The Nature of Nurture with Professor Jay Belsky

31:31Think about it this way. I nourish my kid. I've always fed him good food. He's never overeating. He's always been, and he's never going to get bigger than five foot six. You know, there's a constraint on who he can become. Now, if you do something radical to take him into medical care, break his legs and let him, you know, as they do to make legs longer, which is kind of crazy, I think, but be that as it may, you know, then maybe you can pushed the elephant. I harbor, I don't know if this is a hope or an expectation or a nightmare, but I could imagine when we have in 50, 100 years, if it takes that long, really understanding of the underlying physiological, genetic, hormonal, microbiome dynamics of plasticity, that we may be able to go in in the same way CRISPR tweaks a gene, we may be able to go in and tweak the microbiome or tweak some other hormonal assessed system or tweak some physiological system.

32:38And now in some ways, you're kind of like opening the valve for more experience that we're really changing something or modifying something. Now, that sounds like a great idea to people who believe in developmental plasticity across the board like I used to. But as an old colleague and friend of mine pointed out, do you realize, Jay, that if everybody was maximally developmentally plastic, the Nazis would have had no resistance, the communists would have had no resistance? That is, developmental plasticity in and of itself is not an inherent good. There are plenty of living things out there that don't change in response to the environment.

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38:03Then we have the standards. Then everything has the same potential. And the whole idea of realizing your potential is nuts. What if your potential is to be a psychopathic murderer? What if your potential is to be a great thief? I mean, this is where the field of developmental psychology and child development, and I'm as guilty of this, at least during my career, as anybody else, has romanticized and idealized development. It's as if we're all supposed to become orchids. Some of us are weeds. Some of us are mooses. Some of us are orchids kind of thing. And here's the thing that maybe that parent who has that challenging, difficult, stubborn child who you can't seem to modify, here's the thing to remember, that they are growing up as children in a world that they don't have freedom of movement in a major sense.

39:06That is, they're in this family with these values. They're in this neighborhood with these ways of behaving. They're in this community. They're in this even culture with this way of doing things and they don't fit in. But you know what? When they grow up, maybe they'll move someplace where they will fit in. Maybe there'll be a job and a way of making money. I mean, you know, it used to be the case that if you were on the autism spectrum, when we grew up, our parents worried about what happened when we died, who's going to take care of this kid. What's he going to become? He's completely ineffectual.

39:45He's frightened of the world. He doesn't want to go out of the house. But we move into the IT generation, the IT world, all of a sudden, he's making$300 ,000,$400 ,000,$500 ,000 a year just being himself. That is to say that it may be that he's a square peg today in a round hole. But when he gets out, when he grows up, there'll be places for that square peg to fit in and he'll find his way there. God willing. It's not guaranteed. But the point is that don't think as a parent that you, you know, it's hard to say this and I'm laughing at myself because I was a parent of children once too, is that don't think that you know for certain what is best for your child.

40:32There's another thing that I'm curious about because when you're talking about sort of the the kids who are going to be who they're going to be. We're talking about like the more difficult ones, but, but there's also like, I have my daughter loathes. I have one daughter. If I'm going to stereotype, I have one orchid and one dandelion and the dandelion is so irritated by this orchid research. And this dandelion thinks it's like so ridiculous and dangerous to tell people that these differences exist because what if people take that information and they just like are shitty parents for that kid? And I'm like, do you feel like I was a shitty parent?

41:14My response is, let's say we get to the day when we can really very easily, reliably, confidently say this kid's highly susceptible and this kid's not highly susceptible. right like you could do a swat yeah whatever that doesn't mean taking the kid who's not highly susceptible and putting him in a closet and feeding him many that's right you know one of the mistakes that developmental science has made is it's all about tomorrow what about today later what about the quality of life you don't give children quality daycare i hope because of that they pay off only. Just the better out. You know, my philosophy is very simple.

