The other day I was hanging out in a park near my home that has a gorgeous fountain. It seemed like everyone in the neighborhood was hanging out in the park that day. The rule in Portland is, be outside on sunny days. A child, around a year and a half, was crying right behind me and I heard her father say in a somewhat punitive way, “OK! Into the stroller with YOU!” I turned to see him strapping her into the stroller, while she screamed. One part of me, the trained-by-the-culture side was sympathetic to the feelings of the beleaguered dad, but another side of me that has been educated in a new understanding of brain development was dismayed. Instead of seeing the scene from the father’s point of view, I saw it from the child’s.

First of all, children that age do not have the capacity to soothe themselves. The ability to soothe ourselves when we are in distress comes from a mature limbic system. The hippocampus doesn’t start sending the signals needed until the child is three years old. So from birth to three years old, children need a calm, soothing adult to project tranquility back to their brain. If a child does not have the presence of a peaceful adult, they will cry and cry themselves into a state of intensity and at that point, their brain, in a stop gap measure to quell the storm will signal the adrenal glands to pour cortisol into it. Cortisol does bring the brain back to stasis, but at the price of damaging some of the brain cells. The occasional crisis will not cause a problem, but a child who cries to a state of intensity every day will often suffer some brain damage.

ADHD, anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, personality disorders, depression, and addiction are very commonly the result of this kind of brain damage.  Margaret Meade and other anthropologists like her, who explored indigenous cultures, wrote that they never heard a child cry. To us, this news sounds like a fantasy, but in a culture where there is a lot of free time and many adults take turns holding and gazing at the baby, a baby doesn’t have a chance to need anything for a long time.

Which brings me to the second thing I noticed as the father was placing his child into the stroller.

From a young child’s perspective, the moment he walked out of her line of sight, he essentially disappeared. Babies can’t tell that someone is still around when they can’t see them, that’s why peak-a-boo is such surprise. So, not only was she crying into a state of panic, she felt deserted as well. I can only imagine the extreme desolation she felt, ripped up by emotions she could not control and abandoned by the only person who could help her. No human being does well when feeling abandoned and caught in intense emotions, but babies are especially fragile.

Yet, this was a good father. As were all the parents walking around the park with strollers, pushing their lonely charges. In contrast, note that researchers estimate that the median time between feedings in certain indigenous cultures is THIRTEEN minutes. Not surprisingly, depression, anxiety, etc. are not common issues in cultures with large extended families, women free to breastfeed four times an hour, and lots of one-on-one attention with children.

I can imagine how shocked someone from such a culture would be to watch, as I did, that father continue to push his bawling child around for the next half hour.

Self-compassion comes from understanding that our normal childhoods were tough on our human soul. And that’s for those of us lucky enough to have what this culture passes for normal. If we come from damaged people, then we had even less tranquil attention than most, in fact we might have experienced almost continual trauma.

Tomorrow: The Healing Presence