adaptive capacity – Lion's Whiskers

Hard-wired to Care: You Matter in the Moral Life of your Child!

admin — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Current moral psychology research indicates that as parents we are our child’s first and most important teacher of the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. The good news is that from birth, humans (and other primates for that matter) are hard-wired to care. According to psychologist and primatologist Franz De Waal (2010), empathy, or being able to feel/care/think on another’s behalf, is an instinctual, adaptive capacity that helps us all survive.

Empathy is at the root of being a good person, or ape, whatever the case may be. Infants as young as six months old can differentiate kindness from meanness. By 12 months, infants begin to express care for others in distress. And by 14-18 months, these children show signs of altruistic (unrewarded) helping behaviors towards others (Decety, Michalska, and Kinzler, 2011). Moral reasoning develops as children learn to integrate their inborn empathy with more complex social-reasoning abilities. As parents, we have the responsibility to help our children learn how to connect and activate, through practice, that wiring through our care for them.

Developing a moral conscience is no longer understood to be a logical or even stage-by-stage process as proposed by the grandfather of moral development theory, Lawrence Kohlberg (1984). Social Intuitionist theorists like Jonathan Haidt (2001) conclude that human beings are much less logical and much more intuitive, emotional, and automatic in their moral decision-making and responsiveness. Moral psychologists like Darcia Narvaez, have developed several integrative theories, weaving together current neurobiology with more traditional cognitive and developmental psychology theories concerning the nature of moral development. Her research explores questions of moral cognition, moral development and moral character education. She is, in essence, trying to show that moral behavior in humans is driven by both bottom-up (reptilian brain instincts and limbic system responses) and top-down processes (higher brain metacognition and executive function linked with the development of our prefrontal cortex).

What does all this have to do with parenting and moral courage?

Narvaez’s Triune Ethics Theory (TET) (2007), concludes that a “fully functional moral brain” is an evolutionary adaptation dependent upon modern childrearing practices that support healthy attachment. Such secure parent/caregiver-child attachment leads to the kind of neurobiological development necessary for moral behavior. Which in normal speak means, with regards to the moral development of your child, YOU MATTER BIG TIME in helping to wire your child’s brain in ways that are both adaptive and moral! Read my post from last week, for an example of how much parents do matter!

Moral conscience, therefore, is now understood to be an instinctual and learned skill best passed on from parent to child through loving communication, care, and consistency. It all starts in the chemical soup called LOVE and with the way we hold our babes!

It is the heart with which you bring to parenting that will help define your child’s orientation towards prosocial behavior (which is loosely defined as: empathic caring about the welfare and rights of others and acting in ways that benefit humanity).

However, Narvaez and Vaydich (2008) caution that modern parenting practices, particularly in America, either do not afford or underestimate the importance of spending the kind of time ensuring secure parent-child attachment. They and others, like De Waal, voice concerns that we must not drop the ball on being the kind of attentive mentors our kids need to develop a healthy moral conscience. It can be hard these days with so many different technologies, extracurricular activities, and financial realities competing for our attention. Especially as our children enter adolescence, when their moral compass increasingly shifts towards the magnetic appeal of peer and mainstream media influence. It takes moral courage to be the parent who shuts down the party where alcohol is served to minors. To demand better workplace hours, benefits, or childcare policies so your children are made a priority. Or to advocate for your child in a school where bullying may be the elephant in the lunchroom cafeteria.

When we are engaged in consistent, loving parenting—which is at the basis of secure parent-child bonds—everyday teachable moments with our children abound. Teachable moments that can facilitate the transmission of moral values through moral instruction, modeling, supervision, and even the kind of story-telling associated with helping children to become good people.

Narvaez and Vaydich (2008) urge educators, too, to become the kind of safe, caring mentors children need. They believe school teachers are placed with an increasingly heavy burden of responsibility in helping to shape the future leaders of our world, in lieu of parental involvement and supervision. In fact, these researchers encourage teachers to establish the same kind of secure attachments with their students, through attention and emotional awareness, in order to help ensure children will learn and follow the moral guidelines with which classrooms best function. Moral guidelines like: be kind, wait your turn, share, pick up your garbage, tell the truth, and don’t poke your classmate!

For a list of ways to help support your child’s moral development, be sure to read my post next Sunday!