41:58No child ever asked to be here. In an affluent society, every child deserves safety and physical, physical safety and security and nutrition and a caring, loving environment. That may not pay off in spades like it does for another one. So what? And I think it's something that my PhD student and then postdoc, Michael Lewis, who did great work has confused and I'm a little bit annoyed by it. And that is, he used the word environmental sensitivity. Sensitivity and susceptibility need to be distinguished. You and I, think of a diet. We can both go on a diet. And when the diet's over, you keep the weight off and I don't.

42:44We're both sensitive to the diet. We both lost weight on the diet. But you were susceptible to the long-term effects of the diet. That's what susceptibility is about. So the fact is that... You're totally right. The word sensitivity has messed with our understanding of susceptibility. And what we have to appreciate is that two kids will get really upset by being yelled at by their parents. They'll cry the same amount. They'll feel sad, whatever it is. But it's only going to register on one of them, perhaps. and not the other. The upset, the immediate experience, the sensitivity, the long-term consequences, if there are any, is susceptibility.

43:30And those can't be confused. I really, I appreciate you saying that. Sensitivity is a good word for immediate reactivity, an initial response. That you're sensitive to it, you're reactive to it. But it needs to be separate from susceptibility. but also it's not as a word in this culture it's not a great word either because then you get a lot of eye rolls from people who don't want to hear it because they think it's fragility so i think that i think it's problematic anyway but i but i would like to be able to say jay belsky is distinguishing sensitivity and susceptibility let's imagine we've got two kids they grow up in a nutrient-rich, broadly conceived household, neighborhood, nation, whatever.

44:18One of them sucks the marrow from the bone. The other is unaffected by all those benefits insofar as we can tell. What do you call the first one? It's the opposite of vulnerable. What's the positive opposite of vulnerable? If you come up with a word, you know, I've asked this question to at this point thousands of people. The closer you get is, The word these days is flourishing, but you don't say flourishers. There's no equivalent of vulnerable kid to a flourisher kid, a flourishing kid. No. I guess I'm also hearing something else that I need to ask you, which is, I think there's two types of kids who might suck the marrow.

45:03One of them might be by virtue of sucking the marrow, like self-sucking. like they are self-directed at sucking the marrow out of every opportunity that's not because they're they're more susceptible to their environment if they are actually like would I don't know if this is going to make sense but like I'm going to go back to doing the opposite of what a researcher should do and tell you my own kids my my dandelion would suck the marrow out of every you know like there's a teacher that is available for office hours. She's like sucking that opportunity for dear life. She, but she just like, I've done nothing with her.

45:50She's just, I love her, but like she just is, she takes life and she just takes all the opportunities. But let me just say, the one who's sort of more malleable to the environment, I have to, her natural inclination isn't to take care of herself in such a way that she would suck the marrow out of it. But if I provide that, she does flourish. The other one, it is embedded in who she is to have that. So I don't know how to distinguish. Well, first of all, the characteristic of the orchid is very consistent with one early difficulty, but more importantly, Elaine Aron's notion of the sensitive person.

46:31And there's plenty of evidence now, and Michael Plois and his Italian colleagues have generated, that actually people who are the sensitive person have more anxiety and more depression. And that may be because they haven't had sufficient positive redirectional experiences. And the whole idea is that if experiences register, one of the reasons experiences register powerfully on some kids rather than others is that they have a very sensitive nervous system so things that are potentially upsetting loud noises strange people doing things too fast whatever it is that overwhelms them unless there is a mediator who's helping to regulate that experience you know many years ago my oldest friend we had kids long before I did.

47:28He had these two girls and I met them when they were about three and they were as inhibited, shy, holding onto their parents as you could imagine. And my counsel misguidedly, I don't think they took it, so I'm not feeling guilty about it. But that taught me my understanding of development was, you know, they might grow out of it, but this is who they are. just accept them and don't make life difficult for them. Be sensitive. Well, it turns out that's not what you need to do. You need to push them, encourage them, get them out of their comfort zone. It's kind of like what I think it was named called the zone of proximal development.

