00:00:00Talk to me about daycare. What's the problem with daycare?
00:00:03Well, daycare, as I said, it's basically separating babies from their primary attachment figures,
00:00:11putting them in institutional settings with ratios of no less than five to one, usually
00:00:16eight to one caregiver to child ratio. And you're basically sending that child's cortisol
00:00:23levels, the research shows that salivary cortisol levels go through the roof. So babies go into
00:00:29high stress states. Now they're separated from their mother's bodies. And they're separated
00:00:33from the person in the world who's meant to make them feel safe. They're in a loud overstimulating
00:00:38setting with babies crying and caregivers, transient caregivers, alternating and some
00:00:44being absent. And it's a new caregiver because they're always out sick. And it's the worst,
00:00:51the worst possible caregiving situation for a child. There are so many better. If you have
00:00:56to work, the best is a mother or father, whoever's the primary attachment figure. The next best
00:01:03is kinship bonds, which are family or extended family members who have a more similar investment
00:01:09to children emotionally. The next best would be a single surrogate caregiver or a nanny
00:01:15or a babysitter who's going to be an alternative attachment figure to that baby, which will
00:01:19provide them with some sense of security and care for them in your home. And if you can't
00:01:23afford that, then share a caregiver. That's a big thing in California where they will split
00:01:28the cost of one caregiver. So that caregiver is now taking care of two or three children.
00:01:32You have now reduced the ratio and that child is being cared for in your home. And you have
00:01:36agency over that. Basically private daycare where you don't have to travel. And it's in
00:01:40your home. And so you have agency over who that person is, how they care for your child.
00:01:45You can put cameras in your house if you want. You can see what they do. You can observe them.
00:01:50You know who's taking, taking care of your children. And your child isn't going into this
00:01:55like high stress state of screaming, crying. If you go into a daycare center, you would
00:02:01cry. I always say to parents, you drop them off and you have this schizoid response where
00:02:07you shut down what you're feeling and go to work. But if you knew what happened in those
00:02:11daycare centers, if you heard those babies cry.
00:02:14What does happen? What happens in daycares? Crying babies because the bottom line is if
00:02:20I handed you eight babies and you're one person, could you soothe all those babies in distress
00:02:27at the same time? I'm not convinced I could soothe one of them.
00:02:30Okay. Now I'm giving you eight. And so what's happening is those one person cannot, you know,
00:02:38parents who have attachment disorders of their own think, "Oh, it's better for somebody else
00:02:44to care for my child because I'm not a good, I can't handle it." Without thinking, who's
00:02:49this person that I've just handed my baby to and how are they going to care for five to
00:02:54eight children and soothe them when they're in distress? And so parents just, it's like
00:02:59they shut down a part of their, it's like they shut down their empathy. It's like they have
00:03:04a schizoid response with empathy where they cannot see their baby's vulnerability or their
00:03:10baby suffering.
00:03:12What are your favorite studies that show how we shouldn't ignore early attachment in childhood?
00:03:20John Bowlby is the father of attachment. You need go no farther than John Bowlby, but you
00:03:25could look at all of the, what they call the stranger situation studies, which they've been
00:03:30doing since the 1960s. They have repeated this experiment over and over. In fact, I was, there's
00:03:38a researcher named Beatrice Beebe in New York. She's very famous. And I was in some of her
00:03:43videos because when I was a young social work student, I did some volunteering in a stranger
00:03:51situation study. Again, this situation is repeated over and over and over again. It's the most
00:03:56well-known attachment security study. And it sort of goes something like this. The mother
00:04:02and baby are playing in a room. A stranger walks in. The mother walks out of the room.
00:04:09The mother walks back in and there's a reunion. It's sort of, they look at the baby's reactions.
00:04:15They look at the interaction between the mother and the baby. The interaction between the stranger
00:04:19and the baby. They look at the reunion between the mother and the baby. So this is something
00:04:23that's done over and over. We have so much longitudinal research on attachment security
00:04:29going back to the sixties. So much research to show that attachment security, if you're
00:04:36not securely attached at 12 months, then 72% of those babies 20 years later will not be
00:04:42securely attached. And that insecure attachment is tied to depression, anxiety, borderline
00:04:48personality disorder. So we have the research, the research has been there for many years.
00:04:55We just, now we have, now we have the neuroscience research and the epigenetics research to support
00:05:01the attachment research.
00:05:03Square this circle with the heritability of attachment style for me.
00:05:09The heritability of attachment style? No. So it's generational expression. So I sort of
00:05:16balk at the idea of an inheritance. It's inheritance of acquired characteristics. So you don't inherit
00:05:23it genetically. You inherit sensitivity genetically, but you inherit through acquired characteristics,
00:05:30meaning your environment. A mother who is insecurely, anxiously attached will more likely produce
00:05:38an anxiously attached baby. A mother who is avoidantly attached will more likely produce
00:05:43an avoidantly attached baby. A mother who has a disorganized attachment and is a borderline
00:05:48personality disorder kind of patient will more likely produce a child who has a disorganized
00:05:53attachment and probably a borderline personality disorder. So we call it generational expression
00:05:59of mental illness. So inheritance of acquired characteristics.
