Cultural prescriptions on play are strong. A good example of this is Margot Sunderland’s book What Every Parent Needs to Know. Sunderland, who is a child psychologist and psychotherapist, claims that parents need to “activate” the “PLAY system” and “SEEKING system” in their child’s brain. The warnings of not doing so are stark: “Too many children grow up leading ordinary lives, but not…the extraordinary ones that they may be capable of.”
However, there is a lack of strong evidence demonstrating the benefits of play. “The jury is still out” is the verdict of the authors of the academic textbook of developmental psychology, Understanding Child Development. Their judgement is that the evidence for strong cognitive benefits is not convincing, although it is more so for social competence.
They conclude that whatever the developmental consequences of play might be, it is enjoyable for participants and observers, and this is its enduring value. But play is not valued because it is pleasurable. Alison Gopnik notes a puritan streak in America where simple pleasures are turned into “strenuous work projects”; middle-class parents only allow themselves to play if it is part of the work of parenting.
Advice on play can be very prescriptive, Sunderland’s particularly so. She says that children should not be left to get on with playing by themselves or with other children. She makes the bizarre claim that physical play with an adult is better than with a child because “your adult responses, with your more advanced frontal lobe functions, will be more attuning than those of a child.”
If a child is engaged in play, parents should not walk past but must comment. However, they should not ask questions in case they interrupt the child’s flow. Choosing toys for a child and leading play are “very common mistakes” as this apparently activates stress hormones for the child.
Sunderland appears to be blissfully unaware both of the strong drive in children to play and the absence of parent-child play in many cultures. The historical and anthropological record shows that parents do not play with their babies in most societies and parent-toddler play is, as the anthropologist David Lancy puts it, “virtually non-existent.”
Indeed, the !Kung people, upheld by some as exemplars of “natural parenting,” believe that playing with children is potentially harmful to their development. Play is often regarded as a “welcome distraction” which keeps children out of the way so parents can get on with their work.
Lancy describes the notion that children need to be “taught” how to play as “absurd” and “ridiculous.” Conflict-ridden societies are a rare exception to parents involving themselves in children’s play; in these societies violent play is encouraged to socialize children to become aggressive.
In Western culture, it was only in modern times that play activities came to be seen as the preserve of children. Historically play was, in the words of the historian Gary Cross, “a periodic catharsis, associated with fairs and festivals rather than with childhood.” He observes how industrialization led to specialized workplaces, creating a greater delineation between work and leisure. Children, especially from the emerging middle classes, withdrew from the labor market to attend school and began to enjoy opportunities for holidays and play.
While play became associated with children, it took longer for this to become the responsibility of parents. Indeed, playing with babies was once actively discouraged. “Do not encourage your baby to play before the second year” was the advice in a pamphlet called Hints to Mothers Who Want Better Babies, published in the 1910s by the U.S. magazine The Woman’s Home Companion.
The pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt’s best-selling book The Care and Feeding of Children was first published in 1894 and went through twelve revisions by the mid-1920s. He warned that babies under six months should never be played with because this would make them “nervous and irritable, sleep badly and suffer from indigestion and in many other respects.” If young children were going to be played with at all, this should be in the morning or after the midday nap.
He made brain claims of a very different hue to what we hear today. He argued that the “delicate structure” of the brain and its rapid growth requires “quiet and peaceful surroundings” in order to prevent “excessive nervousness.”
It was only in the post-Second World War era that expert advice turned play into a new duty for mothers, wittily described by the psychologist Martha Wolfenstein as the “fun morality.” The historian Peter Stearns partly attributes the growing obligation of parents to entertain their children to the rise of consumerism and the efforts of advertisers (“buy this, take them there, and you’ll know from their joy that you’re a really good parent”).
Other factors were that children were less able to organize their own activities outside the home and smaller families meant fewer siblings to play with.
“Fun morality” neatly encompasses the practical and emotional responsibilities mothers are supposed to assume around play. For some women, playing with their babies and children can be pleasurable and reassuring—as the psychotherapist Rozsika Parker puts it, ‘a beacon of certainty in the sea of motherhood…a sense of being in possession of a reliable tool of the trade.”