48:12Their zone of proximal development may be more. Their zone of proximal development, where they can be pushed, may be smaller. So you have to do smaller steps. Right. You're not going to throw them in the deep end. Throwing them in the deep end is going to overwhelm them. So the trick is to, and this is where parents who are healthy and secure and have decent living conditions have the wherewithal to do that, have the coping capacity to do that. But what you see is, so what you see actually is in some work, very little of it though, but some of it, is that those parents with a difficult kid are nurturing, supportive, and sensitive, and increased likelihood that those kids will be, if not transformed, dramatically somebody who you wouldn't have expected them to turn out to be.

49:06whereas the same kid under parents, under adverse conditions, they're stressed, they're not coping, they're worried about food, they're worried about their family violence, they're worried about all such things. They don't have the coping capacity, they don't have the wherewithal usually. But that kind of... I had a very difficult first child. I've always wondered if you're better off having a difficult first and an easy second or the other way around. I've never seen a study of it. I would love to see that. But I had a very difficult first child. And I came away from the experience. And as a baby, he was entirely impossible.

49:45I came away from the experience wondering why there wasn't more child abuse, because I felt numerous times like throwing him against the wall. You just had the resources not to. Exactly. Is that I could be reflect. And I tell this story about walking in one day when my two boys were squabbling. And I walked in one day and I was pissed off at something that happened at the office. And I came in with that attitude. I took two steps in the house. I heard them arguing with each other. And I went to make a left-hand turn into their bedroom. It was a small house. And I said, Jay, all of a sudden I had this awareness.

50:22Do you want to be your father or not? But I didn't want to be like that. So I walked in that room and I said, boys, you have two choices. You can go sit on your bed and stop playing. Or you can simply stop fighting with each other. This is verbal. They never hit each other. Can you stop fighting with each other and keep playing? What do you want to do? They looked at each other and said, we'll keep playing. That was it. But I was capable of reflecting. and you know people know Peter Fonagy and others are talking about reflective awareness that we're compassionate to be reflective and it's hard to be reflective when you don't know if you're going to drown in the next minute you don't know what's you know that takes psychological resources and so the same kid can go this way or that way depending whether he's you know was born into the correct family so to speak or born into the unlucky family We're back to the notion that being highly malleable, sensitive, deep processing in this case is, it can be a great benefit, but it can be a great cost.

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55:27And there are some people who take it to the other extreme of just like parenting doesn't really matter. Right. Ultimately. You're either a nativist, you're either for nature or you're for nurture. And there are probably kids at the extremes who... Right, for whom that's true. But, you know, it's our dichotomous thinking, or simple thinking that leads us there. And the sad truth is that in my new book, I just complicated about it because we used to have one nature, genetics. And now we have two natures. I throw in an evolution there. So we get a three variable problem with nurture and all the combinations.

56:08Can you talk a little bit about that? We want simple answers to complex questions and that's what we've had. And it only takes you so far. It only takes you so far. But for the majority of people, if you had to choose. I think, again, for the majority of people, is the majority at what time in history and where are you at what resource level? No, I actually want to talk about that and clarify it for people because I was actually giving a talk and I was explaining temperament and orchid dandelion. And that is exactly what happened to me. is somebody came up to me and said, that's so deterministic.

56:46It feels terrible. And I was like, I feel like it was the opposite of deterministic, except for like, It's somewhat deterministic, but what it determines is quite different depending upon things like your temperament. What people are hearing is you're saying some kids you can't influence and therefore you mean we should just throw them away and disregard them. you said nothing about that but again that's their default no in fact especially because of my lived experience i'm like i'm not so worried about i guess i have a more positive spin even than what you're saying because i'm like i'm not worried about my dandelion i'm worried about my orchid so i'm actually interested because from the beginning of this conversation you're like so it feels like we all want an orchid and i'm like i am i i have a much harder time with my orchid.

