Children Operating Manual

All children are different, but just like an adult’s body, environmental circumstances will more often than not be the origin of dysfunction and disease. However, this is a just a guide and not intended to be taken as gospel. 

Getting Pregnant

Vitamin K deficiency: insulin resistance, inadequate insulin and hyperglycemia, low testosterone and fertility in men, high androgens in women, poor exercise performance or tolerance, and cancers of the liver, lung, and prostate.

• Less well established but plausible signs and symptoms of moderate B6 deficits include cognitive decline, depression, anxiety, insomnia, hypoglycemia, oxalate kidney stones, and the morning sickness of pregnancy.

Both copper transport as well as ceruloplasmin’s ferroxidase activity are exhibited in the testicles, primarily helping in the processes of spermatogenesis. Thus, copper is important for male reproductive systems. Additionally, the copper-dependent cytochrome c oxidase has an integral role in energy metabolism in the testes, enabling the production of ATP needed for sperm motility. Essentially, if a man is deficient in copper, their sperm does not swim as well. On top of that, a copper deficiency can also make the sperm more vulnerable to oxidative stress and DNA damage. When couples are having difficulties getting pregnant, it might be due to inadequate copper status. Foods high in copper like liver, oysters and clams are also considered fertility-boosting foods.

Fertility and Fasting

Couples trying to get pregnant should not eat in too short of a window. Women that are menstruating need sufficient leptin signaling form body fat to the brain for ovulation. For men, reducing food intake too much will drop fertility. The brain wants to know if there are adequate conditions for fertility and reproductive success.

Pregnancy

Nutrition

You should keep vitamin A below 10,000 IU per day during the first eight weeks of pregnancy due to a possible risk of birth defects unless blood measurements, signs, and symptoms justify higher intakes to prevent deficiency.

• Pregnancy lowers 25(OH)D, calcium, and PTH, and raises calcitriol. These are probably adaptations to supply calcium to the fetus while minimizing the risk of bone loss to the mother. Total calcium may drop as low as 8.2 mg/dL, which is below the typical bottom of the reference range.
• Pregnancy may induce a mild acidosis that keeps ionized calcium normal while total calcium drops. PTH is typically between 10 and 25 pg/mL. Alterations to 25(OH)D and calcitriol mainly occur in the second and third trimesters, where 25(OH)D is cut in half and calcitriol is doubled.
• Biotin deficiency during pregnancy may contribute to birth defects.
• Pregnancy raises the need for biotin, and about one-third of mothers become temporarily biotin deficient during pregnancy.

Should Pregnant Women Fast

Whatever the case may be, the mother should focus on being as healthy as they can to promote the health of her child in the future. Quality food, stress management, enough movement, and sunlight are all essential. Fasting can be a good addition but only in a dose-specific manner and definitely not all the time. I would still recommend having a daily fast of at least 14-16 hours to promote the general health of both organisms. Then once a week you may have a 20 hour fast but definitely not any longer than that during pregnancy.

Women may react to time-restricted feeding more negatively than men because of their hormonal sensitivity. It makes sense physiologically as well because they need to be the caregivers and have to actually give birth to offspring.

Research (to be organised)

Vitamin d exposure minimizes high bp in children with mothers with preeclampsia: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201005144631.htm

Vitamin D deficiency linked to higher risk of ADHD

Obesity during pregnancy may result in lower IQ and cognitive development in sons: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191223122808.htm

Pregnant women using cosmetics containing parabens: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200212111438.htm

No safe level of caffeine consumption: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200824203250.htm

Healthier diet and exercise for healthier children: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200911110804.htm

Behaviors That Decrease Testosterone (& Cortisol): Parenting & Prolactin

Expecting fathers have an almost 50% decrease in testosterone, estradiol doubles, and cortisol drops 3-fold. All explained by an increase in prolactin. The assumption is that this is to prepare for long nights with no sleep. Mothers also have an increase in prolactin.

Post-birth prolactin levels have to do with how much physical and odor contact the parent has with the child.

Giving Birth

Caesarean vs. Vaginal (Holobiome and microbiome) 

Fecal transplant can help microbiome of C-section babies: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201001113558.htm

Breast/Formula Feeding

Hunter Gatherer Note

• Breastfeed your infants, if you can. Adults who were breastfed have better formed palates and better-aligned teeth compared to those who were bottle-fed; and breast milk has in it all manner of nutrients and information that we do not understand. It may, for instance, contain cues with which the infant entrains his sleep-wake cycle. Thus, if you do breastfeed, and also pump milk to feed the baby at other times, feeding your baby milk that was pumped at the same time of day as it currently is could be helpful in getting your baby to sleep when you want him to. Put another way: beware Chesterton’s breast milk.

https://www.foundmyfitness.com/topics/breastfeeding

Drinking sugary drinks while breastfeeding – cognitive development issues: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/752207

Infants given formula containing fat globule membranes performed better cognitively: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/stories/bukino

Increased brain volume with high omega-3 intake: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/30/4/2057/5621493?login=true

Difference in breast milk concentration impacts growth up to 5 years old: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/514429 

Sleep

Children’s mental health affected by sleep deprivation: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/childrens_mental_health

Light directly affects the production of melatonin, which is secreted by the pineal gland during hours of darkness and plays a crucial role in the sleep/wake cycle. A newborn baby doesn’t produce melatonin until 3 months old. It increases until adulthood and starts to decrease after middle age.   

Melatonin is more phasic than cyclic in babies. They aren’t born with a sleep wake cycle. Their eyes are sensitive and only really see a cloudy image. You want to avoid night time bright light for them. Every 90 minutes they go through temperature cycles, which will be altered by light exposure.

Get their room into an overall circadian environment that is reflective of night time temperature change and a calming state during.

When the baby goes to sleep, try to get 45 minutes or a full 90-minute cycle. As many phases as possible. Try to mirror their cycle to avoid affecting their development and to ensure you make up for lost sleep.

Use NSDR protocols or other mindfulness techniques to allow mental rest and recovery. Also, get sunlight exposure first thing in the morning if possible. 

Sleep Needs by Age:

• Newborns (0-3 months): 14-17 hours
• Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours
• Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours
• Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours
• School-age children (6-13): 9-11 hours
• Teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours
• Younger adults (18-25): 7-9 hours
• Adults (26-64): 7-9 hours
• Older adults (65+): 7-8 hours

Babies and bright light

Melatonin is more phasic than cyclic in babies. They aren’t born with a sleep wake cycle. Their eyes are sensitive and only really see a cloudy image. You kind of want to avoid bright light for them.

Every 90 minutes they go through temperature cycles.

Get their room into an overall circadian environment with temperature change and calming states during nighttime. Try and maintain your ANS into hyper states of alertness during sleep time.

When the baby goes to sleep, try to get 45 minutes or a full 90-minute cycle. As many phases as possible. Try to mirror their cycle to avoid affecting their development.

Use NSDR protocols and sleep when you can. Also, sunlight exposure.

Teens and puberty

Puberty is the fastest rate of aging. Prioritize the duration of sleep for your teens. Their temperature minimum will probably be later in the morning. Don’t deprive them of sleep. It won’t be as bad if they miss the morning sun.

Breathing and Facial Symmetry

• Discourage thumb sucking, extended bottle feeding, sippy cups, and mouth breathing
• Look into and learn more about orthotropics
• Avoid orthodontics, since getting braces can significantly compromise your airway
• Use a holistic dentist
• Consume foods rich in vitamin K2, such as egg yolks, liver, butter, and natto, or consider a K2 supplement
• Chew each bite of food 25-40 times and avoid pureed foods. Keep head upright to activate the mastication muscles better
• Oil pulling
• Buteyko for kids

Food

(NOT SUPPS)

Calcium:

• 4-8yo need 1000mg of calcium per day.
• 9-13yo need 1300mg
• Must be consumed with adequate levels of vitamin D and K. The source is important too. Kids digest organic raw dairy, goat’s milk, camel’s milk, and A2 dairy far more easily than commercial cow’s milk, and without risk of gut damage unless a true food allergy is present. The best sources are sardines with the bones, hard cheeses like cheddar and pecorino, raw milk, full-fat fermented dairy products like yogurt and kefir, and dark leafy greens like collard greens, kale, and Swiss chard.

• In children, early calcification of cartilage interferes with growth. Soft tissue calcification can be caused by hypercalcemia or hyperphosphatemia. In the urinary system, it may be caused by high levels of calcium or phosphorus in the urine, known as hypercalciuria and hyperphosphaturia. Excesses of vitamin D, calcium, and phosphorus can cause it. Nevertheless, calcium at healthy intakes protects against kidney stones because it prevents excess phosphorus absorption and favors net movement of phosphorus into bone rather than kidney.

