Childhood experience defines adulthood

Child development literature identifies at least two forms of ‘maternal buffering’: nutrition buffer and apparent buffering of aggressive behaviour. In times of food stress, a nutrition buffer is (partially) realized when a mother deliberately limits her own intake in order to ensure that children – usually recently-weaned toddlers – get enough to eat.

Mothers are typically the first to sacrifice in times of distress and the last to experience improvements when supplies are replenished. Apart from the physical environment (health and nutrition), the quality of parenting exerts critical influence on children’s social-affective development, especially in the first year of life.

A buffer occurs through gene-environment (nature-nurture) interaction. For example, a mother’s ability to recognise her infant’s needs and to respond accordingly, is significantly associated with infant’s security of attachment, where ‘attachment’ is the infant’s tendency to seek comfort, support, nurturance, and protection selectively from a small number of caregivers.

 Studies also show that adequate maternal care during this critical period activates various pathways that buffers (or moderates) the otherwise genetically vulnerable offspring from later maladaptive behaviour (e.g. alcoholism, drug and substance abuse, violence, and crime).

Antisocial behaviour

The various pathways through which positive attachment buffers a child’s predisposition to antisocial behaviour need not detain us here. References include (a) Developmental Origins of Aggression (2005) by Richard E. Tremblay, Willard W. Hartup and John Archer, (b) Handbook of Attachment (2016) by Jude Cassidy and Phillip R. Shaver, (c) Nature and Nurture: The complex interplay of genetic and environmental influences on human behaviour and development (2004) by Cynthia Garcia Coll, Elaine L. Bearer and Richard M. Lerner, (d) The Cambridge Handbook of Violent Behavior and Aggression (2007) by Daniel J. Flannery, Alexander T. Vazsonyi and Irwin D. Waldman, and (e) The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease (2010) by Ruth A. Lanius, Eric Vermetten and Clare Pain.

In particular, Lanius, Vermetten and Pain (2010) observe that “traumatic events of the earliest years of infancy and childhood are not lost but, like a child’s footprints in wet cement, are often preserved lifelong. Time does not heal the wounds that occur in those earliest years; time conceals them. They are not lost; they are embodied.”

In many instances, we never outgrow childhood, but only learn to live with what our childhoods have made us. The pervasive social, emotional and moral deficits may, in part, be the bitter harvest of inadequate male support that affords women time and resources to meaningfully bond with their children. An offspring of high birth order (younger) may be more at risk due to parental material and emotional exhaustion from taking care of its older siblings.

John T. Mukui, Nairobi