57:36Like I feel much more hopeful about my, I mean, I feel hopeful about both of them and I love them and we have a very lucky circumstance. But what you're saying is people were reading that and they're like, so you're saying throw out these dandelions, don't bother with interventions. And what I thought people would be saying is like, so these are these like vulnerable orchids and we have to be so careful, otherwise they're not going to flourish. But that's not what people are hearing. The responses I've gotten that are knee-jerk ideological are not like, oh, you're saying we can ruin kids. That doesn't seem to be what they're worried about.

58:12They're more worried about the fact that you're saying there are kids who you can't influence and by implication, you shouldn't bother with them. In other words, it's like, these are kids who are not going to be Nazi youth. These are kids who are not going to go into a fraternity when they say you have to, or a gang when they say you have to kill somebody to become a member, are going to do it. We have this notion, and again, it's the canon, that developmental plasticity is an inherent good, but it depends upon the world. Right. And so if you're in a negative environment, developmental plasticity is very much not good.

58:52Well, unless the world that they're going to grow up into is dangerous and shitty and it's a dog-eat-dog world. And so, hit first, ask questions later, take advantage of others, and it's all about me, me, me, and mine. That's the world. And then you're going to... Then adversity is, and susceptibility, go together to create a winner, probably. I mean, just curious. We live in civilization. Civilization is an attempt to avoid that world. We ate the greater good for the greatest many to, well, at least modern civilization. And so here today, being born an asshole, a psychopath, becoming a sociopath, is not a great strategy.

59:47I mean, there are people who do win at it, but they're the exception, not the rule. if you're in the right side of the economic distribution and you're in the right side of the mental health of parents and in the right side of a good school district, you're much, and, you know, being developmentally plastic is an opportunity to suck the marrow from the bone. Most of us don't realize that the world we live in was not always the world. And so they don't stop and think, you know, what if I was developmentally plastic and it was a shitty world? Who would I become? I often wonder, my grandfather was 15 when the Holocaust started and my grandmother was 18.

1:00:31They both survived and then got married. So obviously everything worked out in terms of procreating, but not, you know, I don't think my grandfather's still, he's 101, but he's still going and that's all he thinks about pretty much, obviously. I'm sorry, what's all he thinks about? The Holocaust? The Holocaust. But I think about like my grandmother went to Auschwitz. My grandfather tried to convince her to go into the forest with him and not go, you know, from the work camp to the death camp because he was like, everybody's going to die. I'm going with a group of people into the forest. And they both survived in very different ways.

1:01:09But the stories that my grandfather has of his survival, I often think like, what temperament do you have to have to notice the strange things that he noticed about the, like he tells a story of being in one of those giant, outside of one of those giant pits where they were shooting mass graves. They were shooting people to go into mass grave. And he noticed that the soil was soft and wet. So he knew that if he grabbed the particular Nazi that was within reach to him, that the soil would drag them both into, because it would collapse, it would drag them both into the pit. And therefore, they wouldn't shoot because they wouldn't want to shoot him.

1:01:57So then I'm like, well, that was a very sensitive person, if you're noticing. But again, he could have been a cool, calm, collected operator for fixed strategy reasons. It doesn't have to be reduced. He had the, you know, I always think of myself, I said, I would have just rolled over and died. Me too. A hundred percent. Like every story he tells I'm like, I would have been like, I'm out. He was a very sturdy, strong, ridiculously confident person at some level that he was going to take this risk to run away and then he kept his cool about him and, you know, when everybody else was losing theirs, it's the same goes.

1:02:36That could have been just who he was by nature. Well, so that's what I wanted to ask you is like, and I don't want to use that as an example, because I certainly don't want to attribute like survival versus not in those kinds of dire circumstances to be like anything about that individual. And so I'll be cutting that section out of this podcast. I don't know why. I mean, I think these are interesting examples. What we don't know is whether, I like putting it this way, whether your grandpa was born that way or made that way. Right. Well, so this is what I wanted to ask you. Ultimately, after this conversation and your decades of thinking about this, is it we need to accept that temperament exists?