• Females, especially adolescent girls, are generally less likely to get adequate amounts of calcium from food. Dairy contributes to 75% of the calcium intake in the American diet. It is common for children to replace milk for sugary soft drinks during the most critical period of their peak bone mass development. Replacing milk with carbonated soft drinks high in phosphorus has been associated with a rise in bone mineral density loss and fracture risk. Soft drinks that contain phosphoric acid have been a major source of phosphorus over the past quarter century.

Iodine:

• Thyroid hormone regulates growth factors, such as growth hormone, which contributes to cognitive and physical growth. Iodine deficiencies are associated with stunted height and lower IQ scores. Best sources of iodine are seaweed (kombu, kelp, and nori) and milk.
• He sends his kids to school with sardines, anchovies, mackerel, or herring wrapped in nori.
• 4-8yo need 90mcg per day
• 9-13yo need 120mcg per day

Iron:

• Supports neurological development and blood cell formation. Best sources are red meat, organ meats, such as chicken liver, and shellfish (especially clams). The iron bound to heme, the non-protein part of hemoglobin and the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood, is more bioavailable than iron that is not bound from plant sources. Iron from non-meat sources, such as spinach, lentils, beans, and cashews, should be combined with high sources of vitamin C, such as citrus fruits and dark leafy greens, to improve bioavailability.
• BG (Boundless) sends his kids to school with thinly sliced chunks of steak; organic elk, bison, buffalo, or beef jerky; braunschweiger; pemmican; or headcheese; along with kiwis, orange slices, and steamed vegetables.
• 4-9yo need 10mg per day
• 9-13yo need 8mg per day (for girls, prior to menarche)
• Iron concentration in a teenager’s brain is linked to cognitive abilities: https://massivesci.com/notes/iron-concentrations-brain-teenagers-development-anemia/

Zinc:

• Supports physical growth and immune system development. Research suggests that 5-6mg of supplemental zinc per day can reverse delayed growth in kids. Other research suggests that zinc supplementation in zinc-deficient kids under the age of 5 can reduce diarrheal infections and pneumonia. The best sources are red meat (particularly lamb), oysters, crab, and lobster.
  • Zinc is needed for synthesizing many neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and melatonin. Taking zinc has been shown to improve sleep in humans.
  • Zinc homeostasis regulates the central nervous system. Dysregulated zinc homeostasis and excess synaptic zinc concentrations, typically induced by inflammation, can cause neurotoxicity and mitochondrial damage. Zinc also regulates the activity of the adrenal glands and cortisol levels.
• Zinc supplementation has been shown to improve insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome in obese children.
• Children in certain U.S. middle- and upper-income families, have been seen to have impaired taste acuity, low hair concentrations of zinc and poor growth. This is due to “picky eating”, but technically, it is due to not eating zinc-rich animal foods like red meat. When giving these children zinc at 2 mg/kg of body weight, their ability to taste, appetite and growth rate improves.
• 4-8yo need 5mg per day
• 9-13yo need 8mg per day

Vitamin A:

• Severe vitamin A deficiency can cause night blindness and permanent blindness and mild deficiency increases the risk of upper respiratory tract infection, while adequate amounts can enhance eye health, bone health, and balanced hormones. The best sources are liver, cod liver oil, eggs, full-fat dairy, sweet potatoes, kale, spinach, and carrots.
• Less common: Kidney stones; disrupted circadian rhythm and an inability to use light therapy to entrain a healthy circadian rhythm; autoimmune disorders; asthma and allergies; food intolerances; low sex hormones; and delayed puberty.
• A common breakfast is scrambled eggs with cheese, sweet potatoes, and kale. Dinner includes roasted carrots, yams, or steamed greens.
• 4-8yo need 400mcg per day
• 9-12yo need 600mcg per day

Vitamin B12:

• Critical for the growth and maintenance of myelin sheaths. If the sheaths deteriorate or you don’t consume sufficient vitamin B12, the result is cognitive decline or poor cognitive development. Red meat, poultry, fish, and shellfish.
• 4-8yo need 1.2mcg per day
• 9-13yo need 1.8mcg per day

Vitamin C:

• Supports collagen formation, connective tissue health, recovery from injury, and immune system function. Fruits and vegetables, such as oranges, lemons, limes, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower.
• 4-8yo need 25mg per day
• 9-13yo need 45mg per day

Vitamin D:

• In the absence of frequent exposure to unfiltered sunlight, vitamin D must be obtained through diet. The mushroom, meat, fish, eggs, and cod liver oil (grass-fed and wild). Research suggests that the animal-based sources of vitamin D are about 5 times more effective than the supplemental form of vitamin D3.
• Meat and mushrooms, but still supplement with vitamin D if genetic testing reveals, in response to sunlight, naturally lower production than most people do.
• Kids of all ages need 15mcg per day

Vitamin K2:

• Responsible for the proper absorption of calcium and for shuttling calcium into your teeth and bones. Natto, egg yolks, grass-fed butter, cream, ghee, liver, gouda cheese, kefir, sauerkraut, and emu oil.
• Adults’ doses tend to range between 50-200mcg per day
• Kids can consume the low-end range of that

Choline:

• Assists the liver with processing fat and toxins and acts as a precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, making choline a critical part of enhancing memory formation and skill acquisition. Egg yolks and liver.
• 4-8yo need 250mg per day
• 9-13yo need 375mg per day

EPA and DHA:

• Omega-3 fatty acids are crucial for brain development. EPA and DHA are responsible for improving memory, mood, neuronal health, and learning. Cold water fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, and herring, as well as salmon roe
• 250-500mg of combined EPA and DHA per day

Omega 3 as an intervention for childhood behavioral problems: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150515134827.htm

Saturated Fat:

• A stable fatty acid that’s less prone to oxidation, which makes up the cell membranes. Saturated fats are also responsible for shuttling proteins between cells, stimulating the release of neurotransmitters, and forming memories. It is found in dairy products like ghee, butter, full-fat milk, and cheese, and in fatty cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. Cell membranes also depend on oleic acid, which is found in high quantities in extra-virgin olive oil.

Cholesterol:

• Necessary for the production of steroid hormones, such as estrogens and progesterone, and vitamin D. While the liver naturally produces cholesterol, consuming dietary sources of cholesterol like egg yolks and shrimp allows your kids to also consume other beneficial nutrients, such as choline, omega-3 fatty acids, and protein.

Prebiotics and Probiotics:

• By producing postbiotics, probiotics provide kids with vitamins and nutrients and make existing nutrients more bioavailable, they also support healthy digestive processes and even secrete mood stabilizing neurotransmitters like serotonin. Probiotics can be found in fermented, “living” foods like raw dairy, natto, kimchi, sauerkraut, and kefir.
• Prebiotics in the form of soluble and insoluble dietary fiber allow beneficial bacteria to thrive and promote healthy bowel movements. Prebiotics are found in high quantities in jicama (Mexican yam), Jerusalem artichoke, garlic, onions, leeks, under ripe bananas, and dandelion greens.

Should Children Do Intermittent Fasting

A growing child needs adequate amounts of IGF-1 and mTOR to promote the proper development of skeletal muscle, bone strength, jawline, brain growth, and the right hormones. That’s why it’s even more important to make sure young kids get things like quality grass-fed meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, and even whole milk, preferably from the mother’s breast. It’s not a good idea to deprive children of these essential nutrients, especially during the most critical periods of growth.

Children already produce a lot of growth hormone, which helps them to build new tissue, muscles, and develops their brain. As you age this surge of growth begins to drop. Fasting is an amazing way to promote growth hormone production and increase longevity. But this may not be necessary for young children. However, when you look at the body composition and health of most children today then you can see a growing concern with diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, and other problems. Fasting can cure a lot of those diseases but it’s still not going to compensate for an unhealthy lifestyle.

Children should learn how to follow their hunger more intuitively and recognize when they actually need fuel and when they’re simply craving junk food. This teaches them to be more flexible while still dipping into a fasted state.

Deliberately enforcing time-restricted feeding onto children isn’t necessary and parents should simply eliminate behaviors of snacking, binging, sedentarism, and cravings. If there’s one thing you could do to benefit your child’s future metabolic health, then it would be not teaching them to eat sugar and candy. It’s just conditioning that can be easily prevented by replacing it with only whole foods. Your kids learn their behavior from you and those around them. So, make sure you are a good role model first.

Dealing with Picky Eaters:

Break up a variety of food for children while they are young so that they can grow up with a broader palate. You can even chew them up and spit them out for them. Kids eat what the adults are eating or go hungry. Even at restaurants.