00:06:08I guess it's interesting to think about predisposition versus predetermination with stuff like this.
00:06:15The raw materials are there. I've always thought this about, I'm a big Plowman fan. I think
00:06:21he's one of the best researchers of all time. He's about the fifth most cited psychologist
00:06:27in the 20th century. The guy that, kind of the grandfather of behavioral genetics. I think
00:06:33he rules. And when I think about the first few years of a child's life, it's such a weird
00:06:40confluence of what were the raw materials that you were made of? How would they expressed
00:06:47in the people who gave you them? They are expressed in behavior. And that behavior happens to be
00:06:56the environment. It would be like a cow that cuts its own leg off to then cook it in a stew.
00:07:04You know, like the very thing that it's made of is the thing that's creating it. And that's
00:07:09a fucking horrific analogy. But it seems so unfair. This is what I sort of came back to
00:07:17when I started to think deeply about behavioral genetics and attachment style. That you have
00:07:23presumably an anxiously attached mother has the raw materials to be anxiously attached
00:07:30and then is presenting in an anxiously attached way. Which means that the child that has the
00:07:34raw materials to be anxiously attached gets that reinforced. And all of this happens pre-verbal.
00:07:40All of this happens before you can even remember. I can't remember anything basically before
00:07:44age nine or ten. Really spotty memories. You know the song from Hamilton, you want to be
00:07:51in the room where it happens? The room where it happens is zero to three. That's what it
00:07:57means to be in the room where it happens. And no one wants to talk about the room where
00:08:01it happens because they can't remember it consciously because it's pre-conscious memory, but it's
00:08:05what shapes your personality. So nature versus nurture is always an interesting question because
00:08:14we are born with a constitution, meaning constitution is the amount of aggression we're born with.
00:08:19Babies are all born aggressive. Was it the most aggressive people on the planet? Three-year-olds?
00:08:24Well, no actually. Babies are born dysregulated and babies are all born aggressive. So people
00:08:30get it wrong. People think that babies are born regulated and we dysregulate them by neglecting
00:08:37them or abusing them. No, actually babies are born dysregulated with highs and lows. If you
00:08:44ever just observe a baby, infants that are newborn infants, they will go from being happy
00:08:53one second and zero to 60 in three seconds. Boy, they'll be screaming. Just the most bipolar
00:08:59little blobs. Okay, but they're not blobs. They're incredibly sort of present, but they
00:09:07have no emotional regulation. And it is by that skin-to-skin contact, that calm, soothing
00:09:14tone of voice of the primary attachment figure. Every time the baby's in distress, the mother
00:09:19soothes the baby. The way I would describe it is babies are born like sailing a sailboat
00:09:26in the Pacific in a storm. This is how babies are born. By having a mother physically and
00:09:32emotionally present in those first three years who is calm and present and loving and soothing,
00:09:39you don't want to get the baby flatlining. That's not what we call homeostasis. We call
00:09:45homeostasis more like sailing in the Caribbean on a sunny day. There's waves, but you can
00:09:51manage them and then they're kind of manageable and pleasant. And that's where you want to
00:09:57get the baby. But you cannot do that if you throw your baby into a daycare setting. If
00:10:02you disappear 10 hours a day and go to work and the one person that's meant to help them
00:10:08to learn these things, they're not learning. So we have children who are going into primary
00:10:14school years and then adolescence completely dysregulated, which is why they're all breaking
00:10:21down in this mental health crisis. It's not a mystery, but you have to go back to the
00:10:26room where it happens. But aggression is one of the things that you're born with constitutionally.
00:10:33In the old days, you used to go into a hospital, into a maternity ward. Thank goodness John
00:10:37Bowlby got rid of the maternity wards. John Bowlby went into the hospitals in the UK,
00:10:43and he said, "No, no, no. Those babies, they need to lie in with their mothers. They need
00:10:48to be, they've come out of their mothers." What was a maternity ward? It was a room where
00:10:53they took the babies from the mothers so the mothers could rest and they took them. So now
00:10:59nurses who they didn't recognize this were just mammals, didn't recognize the smell or
00:11:05the voice, couldn't find their mother's eyes because they saw their mother's eyes when they
00:11:10were born because they would show you the baby, "Here's your baby. Now, bye." They would take
00:11:14the baby away, put it in this maternity room with other screaming, crying babies. The mother
00:11:20is sleeping and they're telling the mother, "This is normal." I mean like cuckoo, right?
00:11:26So he said, "Wait a second." He studied cultures all over the world. He wrote a big book like
00:11:31this called Attachment, which I recommend everyone who has a baby to read. And another book like
00:11:36this is big like this called Separation, where he studied cultures all over the world, universal.
00:11:42The idea that attachment security is critical to a baby's emotional regulation and conditioning.
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