But keep in mind that we've got these things we call norms based on research.
People have, of course, their own layperson's idea
of when babies ought to be doing what they think babies ought to be doing or when
preteens ought to be doing what they ought to be doing or adults, et cetera, et
cetera,
but norms are statistical averages,
right? We were looking at that normal curve where the mean
is what you've got in the middle, right? An average of all possible outcomes.
And most people vary around the mean within
plus or minus one standard deviation. Plus or minus two standard deviations. Once you get
outside plus or minus
three standard deviations, you're looking at some serious deviation from the norm.
But it's not necessarily bad. It's not necessarily good.
It should be taken with a bit of a grain of salt so that if you go, well,
my baby ought to be, you know, talking by 18 months or, you know, babbling her first
word, that's a norm, some might be earlier, some might be later
right? From what I understand my brother didn't really speak until he was almost four
years old.
Now that's a significant statistical anomaly, right?
Now you start to wonder within the context of interpreting it
in the norms whether there isn't something to be concerned about. But when he spoke,
he said a whole sentence.
So apparently he was just waiting until he had something to say.
May I have some more milk please? What?
Babies don't say sentences like that! Well, he was weird.
But he's cool. Just differences, right? So a lot of people get upset
or worried about their child when it doesn't seem to follow what most
other children do. But I would say just use it as a guideline.
Some children walk earlier, you know, babble earlier, some later.
But if you get far enough outside the statistical norms then you might have
something to be concerned about because
little babies can't tell you what's going on, right? You have to look for behavioral
markers,
and you can actually get behavioral markers almost at birth
but certainly within a few days of a thing called temperament which we'll talk about
more
or emotional reactivity which are actually predictive
variables for behavior as late as late childhood and early adulthood.
How we get these norms of these two different kinds of studies, well there's
other kinds of studies but a longitudinal study is one where you take one sample
and you follow it across a longer period of time. I like to use the word long-
itudinal study to help you remember it. It's longer
than a cross-sectional study. Long-itudinal!
It could be a couple months, but it could be a couple years, or even a couple
decades.
There are some studies that have outlived the founders of the studies because
they keep on studying the people
from decades ago and that's kind of cool because what you see is
people as they go through the life span changing
as a result of maturation and its interactions with the environment
and social situations in which they find themselves. But they're
also going to have a problem with that because that's going to create a generational
cohort affect,
right? Is your generation different than my generation? Is my generation different than my dad's
generation?
is my generation different than my grandfather's generation etc.,etc.
Of course it is! Conditions of the world change all the time
but in a global sense we all kind of move through time
as a group of our generation. Now there may be some translation between one and
the other
and some overlap. I know what Twitter is. I'm not that far gone.
My mom now knows what Twitter is but she ain't going to get on it, right?
And now you all aren't going to get on it anymore so there's going to be something else.
So you can see how being a member of a particular generation may affect you.
I believe we've already used the idea of like the post-9/11
scenario. Situations, politically and socially,
have changed dramatically since our 9/11
event such that people who grow up after are going to have some differences
as a result of that event compared to those who grew up before it.
So you have to distinguish between that and one way to look at that is a
cross-sectional study.
So if I'm interested in how behaviors or how concepts that are related to human
experience
emerge over a lifespan, I could look at one group as they go through life
or I could look at a bunch of different people at a bunch of different ages and see how the
variable changes.
But it can also have that generational effect as well.
But looking at them both together gives me the best picture. The problem with the
longitudinal studies, they're really expensive to conduct.
Can you imagine what it might take? You've got to have a a sample size
that's big enough to withstand a lot of what we would call attrition,
people leaving. So if I started out with 30 people,
five years later, ten of them might have moved out of the area.
They might no longer be interested in participating. Ten years later I might be
down to 10 and that's not
going to be sufficient n, number of people in my study,
to give me any kind of statistical power. It certainly isn't going to allow me to say I
have a
a representative sample that I could generalize to other people.
So it would be ideal to have thousands of people which is going to take what?
Probably dozens of researchers and that's going to take money for salaries, for equipment,
for data storage, for the ability to to keep on printing
surveys, to keep on sending mailings, to keep on having
clinical interactions with people to interview them. It's expensive.
But as humans, it's nice to invest in our own outcomes sometimes.
So it's probably worth it. That variable I talked about before that you can measure,
pretty early on,
emotional reactivity is one way of calling it, but it's also called
temperament.
Mood, what kind of mood are you in little baby?
Little baby ain't got a mood you could ask it about, right? But you can see whether
it's crying a lot
or whether it smiles a lot, whether it sleeps through the night or whether it gets
really agitated fairly easily
and you can measure these things with reliability
and with validity, and being able to do that gives you some kind of sense of what
the earliest experiences of a biological organism being in its environment
are. Right? Because as soon as we come out,
we already had environmental experiences prior to being born, right,
you can hear the mom's music, right? They put those little headphones down on the belly.