• Encourage your kids to take at least 5 bites of a dish before deciding they don’t like it. If you have multiple kids, make it a competition to see who can eat the most of the dish.
• Egg yolks can be added to everything from spaghetti sauce to mac and cheese without changing the flavor.
• When they contain the right ingredients (like kale, green bananas, egg yolks, kefir, Brazil nuts, cod liver oil, and frozen fruit), smoothies are an excellent way to provide essential nutrients in desert form.
• Smoothie leftovers make good ice pops.
• Instead of cooking rice in water, cook it in bone broth, add some trace minerals such as a pinch of salt, and throw in some kelp granules for added iodine.
• Although they’re nutrient-void on their own, rice crackers are great vehicles for tuna salad, liver pate, cheese, and hummus.
• Fish sauce made from fermented fish is full of glutamate, which can help picky kids develop a taste for umami flavor of many novel foods. We begin including fish sauce in our children’s dishes at an early age, and as a result, they developed an Asian-like palate and appreciation for this flavor, which is seldom found in Western diets.
• Sticking scallops or steak on toothpicks or skewers instantly makes them fun to eat.
• Bribing kids with small prizes for eating healthy food can work temporarily.

Developmental Movement (True to Form)

From the get-go, children mimic their parents. What the adults around them do becomes the stimulus for their own development. So, while the inherent instincts for right movement will unfold in little bodies, they can be moderated, modified, twisted, and turned as the little bodies copy the movement patterns exemplified in the big bodies around them.

Motor skills problems can hold back a child’s physical and mental development in profound and lasting ways. Clearly, where such imbalances and incorrect movements are concerned, the more time that passes, the tougher it is to undo the pattern and replace it with correct movement.

Mostly, the personal training will consist of challenging and providing encouragement for the baby’s natural curiosity about the physical world. You almost can’t start this too early.

Of course, at every monthly checkup, your family pediatrician will be tracking the baby’s progress on the expected developmental milestones— rolling over, sitting up, head control, starting to walk, and so forth. What is equally essential is that the baby achieve key motor skills milestones by the time he or she becomes vertical, after which it becomes much more difficult to tease out any asymmetries or imbalances. Keep in mind that it is during this crucially important first year of life that the spine assumes its natural curve, and parents-as-personal-trainers can help with that by applying a mix of stretching, massage, positioning of their infants, and, above all, engaging with the infants in challenging ways so that the babies’ bodies recruit the muscles they need and develop those muscles as they should.

When placed on their bellies, babies lift their necks to peer around, igniting neck muscles, pulling the bones of the neck, and helping to build the natural s shape curve in the spine. Face, head, and neck development follows—and in due course, they’ll be able to raise their torso as they prop themselves up on their arms with the elbows bent. This develops arm muscles and strengthens the back muscles that hold the spine in its natural curve. It all means that by the time they are vertical, they are in balance, and the symmetry will persist as their muscles and bones lengthen as they mature.

Few things are more of a detriment to this development than parents overusing the car seat, the ubiquitous essential that seems to define contemporary parenthood, as a general carrying vehicle. The car seat was devised for a single purpose and should be reserved for that purpose only: travel. It keeps the baby propped up and safe in the car, but it also compresses the baby’s body and lets his or her head wobble.

So, are parents better off carrying their baby? Yes, and it even offers the opportunity for some resistance training as you lift and hold the bundle that is your child. Once the baby is walking, however, he or she should not be carried too much. Inconvenient as it may be to help a just-walking baby walk when you have chores to do, it’s a stimulating challenge to the baby. Every step, every view—whether he is gazing up, or looking at eye level, or examining the floor or path—ignites those sensory stimuli, and getting those stimuli charged while at the same time the baby is resisting gravity makes the walk, slow though it may be for the parent, a plus for the baby’s physiological foundation and mental acuity.

Kids in the early grades in school are forced to be sedentary for a good part of the day—unfortunately, at a time when their bodies are fine-tuning motor skills, coordination, endurance, and balance.

Depression and sedentary behavior linked in adolescents: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30034-1/fulltext#seccestitle10

Exercise helps obese children learn and think better (especially math): https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110210111309.htm

Germs

Studies show that a kid’s snot harbors bacteria that, when eaten, help strengthen the body’s immune system.

The Hygiene Hypothesis:

In 1989, Strachan proposed the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ that considers increased use of antibiotics, antiseptics, vaccines and sterilized environments a potential reason for the rise in autoimmunity among children. Children who aren’t exposed to bacteria from dirt, animals, grains, and other sources are much more likely to develop autoimmune disorders later in life. C-section newborns are more prone to suffer from all chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity and asthma. Early-life antibiotic use is associated with inflammatory bowel disease. The rise in insulin-dependent (Type 1) diabetes is paralleled with a decline in bacterial infections, which supports the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, i.e., that exposure to bacteria may provide protection against the onset of autoimmunity. Obesity, which is generally a marker of poor diet, is a risk factor for autoimmune diseases.

• Dr. David Strachan: Hay fever and eczema were less common in larger families, and that children in those families were exposed to more germs through their siblings. Studies have now confirmed this as well as the protective effects of living on a farm.
• A 2003 article in a journal of immunology, Dr. Graham Rook proposed the “old friends” hypothesis, arguing that we have become so dependent on the microbes that coevolved with domesticated mammals and pets that they are still have similar microbes on our skin, gut, and respiratory tract.

The “microbial diversity” hypothesis is the idea that more diverse gut microbiomes are, the healthier we are. Similar to the hygiene hypothesis.

Autoimmune diseases are much more common in industrialized nations than developing ones, and those that emigrate from developing countries tend to be more likely to develop asthma and immunological issues.

Probiotics may help with childhood obesity: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200907080342.htm

Boosting Your Child’s Immune System:

1. Let your child touch and taste things
2. Don’t be a bottle boiler
3. Avoid antibacterial soaps
4. Avoid antibiotics
5. Visit farms and have pets
6. Increase your kids’ time with other kids
7. Eat a variety of cultured foods
8. Encourage your kids to play outside
9. Don’t make your kids bathe or shower every day
10. Don’t do excessive loads of laundry

Fluoride

• Excess fluoride intake above the recommended intake, especially in childhood, can lead to dental fluorosis, characterized by white or brown lines or flecks on the teeth. NHANES data has discovered that the rates of dental fluorosis have increased from 29.7% in 2001-2002 to 61.3% in 2011-2012. High fluoride intake in children may also be associated with lower IQ and impaired cognition.
• A meta-analysis of all available studies on the topic from 2018 indicated that exposure to high levels of fluoride in water were strongly associated with reduced levels of intelligence in children. This was further endorsed by research published in 2019, focused on mother-child pairs from six Canadian cities which found that high fluoride exposure during pregnancy was correlated with lower IQ scores among young children, especially boys. It led to the author’s recommendation for pregnant mothers to reduce their fluoride intake during pregnancy, but the topic is controversial. It even led to the editor of the JAMA Pediatrics who published the findings, writing something of a disclaimer and reminding us that “scientific inquiry is an iterative process”. With the benefit of hindsight however, on the topic of fluoride and its various compounds, the jump to mandatory addition to the water supply in certain areas may have been taken too hastily.
• Overall, drinking only tap water might be problematic for infants and children in developing years but complete avoidance may lead to fluoride deficiencies. Even supplementing fluoride 0.25-1 mg/d for 24-55 months in children living in communities without fluorinated drinking water has resulted in a 24% reduced rate of decayed, missing and filled tooth surfaces. In areas where water fluoridation rates are lower than 0.6 mg/L, fluoride supplementation of 0.25-1 mg/d may reduce the rate of caries in primary teeth by 48-72% in children aged 6-10. Thus, a moderate consumption of fluorinated water (1-1.5 liters a day) should be acceptable and may even be beneficial. Cooking your food and vegetables with fluorinated water may also be recommended if you have a low intake of fluoride.

Learning and Development

Hunter Gather Notes

It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. During childhood, we learn how to be. We also learn who we are, and we dream about who we might become.

We have the longest childhoods on Earth, and we arrive in the world with more plasticity than any other species—meaning that we are the least set-in stone. Software, which is the interplay of experience and knowledge with capacity, is more important in humans than in any other species.

Our ability to learn language is part of our hardware. Nearly all human babies have this competence latent in them. Which language a baby will speak, however, is entirely context dependent. Furthermore, we quickly lose some of our ability to hear and construct the phonemes and tones of languages that are not in our environment, regardless of our particular ethnicity or lineage. Just as we are born with more neuronal potential than we use, we are also born with more linguistic potential than we use, and some of it is lost during childhood. We are born with broad potential, and that potential narrows over time.

We are born to explore the world around us, discover its secrets, and structure our minds accordingly. Once this job is done, we shed our surplus capacity, lest it become a metabolic liability, all cost and no reward.

All species that are social, are long-lived, and have generational overlap also tend to have long childhoods. These other species’ childhoods come with tantrums and play, emotional depth and cognitive capacity, just like ours. The adults that develop from those children of other species have social complexity that is recognizable to us humans as well.

Stealing childhood from the young—by organizing and scheduling their play for them, by keeping them from risk and exploration, by controlling and sedating them with screens and algorithms and legal drugs—practically guarantees that they will arrive at the age of adulthood without being capable of actually being adults. All of these actions—almost always well intentioned—prevent the human software from refining our crude and rudimentary hardware.

Childhood facilitates the passing on of cultural information, and culture can evolve faster than genes. Childhood gives us flexibility in a changing world.

