940And that is that if a child is going to be in a non-parental care arrangement, be it family daycare or daycare center or even a nanny, when they're four years of age, it's because they started in the first year of life, in the first six months of life.
00:35:01.920So we end up with a population of children who are getting some kind of non-familial care from the time they're three, four, five, six months of age until they start school.
00:35:15.140That is quite a different experience than certainly when I grew up or even the immediate generation thereafter.
00:35:21.920What we found when we started the large-scale American daycare study, the mantra among daycare advocates and progressives, for the most part, was that it's quality stupid.
00:35:35.140That is to say, as long as the quality of care was good, everything was fine and dandy.
00:35:39.840And by quality, we meant that the caregivers were attentive, responsive, stimulating, affectionate, the kind of care you'd want for your children.
00:35:47.580Well, it turned out the story was not that simple.
00:35:53.520In fact, it turned out that the quality of care that a child experienced over the first four and a half years of life informed the child's cognitive and language development.
00:36:03.760And better quality care was somewhat modestly related to better cognitive and language development.
00:36:09.600At the same time, what we discovered was that the more time you spent in care, hours, days, weeks, months, from birth through four and a half years of life, you were somewhat more likely to be aggressive and disobedient.
00:36:25.540By the time you started school, in childhood, and in adolescence, you were also more likely to be impulsive and a risk taker.
00:36:34.420Now, again, these child care effects were small in magnitude per the individual child.
00:36:41.320But what we have to think about is all the children we're talking about.
00:36:46.740So, as I like to pose it, or dislike to pose it, is what's more important, a bigger effect that affects few or a small effect that affects many?
00:36:55.020And one of the things some other work has discovered is the more kids in a kindergarten classroom who've had lots of child care, the more all the kids are somewhat aggressive and disobedient.
00:37:06.640Now, having said that, let me qualify it in one important way.
00:37:10.080Families turned out to be more important than child care.
00:37:13.580And invariably, that's because it's not only how marriages get along, how people parent, what sibling relations are like, how organized the household is, but also what the genetics parents pass on to their children.
00:37:29.820So, all this is not to say that child care doesn't matter.
00:37:34.780But it's to keep it, again, in the context of a broader ecology.
00:37:38.660What is the society's policies about child care?
00:37:41.040What kind of family foundations is that child growing up in?
00:37:45.300And intriguingly, when we go to Norway, where children don't have any child care other than family care for their first year of life, and thereafter, almost all of them go into high-quality center-based care, where caregivers receive a decent wage and have training, we don't see these negative outcomes of child care anyplace like we see in America.
00:38:07.960So, we don't want to come to the conclusion that daycare and the separation of children from parents inevitably leads to something.
00:38:17.720Rather, we need to appreciate that in the current context and the continuing context that we have here in America, then it's a different story.
00:38:27.360And here we see both good news, good quality care is good for children's cognitive and language development, and bad news, lots of time in care, which has become normative, seems to undermine, broadly speaking, self-control to some extent.
00:38:41.780Okay, so let's summarize things here a little bit.
00:38:44.420The reason there's a negative effect in the form of increased aggressiveness, disobedience, when you look at child care in the U.S., is that American parents are more likely to put their babies into daycare or child care right after they're born.
00:38:57.280Whereas in Norway, you don't see that problem because there, the parents get a year of parental leave, so the kids aren't going into daycare for at least a year.
00:39:05.800So it seems like starting later, spending less overall time in daycare mitigates possible negative effects to daycare.
00:39:13.440But another takeaway from your research, too, was that if you had to put your kid into daycare, having a supportive family life can also mitigate possible negative effects, too.
00:39:22.380So, yes, if you can secure good quality care, or even if it's not the best quality care, and you're going to get a lot of support for the children at home, I wouldn't say don't do it.
00:39:32.560But I think we have to come back and think about this from a collective society level, and that even if these children are only becoming a little bit more aggressive and disobedient, what happens when you're a teacher with 20 kids in a classroom, and instead of having two or three of them a little more aggressive and disobedient, you have six or seven of them.
00:39:54.800And, in fact, what the evidence is beginning to show is that even affects the kids who've had little daycare.
00:40:01.460It's almost like you have a kind of behavioral infection that spreads.