1:03:21And in the absence of accepting, we're not like understanding humans. We're trying to like create something out of like, like as if we're all the same piece of play. Right. This is where we kind of don't appreciate diversity. And really, the evolutionary utility of diversity, you know, the first rule of evolution is there has to be variation. Because only if there's variation, and that's the risk for clonal species, is they're all exactly the same. So the minute the temperature changes, they all crash. We need to appreciate the diversity instead of trying to sort of make everybody be like we're all the same.

1:04:02If you've gotten to our age and you think we're all the same, then, you know, I don't know what planet you're on. We're not all the same. There's another hidden question here, the fact. And that is that susceptibility, when I first wrote about it, I presumed it was born. That is, it was genetic. And there's good evidence or certainly strong suggestive evidence that that's true to some extent. It never occurred to me, why I don't know, that it could be that plasticity could be experientially induced. But that's exactly what in the way. So I thought of genetics, but not nurture for shaping plasticity.

1:04:43Tom Boyce was just the opposite. He wrote about experience, especially when he got to the U-shaped curve with Bruce Ellis, as experience-inducing plasticity for better and for worse genetics. And we both, and the three of us, myself, Bruce, and Tom, integrate these two and make it clear that these aren't mutually exclusive at all. They can both be going on. And it can even be more complicated so that only on the right genetics will a certain kind of environment influence this kind of plasticity versus that kind of plasticity. So the point is that we have to appreciate it may be that experiences, at least for some kids, can influence developmental plasticity.

1:05:35Remember before I talked about if we could go in and change some biological substrate, be it microbiome or physiology? Well, if you stop thinking about it, orchids and dandelions, the mechanism that Tom identified was physiological reactivity, which is basically how reactive your cortisol system is. That kids who had very high reactivity under good conditions flourished and took advantage. Under bad conditions, they quote, flourished too, but it was in the wrong direction, so to speak. but it was experiences of high levels of support or high levels of adversity that induced greater plasticity.

1:06:23Now, could it do that with anybody or just people who were genetically predisposed to be susceptible to that? I'd probably err on the side of that, but I had no evidence to that effect. Work hasn't been done. So you can think, and this is why I say that to finish, and the second half of my book is all about. this is that plasticity can be born genetically induced, genetic, or may experientially induced. In fact, one of the real interesting things is prenatal stress, which fosters both high physiological reactivity and difficult temperament in infants, also is related to greater developmental So here we have experience prenatally doing something to the organism physiologically, temperamentally, that makes it open to incoming cues.

1:07:21So is it the environment is releasing the possibilities? You know, releasing, inducing, crafting, you know, these are all fabricated verbs or gerunds to try to explicate what we're talking about. But we don't know what's going on. You know, there may be something about distress as a fetus that ramps up the reactivity system, physiological reactivity system, which now makes you more of an open book to learn whatever's coming in. If it's good stuff, you go this way. If it's bad stuff, you go that way. And that's, you know, in fact, it's probably the case, although we don't have evidence, we have hints of it, that your genes, your physiological reactivity, and your temperament, and even your sensitive personality, I think of them sometimes as the blind man and the elephant.

1:08:21Jay Belsky's holding the tail, so he's describing susceptibility some way. Tom Boyce is holding the Trump thing. He's describing it a different way. Elaine Aron is holding something else. Nobody's ever done the genetic and temperamental study which tries to measure all these things at once and seeing how high are they correlated. And I think certainly in some kids it's very highly related. So we're talking about the same beast. We're just looking at different indicators. My belief is that sort of these may be all markers of the same underlining dynamic. Which sort of is like at the beginning when I said defined temperament and it was that you know it when you see it.

1:09:03We do know it when we see it, but there isn't a lot of... Well, you define temperament behaviorally like I tend to do. You can also define it physiologically if you've got written and making the measurements. Now, which one is it? Well, those two are probably not unrelated in many people. Who knows? In some people, they may be strikingly unrelated. But at the same time, ultimately, aren't we just saying that there's a certain that humans are complicated and are complex and that some of it's going to be we can't quite put our finger on it. But this is like you have a way of being and some of it is.