Learning to Navigate Backflips and Traffic

Children learn through observation and experience. While various cultures, including WEIRD ones, focus increasingly on direct instruction (which becomes formalized as school), cultures from the Navajo to the Inuit avoid teaching when at all possible.

Children learn from their parents, from their siblings, from their extended family and friend groups. Siblings have historically been particularly corrective forces, as they tend to be brutally honest when their brother or sister does something poorly, or has an error in judgment. The ways that children enforce their own views of appropriate behavior on other children may look mean to adults, but when children are actually allowed to roam freely, in groups, and engage in long periods of unstructured play, the bullies and jerks are more likely to lose power than gain it, and everyone learns how to both create and follow rules that work. Across cultures in which play has been observed, even very young children who are allowed to engage in open-ended play in potentially dangerous areas with no adult supervision tend to resolve disputes quickly among themselves, and rarely have accidents.

Our societal pendulum has swung too far to one side—to protecting children against all risk and harm—such that many who come of age under this paradigm feel that everything is a threat, that they need safe spaces, that words are violence. By comparison, children with exposure to diverse experiences—physical, psychological, and intellectual—learn what is possible, and become more expansive. It is imperative that children experience discomfort in each of these realms: physical, psychological, and intellectual. Absent that, they end up full-grown but confused about what harm actually is. They end up children in the bodies of adults.

Plasticity

Childhood—and by extension parenting—is an interplay of love and release, of holding someone close while also giving them freedom to explore, even perhaps to leave.

Phenotypic plasticity allows individuals to respond in real time to changing environments, to avoid being canalized into set patterns and lifeways by their genes.

• Human children who chew soft, processed foods have smaller faces as adults than those who grow up chewing hard, tough food.
• Even our critically important aortic arch, the first arterial branch off the heart that takes oxygenated blood to the body, has several common anatomies within human populations, which can develop from highly similar genetic starting gates.

WEIRD parents are not just focused on our children, we are focused on the metrics that are easily recorded and conveyed to others: the when of our child’s first smile, word, or step. Once we have such metrics in hand, we are easily confused into imagining that the when is a critical measure not just of health, but of future capacity. Once again, the easily measured thing—the calorie, the size, the date—becomes an inaccurate stand-in for a larger analysis of the health of the system. By believing in the false notion that when a benchmark is met is the salient measure of health and progress, we play into our modern fear of risk. It is risky for my child to miss a benchmark. It is risky for me not to force my child to meet arbitrary deadlines. Such parental focus can instill fear in our children, which they carry forward as an aversion to risk.

Fragility and Antifragility

Humans are antifragile: We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries. As we grow into adults, exposure to discomfort and uncertainty—physical, emotional, and intellectual—is necessary if we are to become our best selves.

“Expose children to risk and challenge” is therefore a rule, like so many rules in complex systems, that is context dependent. So, while exposing your child to ever greater risk as they grow up is integral to their becoming antifragile, you cannot do so by simply throwing them in the deep end. First, you must make sure that your child knows, at the deepest level, that they are loved, that you have their back, and that no matter what, if they are in trouble, you will do everything possible to come in and get them.

Bond tightly with your children early on. We are fans of attachment parenting: carrying your child as you move through the world, so that they see what you see, and are in literal contact with you; and co-sleeping with your baby (which, contrary to some reports, makes having an infant easier on parents, not harder). When your baby cries, go to him, assure him that he is not alone. A child thus treated is likely to have the confidence, pretty early, to go out adventuring, because they know that someone—their parents—have their back, no matter what.

• So, when some parents try to make their babies resilient by putting them alone in dark rooms and expecting them to learn to comfort themselves, those parents are not understanding what sort of being they have on their hands. There is nothing in our millions of years of evolutionary history that should lead an infant to feel secure alone in a room.
• The younger the child, the more secure and safe she needs to know that she is, which creates the inner strength and resilience to go out and explore sooner, and with greater skill and courage. Just because a parent knows that he adores his child, and would let harm come to himself in order to protect her, does not mean that this is known by the child.

Of course, children will quickly learn to test the system, and to try to game their parents. Parents and children are together for the long haul, and children are selected to figure out parental moves, and to attempt to manipulate them. Indeed, manipulation begins before birth. A fetus is selected to extract resources from its mother, even as the mother is selected to provide for her child, while also keeping some in reserve, both for her own health and for that of future children.

Static rules don’t work with children. Rules have to be nimble, able to change as the child matures, and responsive to both the needs and the tactics of the child. That being said, as early as possible talk to your children as if they are mature and responsible beings. Hold them responsible for their actions, and for ever more of their needs as they grow up. Give them real work to do, not busywork. Do not make false threats (“If you keep doing that, I’ll turn this car around!”). Always make sure that they know they are loved.

Play and Tinkering and Sport

Play, it has been proposed, serves to enable mammalian children to develop kinematic and emotional flexibility for use in unexpected, and uncontrollable, situations.

Broadly speaking, play can explore the physical world, the social one, or some combination of the two. There is terrific value in tinkering, in taking physical objects and moving them through their paces, in taking them apart and seeing if they go back together again.

Many girls are more likely to want to explore explicitly social space—staging tea parties, in which they act out the words and intentions of their guests, which may be dolls and stuffed animals, in advance of having real guests with whom they can interact—and that, too, is exploratory.

Team sports can bring the physical and social together in a fun and creative way, and are a valuable platform for exploration. They are not for everyone, but sports are one way to ensure physical skill, and physical skill facilitates mental clarity and strength. That said, team sports are not a complete replacement for either unstructured play or physical engagement with the world that most would call “work.” Work must be done, and children are well served by doing some of it.

Formal sport is valuable, and physical work is, too, but deeper yet is simple play, with no top-down enforcement of rules. When children make up the rules as they go, or modifying rules for established games for whatever court and gear they have at hand, they are learning deep truths from play.

Older children in mixed-age groups gain practice in nurturing, leading, and mentorship, and often get inspiration for creative activities.

Spending Times Outdoors Improves Eyesight

Nearsightedness is strongly correlated with the amount of time kids spend indoors. Might be the focus on near or far things, or the sunlight itself.

On the Dangers of Apparently Animate Objects That Can’t Respond

Why is there an uptick in diagnoses on the autism spectrum now? We posit that it is, in part, related to the number of children who were raised staring into screens animated with creatures that seemed to be alive but weren’t. Those seemingly alive creatures, which cannot and therefore will not respond to a child’s looks or gestures or questions, send the message to the developing brain that the world is not an emotionally responsive place.

• How is a child to develop a nuanced theory of mind—the ability to attribute mental states to others, and to understand that others can and do have desires and opinions that are different from one’s own?

Humans engage in theory of mind more often and more deeply than any other species. We interact with inanimate and animate objects differently, and learn not to ascribe intent to those that do not react. Letting inanimate objects babysit your young child risks sending the child the message that others in the world are neither responsive to nor deserving of respect and fairness.

Legal Drugs and Children

The considerable rise in mood-altering and behavior-modifying pharmaceuticals being given to children in the last several decades is, we posit, in part a response to children resisting school culture. Boys are more likely to get diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed speed, which “allows” them to focus, and increases the chances that they will tolerate sitting still, facing forward, in neat rows. Because rough-and-tumble play no longer suits our delicate sensibilities as a culture, we prefer to drug our children into submission.

Girls, on the other hand, with less proclivity toward “acting out” and greater proclivity toward being agreeable and anxious, are more likely to get prescribed antianxiety meds and antidepressants. Most school seems better suited to girl ways of being and learning than to boy ways of being and learning, but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy for girls, either.

Except for rare, extreme examples, many people who exhibit “neurodiversity” benefit from trade-offs that allow them enhanced insight or skills in other areas. There is also value simply in being the “rare phenotype,” in looking at the world differently from how the majority sees it. This logic applies not just to people who have autism spectrum disorder, especially if they are high functioning, but also to people who have ADHD or are dyslexic, dysgraphic, color-blind, left-handed, or more. Given a choice, you might not choose any of these traits for yourself or your children, but that preference may say more about our inability to understand trade-offs—especially cryptic intellectual trade-offs—than it does about what is actually beneficial for individuals, and for society.

While learning differences aren’t inherently good or bad, they can serve to break bad educational relationships. A good teacher-student relationship is liberating, but a bad one can be devastating, and this is made more likely by the quantification of teaching that can turn teachers into seal trainers rather than holistic educators. Once education has become highly canalized—directing people unswervingly into banal and generic choices—the canals themselves become toxic. Having a learning disability can free a person from even being able to play in the toxic canals, which can force such young people to forge their own educational path. This provides a view not only into the current metric-heavy system—one that too often fails to reveal wisdom or capacity—but also into a better, alternative future, one in which there are multiple routes to becoming successful, productive, and antifragile.

Does a Butterfly Remember How to Be a Caterpillar?