00:40:05.940I don't want to be catastrophic or hyperbolic about this, but I want to get us thinking about not just effects on the individual, but effects on many individuals, and then we put all these individuals together in classrooms and schools and neighborhoods and the like.
00:40:24.100In your research, you also looked at genetics a bit.
00:40:28.760How did genetics influence these outcomes in these longitudinal studies?
00:40:32.840Some of the work that we did was actually quite celebrated at the time.
00:40:37.480This was around the year 2000, 2002, 2003.
00:40:41.340We published papers that identified a specific gene.
00:40:46.700So, one of those was the MAOA gene, which was thought to be, in mice, a risk factor for aggression, and the serotonin transporter gene, which was thought in humans to be a risk factor for depression.
00:41:02.480So, we looked at those two, and what we found is that those genes didn't have much of any association with the study members' outcomes,
00:41:11.240unless the study members were experiencing an adverse home environment or life environment.
00:41:19.260So, the children who had the MAOA gene that was supposed to be at risk for aggression, unless they were exposed to a lot of maltreatment and harsh physical discipline, it wasn't really related to their behavior.
00:41:33.500It seemed that more like these genes worked in terms of determining sensitivity to the environment.
00:41:41.780Now, I have to put out a cautionary note there, is that at that time, between 1996 and 2003, when we were doing that work, one could only study one gene at the time.
00:42:32.340But those findings were very interesting from the point of view that they attracted a lot of public attention then and were celebrated in the media.
00:42:42.380They were published in the journal Science, which is a very prestigious and discerning journal.
00:42:47.940And that helped the news spread around that genes were simply not deterministic because up until that point, everybody had been assuming if you found a gene that was associated, it was the cause, like the gene for homosexuality or the gene for bipolar disorder or the gene for violence, the warrior gene, that kind of thing.
00:43:10.140And what our research was showing was that the genes were actually pretty weak and how they worked depended upon the environmental setting that the child was growing up in.
00:43:21.680So, I think that's the lesson that we take away from those studies at that time.
00:43:27.720So, yeah, genes play a role, but the environment also plays a role.
00:43:31.000Let me just add that this is exactly the theme we've been expressing throughout this, that knowing about the child's behavior or the other child characteristics, in this case genetics, the meaning and the importance or the influence of those personal characteristics are going to depend upon the context in which that child grows up.
00:43:53.320The gene for X, Y, and Z will not yield X, Y, and Z, usually, if the environment doesn't sustain the expression of X, Y, and Z.
00:44:04.580Temi and I have a friend who wrote a great book about the biological determinants of crime, and he's not a criminal, yet, as he points out in his book, he meets almost, he repeatedly meets criteria for having biological factors that dispose one toward crime.
00:44:22.420So, it becomes a very interesting question, and I think the early study that Temi was referring to began to shed light on this, which is that if we're not taking context into consideration, then we're going to be pretty limited in just looking at characteristics of children, especially if those are measured at one point in time or with a single gene.
00:44:42.060So, what's the future of this research?
00:44:43.640I mean, are there any questions that you're exploring now?
00:44:46.060One thing I thought today was, do you know if there's any studies getting started about how COVID, like all the things that happened in the pandemic, school shutting down, kids having to go home, how that will affect them later on in life?
00:45:01.700And in fact, when we get off of this Zoom call, I'm going to be having one with the Canadian longitudinal study of all the children growing up in Western Canada, which has done just that.
00:45:11.880We've been madly collecting data on how the family's experience of COVID has been and how it's affecting the children's adjustment.
00:45:20.760So, yes, there's been quite a scramble to collect data on this, and as you may imagine, it's pretty complicated.
00:45:30.860It's a time when people are stressed and uncomfortable.
00:45:34.080The last thing they want to be doing is talking to a researcher.
00:45:36.580So, it's been a challenge to collect the data, but we need to have information on how the pandemic has affected family relationships, how the pandemic has affected anxiety levels, sleep, appetite, how the pandemic has affected the children's ability to study and keep up at school, whether they've been going to school or staying home,
00:45:59.460and who in the family has actually tested positive for the virus, who's been sick, and has anyone in the family passed away because of COVID.
00:46:09.120So, there's a lot of data to collect and very little time to do it in, and it's also a moving target.
00:46:15.980So, you can't ask the family these questions just once.