You can be in there jamming or listening to that old boring classical music
so you'll be a smart baby when you come out.
Mmm, probably not so much but you have obviously the nutrients,
malnutrition, possible teratogens, certain other kinds of factors,
pollutants in the environment that can
be environmental influences on your biological entity
prior to birth. But as soon as you are born, it becomes a very social world,
right? Now you depend on someone to keep you alive.
They don't feed you, you die. Right? They don't warm you, you may die.
If they don't clean you up, that's neglect, abuse,
things like that. So we see that these kids are born with somewhat of a personality.
They have a little bit of individuality when they're born.
They look very similar in a very
broad way but what you have is an
entity that now interacts with its environment. When my
son was born, I asked my brother if he wanted to hold the baby. He's like no that's alright I'll wait until
he's more interactive.
Not everybody's down with playing with the baby,
right? Some people are.... ah a little baby. I love babies.
I like playing with them, and I like sending them home with whoever they came with.
Love the babies to go home, because it's hard to raise a baby.
I love my babies and it was interesting because when my
brother had a child, I waited about six months,
and I called and I said, interactive enough for you, he's like yeah that's funny
cause they are little interactive creatures. They are
active and once they pick up and start running, like my niece, my god they can take off
into the street naked.
You've got to go catch them. And you can't just tie them to a leash,
or you shouldn't. I guess you could. It would be an effective way to keep them,
then they'd probably hang themselves, you've got to be careful with them, they're crazy.
And they are now interacting with you in a way that's not the kind of
rational interaction we believe we're capable of as adults, although a lot of people
engage in some pretty
irrational interactions as adults, right? You can't reason with them.
They need what they need when they need it and when we get to Freud you'll see he calls that like an
ID state of mind and they have to have what they have to have to live
and they rely entirely on somebody else to do it. So when they
come into this world with a little personality, interacts with their
caregivers,
in a thing called reciprocal determinism. It reciprocates. Determinism,
one thing causes another thing which then feeds back onto this to cause a change
which feeds back onto that to cause a change, feeds back onto this to cause a change.
So if you think about it, I got say a difficult baby, well I had a difficult baby. I know
what a difficult baby is.
They scream all the damn time. They scream.
(sound of screaming)
That'll drive you insane and
you don't know what's wrong. They've eaten, they're clean, they're warm, they got
everything... what...
sshhhhh... right? It will tax your nerves. There's a
cult classic called Eraser Head where it's a...
this guy and this baby and the baby's doing that (sound of crying)
and supposedly hours and hours and hours go by and eventually the guy starts hallucinating and
freaking out
cause he can't take it anymore. So you imagine a person that
is a fairly calm person with a lot of emotional resources,
they might be able to care for that child pretty well, right? They can handle
the stress, they can handle the
incessant stimulus of a very averse nature
and respond with caring and kindness but imagine somebody that's
kind of already stressed. A parent whose already stressed. Maybe
they already have a very low tolerance for frustration. Maybe they're very quick
to anger.
Maybe they have violent tempers. Maybe they have problems with finances, problems
with relationships, problems with substance abuse. Who knows what,
and now you've tot the same thing (crying sounds)
and they don't react sweet and kind. They react
poorly, maladaptively, and
inexcusably, and then you get this thing we look at as maybe child abuse,
right, which then causes damage to the kid
who isn't going to get calmer but get more upset and then you have this
feeding back and forth, a potentially unending cycle of negativity
that is explainable.
I would say it explains it, but it doesn't excuse it.
If you can see where I'm coming from, people are like well how can anybody do that?
Well if you'd lived every moment exactly as that person lived and came to that exact moment
exactly the same way
they had, you might understand it,
but you might not be able to stop it. Doesn't mean that they don't need to
stop
and can't be held responsible and shouldn't be held responsible because they should,
but at the same time this reciprocal determinism, an upper-level
kind of thing. I'm walking down the hall, just to give you another example.
I'm talking to somebody. Another person comes along, brushes up against me like
that, knocks me a little bit, and I go
oh OK, cool, sorry. I keep on walking -
probably all will be well. If I'm walking down the hall and somebody comes along the other way
and they go boom, and I say, What the hell's wrong with you man?
What's going on with that? Now, that's changing the situation, right?
And they could go, oh oh oh sorry, man, sorry
and, alright, I thought you should be, alright then
go home
or I could go, what the hell's wrong with you
and they go, me? What's wrong with me? What's wrong with you?
And now we've got something else altogether, you see
one variable changed the other variable
which then changed the first variable and it's reciprocating back and forth until the
termination.
In that case, we're talking about a single situation that will terminate
with us beating the crap out
of each other or somebody pulling us off of each other or arresting us, etc, etc,
or peaceful resolution where people just go on about their way and their business
but when you're looking at being in an environment from childhood on
for years and years and years, whatever the organism emits,
the environment responds to positively or negatively,
which then impacts the organism positively or negatively
in a way that could be self-correcting or
damaging. So that's the concept behind this.