As humans, we continue to transform throughout our lives, but the most intense period of transformation is childhood, just as identity is being formed. The fact of transformation can make it challenging to reconcile who you were in early childhood with who you are in late childhood. More challenging yet is reconciling who you were in late childhood, when perhaps you thought yourself already an adult, with who you are as a young adult. This is made even more difficult with a permanent record of those earlier phases always around to remind you (social media).

Combine calls to “be your authentic self” with a Western cultural norm of always being right, and early social media posts are destined to confuse and thwart children as they should be metamorphosing into their adult forms.

If you are on social media in middle school, your identity is bound to be confused and confusing. If your parents were posting images of who you were at seven, and you have those to compare to as well, it’s harder still. Yes, we deserve to have photographs of our children at all stages of development. In general, those photos should not be on display for everyone to see, unless they clearly represent a particular moment in time that is not meant to be universal.

Adult humans remembering precisely how they thought about the world when they were younger is not, in general, necessary to living a good life—especially if those thoughts and images are doctored, not reflective of what was actually true. Being constantly reminded of what we looked like, how we acted, what thoughts we decided to post on social media when we were younger and different is actively getting in the way of the ability to grow up. This applies to adults as well as children.

The Corrective Lens

• Do not expect your children to keep up with the Joneses. Some developmental “delays” are indeed delays, and indicative of physical or neurological problems. But development is wildly plastic, and doesn’t always happen in the order you expect it to, or at predetermined moments. Don’t panic if your kid isn’t reading in the second grade. The chances he’s going to grow up illiterate are slim to none. Earlier is not necessarily better. Early walkers, talkers, or readers do not inherently become more adept, smarter, or more productive adults.
• Encourage active engagement with the physical world. Do this mostly by modeling it, but also by making opportunities and, to some extent, toys that make it easy and fun, available. Allow mistakes. Expect accidents, falls, minor injuries. Be prepared for the possibility of larger injuries. Remember that people do not learn exclusively from being told what others have learned—especially physical truths. They have to have the close calls themselves.
• Do not let inanimate objects babysit your children, especially if those objects are masquerading as animate ones.
• Do let children play without adult supervision as early and often as possible. This includes in game and sport situations where there are established rules.
• Consistently follow through on your promises, both positive and negative. Do not make a threat and then not follow through. Better not to make such threats in the first place, but if you do make them make sure that you deliver.
• Expect that static rules will get gamed. Becoming an adult is, in part, about learning what the system is, where its weaknesses are, and how to take advantage of those weaknesses. Children learn this in the system that their natal home provides. Make honorable systems, listen to children when they have grievances, take them seriously from an early age, but do not pretend to them or yourself or anyone else that yours is a friendship rather than a parent-child relationship. Stop manipulation every time that it starts.
• Do not helicopter or snowplow your children. Let them make their own mistakes. At the same time, make clear rules. One they we set was: “You are allowed to break an arm, a leg, a wrist, an ankle. But you may not break your skull or your back, or impair your senses.” This allowed their children a sense of what kinds of risks were acceptable to take, and also what kind of plans B, C, D, and so on they needed to have in order to protect their brains and central nervous systems above all else.
• Do not spoil your children; instead, give them responsibilities early on. A child who is catered to constantly comes to expect it, and is destined to be both dissatisfied with the world beyond his natal home and unwilling and likely unable to do much for himself.
• Let your children in on (almost) every conversation. Reward your children’s inquisitiveness with conversation, and do not dumb ideas down for them. Obviously, there are some things that are inappropriate at various developmental stages and ages, and what you personally decide is appropriate and when will vary by person, but in general, assume that your child is smart and can handle the content of an adult conversation. Don’t try to make them interested, just have it, demonstrate through your actions that this is what is valuable, and they will come to value it too (just like with food). Similarly, involve them in tasks that are actually useful, and engage them in those tasks in a way that enhances their understanding of the world.
• Let siblings (and friends) teach each other, and do not intervene whenever they have a disagreement or altercation. If they ramp up their arguments so that you have to get involved, do not reward such behavior. They should be resolving their own disputes as early as possible.
• Let your children sleep. Sleep plays a crucial role in brain development, and when synapses—the connections between neurons—are being generated at a very high rate, sleep expands in scope as well.
• Do not succumb to dominant parenting expectations. Most of them are silly—at best unnecessary, at worst actually harmful. Listen to your own self, and don’t let parental peer pressure get you doing things that you take issue with, or that feel wrong for your children. 
• Do not make a habit of displaying your children on social media.
• Provide ample free time for your children and, if possible, allow them to explore unwatched during that time.
• Be the kind of person you want them to become. 

Mental Health, Trauma, and Parental Support

Healthy Emotional Development: Child and Parent

If you ramp the child up in excitement you can make them dopaminergically hyped. Engage the sense of pleasure with what’s there.

Never Say “Maybe” (Reward Prediction Error)

Dopamine is in anticipation, not the actual having what is involved. By saying maybe, you are causing a reward prediction error and a crash in dopamine (punishment).

(Gabor – When the Body Says No – Notes)

People and their pets connect via shared brain structures that predate the development of the human frontal cortex with its apparatus of language and rationality. Animals and humans interact from their respective limbic systems, the brain’s emotional parts. Unlike people, animals are acutely sensitive to messages from the limbic brain—both their own and that of their owners. Some pets are able to detect repressed anger and identify it as blatant expression, refusing to interact with their owners during this period. Childhood conditioning may cause the owner to not realize they are feeling this pain until the animal detects it.

Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall.

In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally.

A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40% of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before age seventeen.

Ashley Montague (Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin): “The various forms in which the newborn and young receive it is of prime importance for their healthy physical and behavioral development. It appears probable that, for human beings, tactile stimulation is of fundamental significance for the development of healthy emotional or affectional relationships, that ‘licking,’ in its actual and in its figurative sense, and love are closely connected; in short, that one learns love not by instruction, but by being loved.”

In a study of premature babies, incubated infants were divided into two groups. All their nutritional and other conditions were identical, except for one variable: one group was given fifteen minutes of tactile stimulation three times a day over a period of two weeks. “Providing this form of stimulation to these babies resulted in significant acceleration of weight gain, increased head circumference, and improved behavioral indices,” compared with the control group.

Parental love is not simply a warm and pleasant emotional experience, it is a biological condition essential for healthy physiological and psychological development. Parental love and attention drive the optimal maturation of the circuitry of the brain, of the PNI system and of the HPA axis.

When “happy” events are experienced by the infant, endorphins are released. Endorphins encourage the growth and connections of nerve cells. Conversely, in animal studies, chronically high levels of stress hormones such as cortisol have been shown to cause important brain centers to shrink.

A fundamental goal of human development is the emergence of a self-sustaining, self-regulated human being who can live in concert with fellow human beings in a social context. Vital for the healthy development of the neurobiology of self-regulation in the child is a relationship with the parent in which the latter sees and understands the child’s feelings and can respond with attuned empathy to the child’s emotional cues. Emotions are states of physiological arousal, either positive — “I want more of this”— or negative — “I want less of this.” Infants and small children do not have the capacity to regulate their own emotional states, and hence are physiologically at risk for exhaustion and even death if not regulated by the interaction with the parent. Closeness with the parent, therefore, serves to preserve the infant’s biological regulation.

The prefrontal cortex modulates our responses to the world not in terms of primitive drives but in terms of learned information about what is friendly, neutral or hostile and what is socially useful and what is not. Its functions include impulse control, social-emotional intelligence and motivation. Much of the regulating work of the cortex involves not the initiation of actions but the inhibition of impulses arising in the lower brain centers.

• The limbic system is essential for survival. Without it the regulatory and thinking capacities of the cortex would function like the brain of an idiot savant: intellectual knowledge would be disconnected from real knowledge of the world. Emotions interpret the world for us. They have a signal function, telling us about our internal states as they are affected by input from the environment. Emotions are responses to present stimuli as filtered through the memory of past experience, and they anticipate the future based on our perception of the past.
• The brain structures responsible for the experience and modulation of emotions, whether in the cortex or the midbrain, develop in response to parental input, just as visual circuitry develops in response to light. The limbic system matures by “reading” and incorporating the emotional messages of the parent. The centers of memory, both conscious and unconscious, rely on the interaction with the parent for their consolidation and for their future interpretations of the world. The circuits responsible for the secretion of important neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine — essential for mood stability, arousal, motivation and attention—are stimulated and become coordinated in the context of the child’s relationship with his caregivers.
• Within the parent-child interaction the child’s sense of the world is formed: whether this is a world of love and acceptance, a world of neglectful indifference, or a world of hostility where one must be hypervigilant.
• We will understand ourselves as we have felt understood, love ourselves as we perceived being loved on the deepest unconscious levels, care for ourselves with as much compassion as, at our core, we perceived as young children.