But for others, as Parker observes, it is a source of guilt, anxiety and boredom. This guilt can be intensified by expert advice that ignores the possibility that children’s play can be dull for adults. For instance, Sunderland informs us that playing is so rewarding for parents they will inevitably want to do it more: “Once you have managed to activate the PLAY system in your child’s brain, her squeals of delight will soon be so reinforcing that you will both want more playtimes like this.”
Parents, and particularly mothers, are expected to lavish babies and young children with attention. This is another culturally shaped belief, a Good Mother myth specific to the modern era.
What is required from parents today was regarded as most inadvisable in Victorian times. Mothers and fathers were warned that “the restless over-anxiety of parents to excite and amuse very young children” could cause “nervous susceptibility…ultimately becoming the source of great distress of both mind and body.”
This is from The Management of Infancy: Physiological and Moral, a popular Victorian work. It highlights the dangers in making a child ‘unceasingly the object of the exclusive attention of those around it’: ‘Its self-esteem, thus early and assiduously fostered, becomes daily more dominant and exacting; and, in proportion as the infant feels its power, it becomes a tyrant in its own petty sphere.”
Concerns about the potential physical and emotional harm of over-stimulation echoed down the years. Sydney Frankenburg, author of the bestselling manual Common Sense in the Nursery, equated this to cruelty, warning of perils, such as ‘badly-built teeth’:
Over-stimulation, next to deliberate cruelty and persistent neglect, is the most harmful treatment to which a child can be subjected….Among the more serious physical effects of over-stimulation are badly-built teeth, the result of diverting to the brain the blood that should have been used for body-building.
Frankenburg instead recommended some “wholesome neglect”. By 1946, when she wrote the final edition of her manual, wholesome neglect was falling out of fashion. The developmental paradigm was changing. In the words of historian Stephen Lassonde, faith in children’s “innate resilience” was being displaced by the belief that children are “fragile and requiring constant attention.”
This shift had its roots in economic changes and the withdrawal of middle-class children from the labour market. In the sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s memorable and often-quoted observation, “the twentieth-century economically useless but emotionally priceless child displaced the nineteenth-century useful child.” The historian Julia Grant puts it another way – the dynamic changed from children serving their parents to parents serving their children.
Parents were required to be attentive but not excessively so because concerns about giving children too much attention endured. In all seven editions of his manual published during his lifetime (from 1946 to 1998), Dr. Spock warned against “a steady flow of fussy attention” because this can spoil children in two ways:
He grows up assuming that he is the hub of the universe and that everyone should automatically admire him whether he is being attractive or not. On the other hand, he hasn’t been practicing how to make his own fun or how to be outgoing and appealing to people.
From the second edition onwards, Spock included a section on what he called “unspoiling.” He advised mothers to busy themselves for most of the time the baby is awake (“with housework or anything else”). If the baby frets or wants to be carried, the mother should say in a ‘friendly but very firm tone’ that she has jobs to do. Spock concedes that this may be difficult:
It takes a lot of willpower and a little hardening of the heart. To get yourself in the right mood you have to remember that, in the long run, unreasonable demandingness and excessive dependence are worse for babies than for you. They make him out of sorts with himself and the world.
Spock was criticized for being too child-centered and permissive on discipline, charges which were in part politically inspired because of his anti-war and civil rights activism. These accusations were a cause of great frustration to him, both professionally and personally (he told an interviewer “I was a stern, stern father”).
It is a sign of how much attitudes have changed that the political attacks against Spock in the 1960s for producing a permissive “Spock-marked generation” could have any currency at all. Now, Spock would be criticized for advocating childcare practices which fail to “optimize” infant brains.
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Parents nowadays are expected to build their babies—and their brains. Building metaphors pervade advice about babies.
“Remember, you’re building her mind,” an instructor tells Frida, the protagonist of Jessamine Chan’s novel The School for Good Mothers. Frida has been sent to a facility for mothers and has been issued with a robotic child on which to practice her parenting skills. Her instructors school her on strengthening her child-first orientation and stimulating her doll’s curiosity with developmentally appropriate, loving and insightful questions.
The doll collects data on Frida, who is warned any negative feelings will impede her progress and that she must also relax because her heart rate shows she is stressed. Frida was sentenced to a year in the facility because she left her eighteen-month-old daughter alone for a couple of hours. The judge admonished her that her daughter’s brain may develop differently because of this. Chan’s book brilliantly satirizes how cruel and absurd Good Mother myths can be.
