Your grandmother was right: Love really does build brains

By Emmett Francoeur, MDCM, FRCPC

It used to be that grandparents’ wise comments about raising children were referred to as “motherhood and apple pie,” which somehow belittles that advice. An Iroquois grandmother’s counsel that fathers should never yell at their wives while they are pregnant was cast aside. But Dr. Jean Clinton, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, makes clear that today’s neuroscience actually supports much of this advice: Naysayers have been repudiated by neuroscience.

In the foreword to Dr. Clinton’s new book, Love Builds Brains, Dr. Robin Williams talks about when she realized how upstream interventions—policies that improve fundamental social and economic structures—are crucial to preventing morbidity in children. Dr. Richard Tremblay—Canada Research Chair in Child Development and a professor at Université de Montréal—recognized that “upstreaming” could help prevent aggression and ultimately therefore imprisonment.

Now Jean Clinton delivers the strongest of arguments for the need to zero in on early years to nurture and promote the mental health of children. She describes how the brain’s plasticity makes it exquisitely capable of change, particularly in the early years but also over the lifespan. She does so with the special touch of a mother-grandmother-physician who knows about “feeling felt” and the need for the “drip-by-drip” consistent and sensitive responsiveness of the loving caretaker.

In Love Builds Brains, which was inspired by the countless talks Dr. Clinton has done across Canada and internationally, she informs us of the molecular-level epigenetic mechanisms that make parental influence a miraculous reality. Humankind’s vocation, as Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire asserted, is to become someone “who acts upon and transforms the world, and in so doing, moves toward ever new possibilities of fuller and richer lives individually and collectively”.

Dr. Clinton does not support the concept of “stuffing the duck”—filling an empty child with information—but rather sensitive, customized, loving support of a child as they blossom into their own creative selves.

She reminds us that one-third of Canadian children arrive at preschool vulnerable in at least one critical developmental domain, something the late Dr. Clyde Hertzman showed through studies using the early development instrument or EDI. Dr. Hertzman asserted that if we could bring childhood vulnerability down from 30% to 10%, we would increase a country’s economic growth by 20% over the work-lifetime of that group. Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman has shown the same astonishing numbers. Dr. Clinton lays out the blueprint for achieving these transformational changes in the pages of her book.

Dr. Clinton builds effortlessly from the work of others, including Bowlby’s attachment theory, and makes it all come alive in an organized way when using the welfare and growth of children as the outcome. Resilience is reborn in this book, not as a special gift given to a lucky few, but as emanating from the everyday magic of ordinary, normal human resources in the minds, brains and bodies of children (there is that epigenetics again), adaptive behavior which arises from interactions within and between individuals and their environment.

Adolescent development expert Stuart Hauser describes the characteristics of resilience as: personal agency and a concern to overcome adversity; a self-reflective style; and a commitment to relationships. In targeting resilience as a way to teach a sense of connectedness to their children, parents give them hope and shift the focus from the child behaving well to a child who will grow up loving well.

Dr. Clinton speaks about how children need a sense of purpose, belonging and meaning, all of which are often within the child, waiting to be discovered by both children and adults. In Cree culture, the strong belief is that each child has a story to tell; it is our job to take the time to hear those stories. If we address children’s emotional and social development, they learn better. A recurring Jean Clinton theme is her determination to demonstrate how to stand in awe of children; she is the poet laureate of this skill.

Dr. Clinton does not forget practical needs of clinicians. She outlines several excellent interventions:

1. Neurorelational framework (Dr. Connie Lillas) works by helping adults learn to read a baby’s cues and make sense of the environment and relationships that have an influence on the baby
2. Circle of Security gently teaches parents about attachment, creating a secure base for the infant.
3. Watch Wait and Wonder is an infant-led approach which helps parents and infants discover a new way of relating to one another.

Nor are adolescents forgotten. She quotes Michael Fullan’s book Deep Learning: Engage the World Change the World. When adolescents give back to others, they utilize a social drive leading to changes in their brains in the way they interact with others.

I used to believe I was immersed in brain development theory in my day-to-day life, but Dr. Clinton sets another standard. Granted, she might not mention authors such as Michael Meaney, Tom Boyce, and Stella Chess, but each chapter offers up a wealth of ideas and further readings to keep one busy for a long time. Her style of “asking questions”, of using novel phrases such as the “serve/return” of warm interactions, easily engages her readers. One can read each chapter as a stand-alone, the messaging is that clear. My only suggestion is that an audiobook should be provided so that we can all hear the dulcet Scottish tones of Dr. Clinton’s delivery. That way her brilliant message of hope, wisdom and wonder would be even more spectacular.

Dr. Emmett Francoeur, a developmental paediatrician, is currently the Executive Associate Chair (Partnerships and Network) and Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at McGill University. He is also a past president of the Canadian Paediatric Society and member of the CPS Early Years Task Force.

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