Attunement, a process in which the parent is “tuned in” to the child’s emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood. Strong attachment and love exist in many parent-child relationships but without attunement. Children in non-attuned relationships may feel loved but on a deeper level do not experience themselves as appreciated for who they really are. They learn to present only their “acceptable” side to the parent, repressing emotional responses the parent rejects and learning to reject themselves for even having such responses.

Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense—rightly or wrongly—that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” We are speaking here not of a lack of parental love, nor of physical separation between parent and child, but of a void in the child’s perception of being seen, understood, empathized with and “got” on the emotional level.

Proximate separation happens when attuned contact between parent and child is lacking or is interrupted due to stresses on the parent that draw her away from the interaction.

• An example of an attunement break occurs when the parent looks away first from the child during one of their intensely pleasurable eye-to-eye gaze interactions. Another attunement break occurs if the parent insists on stimulating a resting child because he (the parent) desires the mutual engagement, even if the child at that moment needs some respite from the intensity of their interaction.
• In proximate separations the parents are physically present but emotionally absent. Such parent-child interactions are increasingly the norm in our hyper-stressed society. The levels of physiological stress experienced by the child during proximate separation approaches the levels experienced during physical separation.
• Proximate separation affects the young child on the unconscious level rather than on the conscious thought-feeling level. It will not be recalled later, but it is entrenched in the biology of loss.
• People “trained” in this way in childhood are likely to choose adult relationships that re-enact repeated proximate separation dynamics. They may, for example, choose partners who do not understand, accept or appreciate them for who they are. Thus, the physiological stresses induced by proximal separation will also continue to be repeated in adult life— and, again, often without conscious awareness.

If a parent’s loving feelings are constricted, it only because that parent has suffered deep hurt. Where parenting fails to communicate unconditional acceptance to the child, it is because of the fact that the child receives the parent’s love not as the parent wishes but as it is refracted through the parent’s personality. If the parent is stressed, harbors unresolved anxiety, or is agitated by unmet emotional needs, the child is likely to find herself in situations of proximate abandonment regardless of the parent’s intentions.

The intergenerational transmission of parenting style is largely a matter of physiological development, of how the limbic circuits of the brain become programmed in childhood and how the connections within the PNI super-system are established.

• The child does not learn the parenting styles of his mother and father by imitation—or only in part. The biggest influence on the future parenting style of the child is the development of his emotional and attachment circuits in the context of his relationship with his parents. The same is true of the development of the child’s stress-response apparatus.
• As a group of Canadian researchers have written, “Maternal care during infancy serves to ‘program’ behavioral responses to stress in the offspring by altering the development of the neural systems that mediate fearfulness.” Anxious mothers are likely to rear anxious offspring.

Infants who had received attuned attention from their mothers at home showed signs of missing their mothers on separation. They greeted their returning mothers by initiating physical contact. They were soothed easily and returned quickly to spontaneous play. This pattern was called secure. There were also a number of insecure patterns, variously named avoidant, ambivalent or disorganized. Avoidant infants did not express distress on separating from the mother and avoided or ignored the mother on reunion. Such behavior did not denote genuine self-reliance but the pseudo-autonomy that we noted, for example, in rheumatoid patients: the belief that they must depend only on themselves, since trying to obtain help from the parent was useless. Internally, however, these avoidant infants were physiologically stressed when the parent returned, as measured by heart rate changes. The infants falling into the insecure categories had been subjected to non-attuned parenting in the home. They had received implicit messages of maternal emotional absence, or mixed messages of contact alternating with distance.

The patterns of people’s speech and the key words they “happen” to employ are more meaningful descriptors of their childhoods than what they consciously believe they are communicating. The intended meaning of words reflects only the speaker’s conscious beliefs, from which painful memories are often excluded. The real story is told by the patterns of the narrative—fluent or halting, detailed or characterized by a paucity of words, consistent or self-contradicting, along with Freudian slips, revealing asides and apparent non-sequiturs.

The test developed by Mary Main is called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Just as the responses of infants in the Strange Situations, the narratives of adults could also be classified along lines that reflected the degrees of security they had experienced in their early interactions with their parents.

• The adult’s AAI narrative of his own childhood will often predict how he will nurture his future child, and therefore how his child, at one year, will respond in the Strange Situation. And, the child’s behavior in the Strange Situation will foretell the type of narrative she, in turn, will give about her childhood twenty years later.
• Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain,” wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose work threw scientific light on the decisive importance of attachment in infancy and childhood.

Some random examples:

• NATALIE: multiple sclerosis. Her oldest brother was an alcoholic who died of cancer of the throat. Her younger sister is schizophrenic. Her uncles and aunts were alcoholics. Her maternal grandfather was alcoholic. Her husband, Bill, died of bowel cancer. Her son has attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and has struggled with drug addiction.
• VéRONIQUE: multiple sclerosis. She believes she was conceived during an incestuous rape. In her adoptive family, the maternal grandfather was an alcoholic and her maternal grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease in her sixties. Among other medical problems, her father has early-onset high blood pressure.
• SUE RODRIGUEZ: ALS. Her father died of alcoholic liver disease; one of her aunts died of a brain aneurysm, another in a house fire.
• ANNA: breast cancer. Both her mother and maternal grandmother died of breast cancer—but neither through genetic transmission. Anna inherited a breast-cancer gene on her father’s side. She has two sisters: one is living with an alcoholic; the other is mentally ill.
• GABRIELLE: scleroderma, with features of rheumatoid arthritis. Her parents were alcoholics. Her brother has had a colectomy for cancer of the bowel, and her sister was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.
• JACQUELINE DU PRé: multiple sclerosis. Her grandmother was traumatized by the death of other children about the time her mother was born. Jacqueline’s mother predeceased her with cancer, and her father developed Parkinson’s disease.
• RONALD REAGAN: Colon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. His father and brother were alcoholics; his second wife developed breast cancer. His daughter died of metastatic malignant melanoma.

Lies, however innocently intended, never protect a child from pain. There is something in us that knows when we are lied to, even if that awareness never reaches consciousness. Being lied to means being cut off from the other person. It engenders the anxiety of exclusion and of rejection.

Adaptiveness is the capacity to respond to external stressors without rigidity, with flexibility and creativity, without excessive anxiety and without being overwhelmed by emotion. People who are not adaptive may seem to function well as long as nothing is disturbing them, but they will react with various levels of frustration and helplessness when confronted by loss or by difficulty. They will blame themselves or blame others. A person’s adaptiveness depends very much on the degree of differentiation and adaptiveness of previous generations in their family and also on what external stressors may have acted on the family.

Children who become their parents’ caregivers are prepared for a lifetime of repression. And these roles children are assigned have to do with the parents’ own unmet childhood needs—and so on down the generations. “Children do not need to be beaten to be compromised,” researchers at McGill University have pointed out. Inappropriate symbiosis between parent and child is the source of much pathology.

As Dr. Kerr suggests, it is much more illuminating to think of, say, a cancer position than a cancer personality. “The concept of a cancer personality, although certainly having some validity, is based in individual theories of human functioning. The concept of a cancer position is based in a systems theory of human functioning. In a family system the functioning of each person is influenced and regulated by the functioning of every other person.”

The main effect of globalization has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide humans with a sense of purpose and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults and their “extended family” (village, community, neighborhood) has been replaced by daycare and school, where children are oriented towards peers than reliable parents or family.

• In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.

The element of control is the less obvious but equally important aspect of social and job status as a health factor. Since stress escalates as the sense of control diminishes, people who exercise greater control over their work and lives enjoy better health.

Discarding blame leaves us free to move toward the necessary adoption of responsibility.

Childhood Attachment Patterns in Adulthood

While there is some lateralization of the brain, the idea that one side is emotional and the other is rational is false. Here we will consider more autonomic vs. more conscious forms of bonding.

Early infant-parent attachment, involves a coordination of right and left-brain circuits as they relate to the ANS. All of your needs are met by your mother/caregiver as a baby. When measuring the physical contact of the two, breathing, heart rate, pupil size gets synchronized. Therefore, regulating each other’s ANSs.

The right brain system (emotional ANS) is tapped into the oxytocin system, which is associated with social bond, milk let down and production in early childhood. Stimulation of oxytocin in the mother by nursing (physical contact with the nipple), the contact of skin, and the specificity (not just any baby can elicit this). The amount of oxytocin scales to how closely related one is to that particular child.

As we get older, the left-brain system comes into play. There is a processing of logical narratives. Keep in mind that these sides are both happening in parallel. There is a bit of dominance of the left-brain circuitry in bonding for prediction and reward, such as reading a bed time story. Healthy social bonding relies on both systems being engaged. Enjoying experiences together too.

Both of these circuits tap into the dorsal raphe nucleus dopamine release. As well as serotonin, which is associated with warmth, comfort, and satisfaction with our immediate surroundings, rather than seeking things.

Attachment Styles: Autonomic Versus Intellectual Attachment

As people start to progress into adolescence and adulthood, the same circuits that were active in childhood are repurposed for other forms of attachment. To have truly complete bonds, requires synchronization of physiology, as well as the more rational, predictive type circuits.