The building metaphor was dreamed up by the communication-savvy Harvard Center on the Developing Child and its related body the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. It underpins a narrative which lays at the feet of parents the job of building, moulding and sculpting their children’s brains.
The starting point is “brain architecture,” as a 2007 paper sets out: “The quality of a child’s early environment and the availability of appropriate experiences at the right stages of development are crucial in determining the strength or weakness of the brain’s architecture.” The concept of a house is then deployed to explain the perils of defective brain wiring: “Just as a faulty foundation has far-reaching detrimental effects on the strength and quality of a house, adverse early experience can have far-reaching detrimental effects on the development of brain architecture.”
The edict to ensure children’s brains are wired properly is used to justify all sorts of prescriptions, notably the micromanagement of interactions between parents and children. This is through the concept of “serve and return.”
Serve and return happens “when young children naturally reach out for interaction through babbling, facial expressions, words, gestures, and cries, and adults respond by getting in sync and doing the same kind of vocalizing and gesturing back at them, and the process continues back and forth.” It is claimed that these interactions are “fundamental to the wiring of the brain.”
But “serve and return” does not accord with the ethnographic record, as we have seen. It also makes little evolutionary sense—if parents had spent their time ensuring they smiled and babbled every time their baby smiled and babbled, we would not have got very far. And there is no consideration for the different ways babies and adults relate to each other or space for questions or doubts.
As a parent, how well am I equipping my children for the world if I “return” every time they “serve?” More practically, how are parents supposed to deal with the many other demands on their time and energy if they are constantly serving and returning? The time of parents, particularly mothers, is assumed to be a boundless resource.
Concepts such as “brain architecture” and “serve and return” are shielded from criticism and scrutiny because they are presented as scientific fact. But neuroscience is in its infancy, the science is far from settled and there is much we have yet to learn about the human brain.
What we can say is that the brain is anything but a house built from the bottom up. It is a plastic living organism which changes throughout life. Time-lapse studies on the brain in animals show that, in the words of Hilary and Steven Rose, synapses are “highly dynamic, continually being modified, disappearing and being reformed throughout life….This remodeling capacity—plasticity—is the neural mechanism that enables a person to learn from experience, remember and change how they respond.”
Matthew Cobb points out the limits of metaphors of the brain as a computer or a machine:
Brains, unlike any machine, have not been designed. They are organs that have evolved for over five hundred million years, so there is little or no reason to expect they truly function like the machines we create….The scale of complexity of even the simplest of brains dwarfs any machine we can currently envisage.
A house is a particularly clunky and inadequate metaphor for something as complex and mysterious as the brain. We still don’t really know how simple nervous systems like the gastric mill in a lobster’s stomach work. This demonstrates how far we have to go in understanding how the human brain develops.
Cobb says, “Given our poor understanding of even very simple nervous systems, unravelling the genetic architecture of the human brain and how it interacts with the environment will be the work of centuries.” There is a yawning gap between the state of our actual knowledge of the brain and the confident certainty with which the decrees about building babies’ brains are made.
The strength of the metaphor is cultural, not scientific. It derives its power and credibility from Good Mother myths, not scientific knowledge. The belief that women can sculpt their children’s brains appeals to our desire for neat explanations and simple solutions.
There is a yawning gap between the state of our actual knowledge of the brain and the confident certainty with which the decrees about building babies’ brains are made.The brain claims developed by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child support a thriving early intervention industry which instructs parents on how to interact with their children. Vroom, a global program funded by the Bezos Family Foundation, “provides science-based tips and tools to inspire families to turn shared, everyday moments into Brain Building Moments®.”
What all these programs, campaigns and “tips” boil down to is an admonition to “do more” and to do so consciously with the aim of “optimizing” development. The concept of “optimizing” runs through current orthodoxy about child development, with ‘the more the better’ exhorted implicitly or explicitly.
For instance, the NSPCC tells us, “Right from birth, every time you talk, sing or play with your baby, you’re not just bonding, you’re building their brain.” The implication is that every time you don’t do these things, your baby’s brain is not being built.
The Good Mother myth that the more stimulation a baby receives the better is a logical fallacy. There is a ceiling to how far anything can develop or grow, it cannot be infinite. If this myth goes unchallenged, it means that whatever parents—particularly mothers—do, it is never enough. We will always be found wanting.
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Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths by Alex Bollen is available via Verso.