1:09:41It's complicated because people want simple answers to complex to critical questions. And there aren't simple answers to critical questions unless you're an idiot. It's genes. It's environment. It's a whole mess of stuff. If you were like, I need parents to know, this is the most annoying question. But if you were like, given the culture we're in today and the conversations that happened, particularly directed at parents about kids, what do you feel like I just want to, do your kids have kids? Do you have grandchildren yet? Are they, has there been anything where you just are like, this is what I really want to say to the parents, but I don't, but I won't.

1:10:22I'll bite my tongue because I certainly... Both of my sons, a professor of public health at Columbia and studies biological aging, which child adversity is part of that story as I make clear in the book. My daughter-in-law is, you know, had worked for the Nurse Family Partnership and now she was actually a child development commissioner in New York City and now she's doing something else. So they're both tuned in. and I don't think I've, I can only think of two things that I've explicitly said to one or both of them. I don't, and in fact, maybe three things because something happened recently and I actually didn't say it to them.

1:11:06I said to my granddaughter in an email and I've kind of stayed out of it. It's not my, I figure it's not my place and most importantly, it's not like there's something going on. You're super good. In front of them, what I tell my granddaughters is, you kids are really smart. You really pick good parents. Well, you know, maybe that's part of it too is given your research, maybe you feel more calm than other people about all of it. When my first son, the Columbia professor, was a kid, I was beside myself with what is he going to turn into? He was difficult, ornery. Ornery. He was a terrible baby.

1:11:48He was ornery. He didn't have friends. He was, you know, and the thing is, his first daughter, my granddaughter, is very much like him. And, you know, well, I'll chat with his wife and she'll say, you know, it's your fault. I said, you married him, not me. Don't blame me. But, you know, and he gave me confidence, actually, that with the right degree or at least sufficient supervision and support and not demeaning and humiliating and threatening and whatever, that he'd get to a place and he'd mature into the person he's become. Now, we still can be somewhat overbearing like his father. We can talk too much like his father.

1:12:37But the worries I had as a parent, in some ways, I say this facetiously, but probably wasted. You know, looking back, I sort of, if I would have known then what I know now, I probably would have thought about things different. At least I hope so. Well, that's kind of what I wanted to know, because I think that's very valuable for people to hear, which is this doesn't take away the sort of rite of passage of being a very attentive, worried parent. but the question is more like in looking back, is it when you zoom out and you know what you know with the assumption that you were relatively sensitive and thoughtful?

1:13:24Love you kids and take care of them as you think is right and appropriate and not because of what it's going to do down the developmental road, but what it's doing here and now. And that doesn't mean make their life easy and everything. you know you're not going to when your child comes home and complains about the teacher you know my attitude is you don't say oh that's a lousy teacher you know you say what the child doesn't want to hear which is that teacher works hard it's a job that doesn't get enough respect and in this house except in severe conditions the teacher is always right so if you want to complain about the teacher, I'm not the person to listen to it because I don't think that's appropriate for me to do anything other than to stand behind the teacher.

1:14:16And if that upsets you and disappoints you, then let it. Okay. In other words, I'm not going to just coddle him. I'm not going to, but, but there, you know, you could say what I'm doing is, you know, preparing the child for tomorrow, but I'm not, I'm telling him about today. I'm telling him about who I think teachers are and what they deserve in terms of respect today. And your values, by the way. Exactly. And so live your values. Hopefully they're not, you know, harsh. Live your values and worry less about tomorrow because you don't know what world he or she's going to live in. I think I'm a believer that the aspiration should be to be sensitive, to taking the consideration who your child is, what are his or her characteristics, how does that interact with your values and your proclivities and your preferences, and know, so you won't treat two kids exactly the same way.

1:15:22And one of them might say, that's not fair. And then you can say, well, that's my favorite. When the other kid says, that's not my, you know, like my father did. But the point is that I think it's this obsession with tomorrow that we developmentalists have oversoul. And that the culture has overbored. Yeah.

1:16:04Thank you.