We can have a more emotional connection (like the felt experience connection with a dog) and also a cognitive connection (discussions on interesting conversations and ideas).

School

The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives. John Taylor Gatto, in A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling

Keep your wits about you. Believe that you can rather than that you cannot. Build deep community and, having built it, trust that it will be there for you.

In light of the relative rarity of teaching both in other species and among other human cultures, we should be asking ourselves: What do we need to learn in order to become our best selves? And of those things that we do need to learn, which of them need to be taught, and which can we learn in other ways—through direct experience, or through observation and practice, for instance? Put another way: What do we need school for?

You do need school to learn to read and write. Reading and writing are so new that we need an educational supplement in order to learn it. School is also useful to learn cell biology, written history, and all but the most basic math. Literacy, like math and thinking from first principles, is like an adaptive foothill, though, and once you’re literate (or numerate, or adept with logic), you can teach yourself many things without requiring further school.

We can also use school to discuss texts with real people, to gain exposure to ways of thinking about and representing the world about which we were previously ignorant, and to gain experience in proposing and running scientific experiments. School is not necessary to engage in any of those pursuits, but it can be useful.

In school we also might learn what it sounds like when irreconcilable positions meet one another. This allows an insightful person to go on to do the same thing within themselves: hold two irreconcilable positions in their head at once. The value in this is immeasurable; it allows a person to learn argument by arguing with themselves, which facilitates their ability to both uncover and recognize truth. Humans are perhaps unique in the degree to which our theory of mind—the ability to understand that other living beings have points of view, and that those perspectives might be different from our own—enables us to explore contradiction and paradox.

• While the West has tended to avoid paradoxes and to find them troublesome, Eastern traditions are more likely to have embraced inconsistency. We argue that Buddhism being littered with contradictions is adaptive, serving exactly the educational purpose we are advocating for. Similarly, classrooms ought to be littered with paradoxes, left in various states of interpretation, for children and older students to discover and poke at and understand.

Because memory and recall are easy to assess and measure, they can easily become the metric that is being chased, by students and teachers and schools alike. Far harder to teach and to quantify—and at least as valuable, if not more so—are critical thinking, logic, and creativity. Memory exercises tend to drill down on detail, on facts that are unchanged by context. Trade-offs being ubiquitous, a focus on memorized details, then, will likely come at the expense of a focus on the big picture.

While people don’t intuit the formalization of the scientific method, children are inclined to observe pattern, to postulate reasons for the pattern, and to try to figure out if they’re right. All people are inclined to be verificationists, to look for verifying evidence of their own correctness, rather than to look for falsifying evidence that, if it doesn’t show up, makes their precious idea look more and more likely.

What Is School?

School is based on an economic efficiency, while being unimaginative about what could be accomplished. The economics—not to mention the perverse incentives behind compulsory schooling—of school tend to fill children’s heads with knowledge, without showing them a path to wisdom.

Perhaps school should serve the purpose of helping young people grapple with the question: Who am I, and what am I going to do about it? Another way of phrasing this might be: What’s the biggest and most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? Or: How do I find my consciousness, my truest self? Done well, then, school can provide a great platform for formalizing and delivering rites of passage. Rather than focusing on any version of these questions, though, modern schooling, especially the compulsory sort widespread across the WEIRD world, is more apt to teach quiescence and conformity.

Or perhaps school should reveal to children that fringe positions should be explored and considered, not thrown out immediately on the basis that they are unpopular. Betting against the fringe is an easy and safe bet and when done in a tone of paternalistic indulgence, say, or authoritarian disdain, it usually shuts down dissent. While most fringe ideas are in fact wrong, it is exactly from the fringe that progress is made. This is where the paradigm shifts happen. This is where innovation and creativity occur, and yes, most of it is wrong or useless, but the most important ideas on which we now base our understanding of the world and our society came from the fringe.

School should be fun, but it should not be gameable. A child shouldn’t be able to “win” at school (although many do, and many more lose at it). Social rules are learned at school, but at its base, school should be about discovering truth, both universal and local. School is, for better and for worse, a stand-in for parents, for kin group, for those with whom the child has shared fate.

School should not, therefore, teach through fear. Risk and challenge help children learn. As with parenting, this requires early tight bonding, during which a secure base is established, which provides children the confidence to go out adventuring fairly early, because they know that someone has their back, no matter what. School that operates by fear will teach the opposite lesson.

• Fear is an easy mechanism of control, and so it should not be surprising that teachers use fear to control students of all ages. As corporal punishment in the classroom fell out of favor in many (but not all) places, psychological and emotional control replaced it. 
• Children are threatened with poor grades, poor test scores, and having their parents informed that they have behaved badly. The rise of metrics within a system—which are often overly simple, wrongheaded, and only pseudo-quantitative—tends to accompany a decay in social trust.

One approach, which will be more effective with older children and young adults, is for teachers to explicitly hand away their own authority by telling students not to trust them just because they are the figure in the front of the room. When a teacher then does earn the respect and the trust of her students, such that she becomes a legitimate authority figure, one with authority that was earned rather than assumed, her authority will better serve both the students and their education.

• Using fear to keep children seated in neat and tidy rows, to keep their eyes forward and their mouths closed, to keep them from moving their bodies at all but for a few scheduled moments in each day—this will help create adults who are unable to regulate their own bodies and senses, unable to trust in their own ability to make decisions, and likely to demand similarly controlled environments in their adult lives—trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the like.

For young schoolchildren, one solution would be having a garden at school, and spending time in it in all sorts of weather. Frequent field trips to natural areas, and spending time actually outside rather than in the climate-controlled protection of the “nature center,” help, too. Will it always be comfortable? No. Will some children be ill prepared for rain or wind or sun? Yes. Will they learn from small, early mistakes to start taking responsibility for their own bodies and fates and so get better at navigating the world? Yes. Yes, they will.

Preparing students to understand risk encourages them to expand their worldviews, and embrace experiences that lead to maturity. This does, however, come at a cost: understanding risk cannot completely protect individuals from danger.

Modern school tends to protect against individual tragedies, while facilitating the larger, societal ones. Arrange all the little boys and girls neatly in rows, assign them seats, and tell them never to speak unless they are called on first, because that will make it easier to keep track of them. At the same time, at home, teach the little boys and girls that they are each the center of the entire universe, and that they may and in fact should interrupt adults at any moment, for any reason. Teach the children that temper tantrums are acceptable by caving to them whenever they erupt, and also tell the children that they are the most precious and infallible beings in existence, and as such, any criticism is a crime against their core selves.

We should not be surprised when children raised this way can make no sense of the confused and confusing messages coming at them from home and from school. Nor should it surprise us when they gravitate to the systems that are most gameable.

Congratulations, society, you have successfully produced self-satisfied whiners who are accustomed to getting what they want, who are good at school but not at thinking, and who are, in fact, neither smart nor wise.

The World Is Not About You

The rise of pharmaceuticals being prescribed to children, helicopter and snowplow parenting, and the near ubiquity of screens have all made school an even more difficult place than it once was. In the United States, add to these the economic and political forces that have reduced school funding while increasing testing, thus cutting the creativity and freedom of teachers off at the knees.

Risk and potential go hand in hand. We need to let children, including college students, risk getting hurt. Protection from pain guarantees weakness, fragility, and greater suffering in the future. The discomfort may be physical, emotional, or intellectual—My ankle! My feelings! My worldview! —and all need to be experienced to learn and grow.

By inculcating in children the sense that order is always better than chaos, and that being easily counted and prioritizing doing things that are easily counted is the honorable way to go through school (and therefore life, many would extrapolate), society creates adults who bristle at the unexpected and the new.

Higher Ed

Science and art, in particular, often mistakenly described as at opposite ends of some imagined spectrum in the pursuit of truth and meaning, do not make their primary impact in the world through careful, thoughtful assessment and critique of what has come before. Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants, and yes, the history of ideas and of creations that came before us is integral to what we know and think and do, but that does not mean that it ought to be our primary focus, or that it is our mission.

Tools Are More Valuable Than Facts

Explicitly tell students—and make sure that it is true—that they are not in competition with one another. Our students actually learned more when they collaborated with one another. There was never a “curve” looming that guaranteed that some would fail. Another piece of the puzzle is to break the “this is the time of day that we are educated” paradigm, by leaving the classroom and spending more time together. When students and faculty do this, and break bread together day after day for several days or weeks or even months, it becomes clear that, actually, good questions show up at all hours of the day, all days of the week, and if you are traveling with an intellectual tool kit that you have cultivated through logic, creativity, and practice, you can engage such questions whenever and wherever they arise, not just in the classroom when the authority with the appropriate degree is standing in front of you, paid to answer your questions.

