For my first* post, I will try to answer the fundamental question behind all this pregnancy and baby care hoopla – does it all matter?
If kids were genetic automatons, then it wouldn’t much matter what we do to them. No amount of good parenting would do much good. As long as you and your partner have high IQs and fancy graduate degrees, your baby will turn out just fine. It wouldn’t matter if he spent his childhood watching Jersey Shore or listening to Mozart.
If, on the other hand, some aspect of nurture were essential, then we should be able to observe that kids get bigger, stronger or smarter based on the way they were raised.
The trouble is that nurturing is mighty hard to study in any scientific way. Uptight experimental ethics boards get their knickers in a twist over randomizing children into the bad parenting group. Sadly, that leaves us with observational studies that are riddled with bias – i.e., it is really hard to separate bad parenting from bad genes.
To the rescue comes, of all things, the government of Nicaragua. In the late 90s, before he was ratted out by his own VP – convicted and barred from office for massive corruption – then President Arnoldo Aleman jumped on the conditional cash transfer bandwagon (CCT, in Mexico and Brazil) with the Red de Protección Social (RPS, Social Protection Net). Beneficiary families received cash subsidies as long as their kids got preventative health care and went to school. But the real marvel was that someone convinced him to implement the program randomly in districts across the country – total coup for us pediatric economists! With the RPS, we got a that rarest of gifts, a huge database of children randomly assigned to different conditions.
Now that those first children have made it grade school, we can answer some really interesting questions about the core importance of environment.
Interesting Question #1 – Do kids in richer environments grow up to be bigger & stronger?
A – Curiously, no. Kids in families who got the subsidy first start out a little bigger, but their neighbors catch up once they get the subsidy. Catch-up growth is certainly not unheard of but is rarely seen so clearly.
The conclusion is that kids are physically resilient and will grow up just fine as long as they get nutrition at some point.
Interesting Question #2 – Do kids in richer environments grow up to be smarter?
A – Amazingly, yes. Tested at age 10, kids in families who got the subsidy when they were in utero up to 2 years old did significantly better on a cognitive exam. That benefit vanished when the subsidy came after a child’s 2nd birthday.
The implication is remarkable. It suggests that intelligence is not simply genetic and that those first 2 years of life plus pregnancy (the “first 1,000 days”) truly represent a critical period of cognitive development that no amount of catch-up can replace.
I don’t know about you, but I was totally floored by those results. Snippets of evidence, some anecdotal and some legit, suggest that your baby’s core intelligence and emotional coping are pretty well baked in by his second birthday, but this is the most impressive proof I’ve seen. I will try to explore this topic in greater depth in future posts to try to figure out how to make the most of that critical period. We’ll see what other deep lessons we can teach our babies and that they can teach us.
* This was originally posted Nov 2013 and is now reposted after a technical upgrade in Oct 2017.