00:46:19.020You need to go back a couple of months or three months later and ask them again because the pandemic is lasting a long time, and people who had no difficulty with it three months ago are now having serious difficulties because of it.
00:46:33.720And we're starting to see some fascinating findings, and there'll be more.
00:46:36.680But I think that we can generate some reasonable hypotheses here based on everything we've said so far, which is that even children who you might anticipate are most vulnerable to the isolation, the lack of schooling, etc., from the effects of COVID,
00:46:55.440to the extent that they find themselves in supportive, nurturing families that have the resources, psychological, economic, and otherwise, to compensate for the losses of experience,
00:47:07.220they're going to do better than other kids who start out with the same vulnerabilities, but don't get that.
00:47:13.540So, it's really when you're carrying, when you're vulnerable yourself for genetic reasons, for temperamental reasons, for behavioral reasons,
00:47:22.260and then your family is also limited, it's a chaotic household, it's maybe a poor household, it may be a household in which mother and father are not getting along, or siblings are not getting along, now you get a double whammy.
00:47:38.380And so, again, the moral of the story is, look at the child's development in the context of who he or she is as a biological and a behavioral organism,
00:47:48.400and in the context of the world that child is living in.
00:47:53.500In this case, it's going to be often a sheltering-in-place family.
00:47:58.240So, Brett, can I turn things around and ask you a question?
00:48:43.480Was there any particular chapter or finding in the book that you liked best or that resonated with you?
00:48:49.640Well, actually, the section about self-control was really good.
00:48:53.160And we actually, so my family, every week we have like a family meeting night where we start off, like we go talk about what's going on in our schedules, get that synced up.
00:49:01.260And then we also share like a short message.
00:49:02.960And we, I did the message about self-control.
00:49:06.540And I had the kids read the William Wordsworth poem.
00:49:20.660Like, they understood what this romantic poet was getting at.
00:49:24.200Like, what happens to them as a child, as a kid, can have influence as, you know, basically, like my son said, like, I'm raising my future self.
00:49:35.120And I'm like, being a kid, you got it.
00:50:39.280Yeah, I remember when we first did the paper on self-control and it came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
00:50:46.560And quite a few journalists were contacting me and asking me, well, what do you do to foster self-control in a child?
00:50:53.200And I don't have any children, so what do I know?
00:50:55.900So, I'm calling up Jay and going, Jay, tell me what to say.
00:50:59.500And he said, well, something that families could do is instead of just giving a kid their allowance and just, you know, giving them the money, handing them the money, you could have a family meeting and you could try to anticipate all the things that are going to happen during the week that they could spend that money on and have them choose which ones are the most important to them.
00:51:19.780So, that, you know, so they won't end up at the end of the week having the most fun and exciting thing, but they're already out of money.
00:51:26.120So, just planning how to spend one's allowance with your dad turns out to be the best training in self-control.
00:52:01.140Let me make a suggestion to modify that a bit, and if you want to, is, and I've thought about this as a teenage pregnancy prevention strategy, which is, let's say you give your kid $2, okay?
00:52:15.520You can say, well, $2, nobody gives their kid $2 anymore.
00:52:25.980You can say, you know, that's yours to spend.
00:52:28.000But everything you put in, up to a dollar in a savings account, I'll match it.
00:52:36.220So, now, and what you're doing is inducing consideration of the future.
00:52:42.200And this is where it comes back to the fact that, you know, often kids who grow up without self-control are never given the opportunity to acquire control.
00:52:54.080They're not structured to provide, but the family's not structured to provide planning.
00:52:59.980So, why would you, you know, delay gratification as the marshmallow test for something that's promised later on versus something to get right now if promises haven't been kept?
00:53:11.680If, when you followed the rules, you haven't gotten the payoffs?
00:53:14.720So, I think a Warren Buffett, the strategy would be, you get $2, up to a dollar, you put it in your savings account, I'll match it.
00:53:25.060Because now you've got a $3 allowance, not a $2 allowance.
00:53:40.620My guests, they were Terry Moffitt and Jay Belsky.
00:53:42.360They are the co-authors of a book called The Origins of You, How Childhood Shapes Later Life.
00:53:46.560It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:53:48.660You can also check out our show notes at aom.is slash childhood, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:54:01.240Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
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