Intellectual Self-Reliance

When I go outside at night and look up at the stars, the feeling that I get is not comfort. The feeling that I get is a kind of delicious discomfort at knowing that there is so much out there that I do not understand and the joy in recognizing that there is enormous mystery, which is not a comfortable thing. This, I think, is the principal gift of education. Teller, in “Teaching: Just Like Performing Magic”

The brick-in-the-wall model creates minds that are all alike, minds that are ever less capable of generating or considering strange new ideas, minds that are outraged by confusion, and by uncertainty. Nearly every student whom they taught was, in the end, game to be challenged, actually challenged—told when they were wrong, told the teachers when they were wrong, and told that they needed to learn to pose real questions and then sit in the not-knowing for long enough to figure out how one might figure it out.

What harm can come from looking up answers to straightforward questions? The harm is that it trains us all to be less self-reliant, less able to make connections in our own brains, and less willing to search for relevant things that we do know, and then try to apply those things to systems we know less about. If answering “how” questions quickly, with a few keystrokes, impedes the development of self-reliance, what of the desire to pursue “why” questions this way? It is even more likely to kill logical and creative thought. Why do birds migrate? Why are there more species closer to the equator? Why does the landscape look this way? Before you look it up— think on it. Walk on it. Sleep on it. Talk about it. Share your ideas with your friends, and when they disagree, engage the disagreement.

Calm Down, Level Up

In the past, it was difficult to find yourself in a habitat without having an intimate understanding of it. Either you had received wisdom about it from your elders, or you had come to understand it by entering it from the edge, gradually immersing yourself in it. We moderns, though, live in such a rapidly and unpredictably changing habitat that none of us can claim to be fully native in it. We also have a problem of abrupt boundaries that our ancestors did not, a strangely clear line demarcating safety from not: the swimming pool; the garbage disposal; the curb.

Fear, anger, and hyperbole sell products, attract an audience, and are a useful tool of control. They are not, however, representative of the best that we can do as humans. Terror-inducing stories may be a hack to prompt appropriate behavior in modernity. It is a failure of education to scare people into acceptable behavior. If the ultimate goal of education is to produce capable, curious, compassionate adults, helping students stay calm and capable of reason, rather than in a constant state of alarm, is a far better route to that end.

Observation and Nature

One set of goals for higher ed ought to be to teach students how to hone their intuitions, become experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations.

It takes being willing to fix your own errors. Modeling for students the actual process by which ideas emerge, and are refined and tested, then rejected or accepted, allows them to move away from the linear models of knowledge acquisition that most of their schooling, and nearly every textbook, have inculcated in them.

If education is, in part, preparation for an unpredictable and shifting world, teaching courage and curiosity ought to be a priority.

By creating opportunity to go into nature—regardless of what your discipline is, and what you are trying to teach—you allow students to begin trusting themselves, rather than taking other people’s words for what is true.

Students may think that they want to be seduced, led astray by false praise, as it feels good in the moment. Most whom we met, though, wanted to be educated, led forth from narrow, faith-based belief into intellectual self-sufficiency, where they could assess the world and the claims in it from first principles, with respect and compassion for all.

The Corrective Lens

School and, parents should teach children:

• Respect, not fear.
• To honor good rules and question bad ones. All people run into bad rules—whether in the legal system, at home, at school, or elsewhere. If you’re a parent, strive to show your children that you are 100% on their team—no matter the trouble they’ve bumped up against. Children should be free to ask why the parents’ rules are what they are, but also know that it is counterproductive to break the rules simply for the sake of breaking them.
• To get out of their comfort zone and explore new ideas. You will likely learn the least in exactly the areas where you are most certain of what you already know, whether or not what you (think you) know is actually accurate.
• The value of knowing something real about the physical world. When you have a sense of physical reality, you are less likely to be gameable by the social sphere. Never accept conclusions on the basis of authority; if you find that what you are being taught does not match your experience of the world, do not acquiesce. Pursue the inconsistencies.
• What complex systems actually look like, even if the messiness of those systems is beyond the scope of the lesson. Nature is an example of such a system. Nature provides, among other things, a corrective to the ideas that emotional pain is equivalent to physical pain, and that life is or can be made perfectly safe. Exposure to complexity is key.

Higher education, in particular, should recognize that:

• Civilization needs citizens capable of openness and inquiry; these should therefore be the hallmarks of higher education. The need for nimble thinking, creativity in both the posing of questions and the search for their solutions, an ability to return to first principles rather than rely on mnemonics and received wisdom—these are ever more important as we move forward in the 21st century.
• A misunderstanding of how work will look in the future is driving people to specialize earlier and more narrowly. Higher ed is the natural place to counteract that trend and push toward greater breadth, nuance, and integration. Students of traditional college age today cannot accurately predict what their career will look like by the time they are seventy, fifty, or even thirty. College is where breadth should be inculcated.
• A university cannot simultaneously maximize the pursuit of truth, and the pursuit of social justice, as Jonathan Haidt has famously noted. This is a basic trade-off, and unavoidable. It becomes important, then, to ask what the purpose of a university is. Is it necessary that we focus on the pursuit of truth? Yes, in fact it is.
• Social risks—intellectual, psychological, emotional—must be taken, but doing so in front of strangers is particularly difficult. Both small class sizes and extended time together building community are correctives to anonymity.
• Authority is not to be used as a bludgeon to shut down the exchange of ideas. Bob Trivers, evolutionary biologist, once advised them to seek positions in which they taught undergraduates. His reasoning was this: Undergrads do not yet know the field, and so are likely to ask questions that you aren’t expecting, “dumb” questions, or ones imagined to already be settled. When the educator is confronted with such questions, one of three things is likely to be true:

1. Sometimes the field is right, and the answer is simple. Full stop.
2. Sometimes the field is right, but the answer is complex, nuanced, or subtle. Figuring out, or remembering, how to explain that complexity or subtlety is worth the time of any thinker who deserves the title.
3. Sometimes the field is wrong, and the answer is not understood, but it takes a naive view of the matter to ask the question.

• Classrooms are effectively sterile boxes removed from the world. It is difficult to learn in such a situation, because you won’t run into the things that you need to learn but that cannot be taught—things like how to survive tree falls, boat accidents, and earthquakes.

Puberty and Social Development

Puberty: Biology & Emotions on Deliberate Overdrive

Absolute biological event. Hormonal and brain changes. Brain first, which allows the hormonal ones to occur. Girls average age 10, boys 12.

Leptin is made by fat and communicates to the brain that there is enough body fat. It can also signal to the brain to go through puberty.

Bodyfat & Puberty: The Leptin Connection

Leptin can be injected into younger females and accelerate the onset of puberty. Obese children don’t seem to undergo puberty earlier but they have denser bones that grow quicker (leptin is also related to bone density).

Pheromones: Mates, Timing Puberty, Spontaneous Miscarriage

Pheromones acts on and impacts other members of species. Pheromone interactions in humans are controversial.

Vandenbergh effect: In animal studies, pre-pubescent female and introduce a novel male that isn’t related, she’ll undergo puberty almost immediately. Mandrills exhibit it. Unclear in humans.

Bruce effect: Introduction of a novel male elicits spontaneous abortion. If the father is gone. Also, controversial whether it happens in humans.

Kisspeptin: Robust Trigger of Puberty & Performance Enhancing Agent

Made by the brain and stimulates GnRH. This causes the release of luteinizing hormone that then travels through the bloodstream to ovaries to produce estrogen and testes for testosterone.

In an adult, a big increase in GnRH will shut down luteinizing hormone. Negative feedback loop. Kisspeptin is able to drive these levels high in an ongoing way to carry on puberty. Also, big effects on libido.

So, puberty is triggered by leptin and kisspeptin. A shift in social bonds within the now pubescent child.

Neuroplasticity Of Emotions: Becoming Specialists & Testing Emotional Bonds

There are genetic biases, like hair and eye color, but it isn’t until puberty where we become specifically good at certain things. The ability to change the brain increases at puberty. How they relate to social structures is greatly focused on.

Testing Driving Brain Circuits for Emotion: Dispersal

Connections between the dopamine centers and emotion and dispersal areas. An intense desire to get further away from primary caregivers. A bias for action away. More time with peers and less with adults.

Increased connectivity in PFC as well as dopamine centers and the amygdala. Good for testing social situations, threat detection, how behaviors lead to different success or fear states. Testing of contingencies in a more capable body.

The internal state is testing and sampled against different exteroceptive events but they are in control of their body and sample more events.

They start questioning who their parents are and if they can feed themselves.

Science-Based Recommendations for Adolescents and Teens: The Autonomy Buffet

Almost every mental health issue is related to sleep problems. A good night’s sleep can help adolescents test their autonomy and to make better exteroceptive judgements based on how they feel interoceptively. “How do I form bonds and make better predictions?”

Research in brain function and learning: https://www.apa.org/education-career/k12/brain-function

Mothers interactive with infant – epigenetic changes: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/stories/rnzzjj

Screen time begins in infancy and increases with age: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/stories/dbfvmy