Policy Debates Based On Stubbornly Misguided Science

Rising inequality is not the cause of all early life stress, but it often amplifies the effects. But for those who experience chronic high levels of stress, this phrase is sadly on the mark. We’re learning now that stress is a silent killer, one that affects our very biology, and those of our families and others around us. It’s a haunting story, to be sure. It includes important information about what expectant and new parents can do to minimize stress and thus avoid exposing their children to a lifetime of chronic stress. And it urges all of us to acknowledge that the elevated stress system of others is not just their problem but ours, to solve together. And at the time I entered the field of psychology, that battle had entered a particularly nasty phase. The result would directly impact my chosen field. The social safety net was rapidly fraying, with proposals to roll back the Great Society emanating from the White House. The liberal efforts of the 1960s were widely viewed as having failed, and even if this wasn’t entirely accurate, the political direction seemed to be taking a different tack. Doubts about the costs of social programs, their effectiveness, and even their fairness were rising fast. From this swell of anxiety and uncertainty emerged the outspoken University of Chicago political scientist Charles Murray, who argued that welfare and the social safety net had done little more than encourage dependency.

Teacher I Need You

Nurture wouldn’t go down without a fight, though. Taking an opposite tack, but with equally dire implications, the culture of poverty arguments began to make a comeback to redirect blame away from ineffective antipoverty programs and place it on those who were the most vulnerable. The Case for National Action, there was a resurgent belief that the ills of the underclass arose from cultural deficiencies. In Code of the Street, the sociologist Elijah Anderson argued more persuasively that the claim of presumed deficiencies misunderstood the real cultural imperatives at work. But with rising rates of violent crime and limited progress on child poverty, clearly they hadn’t succeeded in the public eye. The argument that more spending was the answer, that we hadn’t done nearly enough to implement promising programs like Head Start, was met with increasing skepticism, even when there was evidence to support this unpopular rebuttal. This supremacy of the nature view resonated clearly in the work of Murray and others, like the psychologist Arthur Jensen, who explained the better performance of whites in the United States by claiming that they had a superior genetic endowment. The statistics alone fail to capture the disruption created in individual lives, families, and entire communities. In short, we were stuck. We were stuck in policy debates based on stubbornly misguided science. As I soon learned, Fraser Mustard was nothing if not ambitious in his goals. With very little by way of introduction, and no explanation of why he was calling, Mustard asked me if I’d heard about three recent studies that, he said in his probing way, had intriguing implications individually and perhaps even more intriguing implications when considered together.

Beast Of Burden

He started by talking about something called the Whitehall Study. And yet, even with these factors removed from the equation, between 65 percent and 75 percent of the health differences associated with social status were left unexplained. But he was also taken by the fact that these weren’t the usual victims either. Until this point, research had been centered on the health impacts of being poor, but here, the sufferers were clerks in the British civil service. Ultimately, Werner found that those who were able to rebound from setbacks and troubles in early life had benefitted from a close nurturing relationship in childhood or adolescence–either with a parent or with someone who stepped in to fill that role. Lastly, Mustard brought up a theory put forward by the British medical researcher David Barker suggesting that a baby’s nourishment in utero was a crucial factor in predicting aspects of adult health decades later, including blood pressure and heart disease. Until this work appeared, most of the focus was on stressors that happened during adulthood, like difficult working conditions. This research showed that the more important link was between prenatal conditions in utero and later adult health. Barker had examined the detailed medical records of 449 men and women born in Preston, England, between 1935 and 1943, following them from birth until their late forties and early fifties. Although Barker made the link between fetal growth and adult heart disease clear, he did not offer the cause. Werner’s work on resilience offered the glimpse of a solution, or at least a way to ease the harm our early life circumstances might inflict on us. And yet Barker raised the disquieting possibility that there might be factors, in addition to the social elements Marmot had introduced, influencing our health before we’d even entered the world.

Trapped Again

What was really at the heart of these seemingly disparate studies, however, was the notion that one could not simply point a finger at nature or nurture. These findings were beacons signaling that there was something larger and more complicated going on than the intellectual leaders of our day would have us believe. Mustard didn’t yet know what that something was, but it seemed clear that venturing further down this road might offer an alternative argument to the sterile debate raging around us. And I, too, had been working to escape the confines of the national conversation. And perhaps this would offer real help for those whose fates were being inexplicably altered by their circumstances and their genes. He had an instinct that the research we’d discussed was only the beginning of a larger conversation. He wanted to find the missing piece. He also believed that more than just our cardiovascular health could be determined in our early lives. Barker’s work may have only opened a door. We assembled a diverse group of experts, which included an epidemiologist, a couple of neuroscientists, a child psychiatrist, two developmental psychologists, and a primatologist, who worked with monkeys exploring the behavioral and physiological consequences of early nurturing deprivation.