On a Journey

admin — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” – Leo Tolstoy

Lisa and I were talking about Steven Spielberg, and that had me thinking about how this great modern storyteller’s work fits Tolstoy’s observation. Stories are about our encounter with the unfamiliar. Either we have gone on a journey and find the unfamiliar along the way, or the unfamiliar comes and finds us where we live, even if we just wanted to stay home and have a cup of coffee. Consider two of Spielberg’s many great films: Jaws, and Schindler’s List.

Jaws (one of my very favorite movies, precisely because the storytelling is so masterful) is like so many great tales that follow the “stranger” model: a monster has broken the security of our peaceful home, and the hero must conquer the monster and restore peace. Police Chief Brody had expected the island to be a quiet refuge from the dangers of New York City, only to have a more ominous danger rise from the deep (metaphor alert!) Classic stories of this type include Beowulf (both the monster and Beowulf are strangers, by the way.)

Schindler’s List, on the other hand, is a journey. (Bear in mind that most journeys in story are metaphorical; the hero travels from one emotional, psychological, spiritual, or moral state into another.) At the start of this movie Schindler’s motto is “What’s in it for Schindler?” By the end, he is weeping with regret that he had not been able to save even more lives. Classic stories of this type include, of course, the Odyssey.

The unfamiliar or the unknown is at the root of many of our fears, maybe even all of them. We don’t know what will happen to us if we try X; will that new person be our friend or not; if I go to the different place will I be safe? But because stories, at their core, are about meeting the unfamiliar, they help us experience that meeting again and again – in safety. They are a way to practice encountering strangers, facing the thing in the shadows that we can’t see. We can be fortified by this practice and apply that courage in our life.

(Readers interested in exploring what mythology and legend can tell us about the Shadow, our projection of our negative qualities onto a faceless enemy –may want to read Joseph Campbell, or watch the famous conversations between Campbell and Bill Moyers about “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” on DVD.)

But I would like to add that there are other ways to practice encountering the unfamiliar, and this may be part of our practice of developing our adaptive capacity, our ability to “roll with it” when changes occur. When I catch myself being rigid in my parenting, I know it’s time to loosen up. There is security and comfort in the familiar, for sure, and I know that predictability has been important for my daughter in her transition to life in this country; but inflexible routine can also create tedium and resentment. A few months back, the Lovely K. asked if she could sleep under the dining room table. It was a school night, and my knee-jerk reaction was to say no.

But I caught myself. What’s the worst that can happen? A poor night’s sleep and thus a cranky kid the next day? Wanting to sleep somewhere else the next night? A refusal to sleep in her own bed again? Outright sedition and rebellion? Nonsense. What I was really afraid of was change.

Yet change is exactly what I want her to be open to – to trying new things, to being willing to explore, to treat the unknown and unfamiliar as opportunities rather than threats, to have the courage to break away. I want her to develop her adaptive capacity!

“Okay,” I said when I saw where my thoughts were leading me. “Go ahead.”

She eagerly prepared a bedroll, and arranged stuffed animals in her camping spot as I began turning out lights and prepared to go upstairs. “Everything’s different under here,” she said with awed excitement.

Did you see that? That was a journey.

Children, Courage, and Adaptive Capacity

admin — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

The committee defined an earthquake-resilient nation as “one in which its communities, through mitigation and predisaster preparation, develop the adaptive capacity to maintain important community functions and recover quickly when major disasters occur.” – National Institute of Standards and Technology, New Study Maps Out Steps to Strengthen U.S. Resilience to Earthquakes

The adaptation projects made possible by the WCS Climate Adaptation Fund will increase the adaptive capacity of wildlife and their habitats to new conditions precipitated by climatic changes. – Wildlife Conservation Society, press release

But the one competence that I now realize is absolutely essential for leaders – the key competence – is adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is what allows leaders to adapt quickly and intelligently to relentless change. – Warren Bennis, On Becoming a Leade

One of the assumptions that underpins Lion’s Whiskers is the assumption of a changing world. We all know change is inevitable; what we don’t know is what form that change will take, or what the magnitude of it will be. Climate scientists are trying to piece together what they know and predict the effects on the ecosystem; economists and business leaders are studying world markets and trying to extrapolate what will create tomorrow’s prosperity; social and political scientists are looking at trends in human behavior and trying to imagine where those trajectories will take our society.

Adaptive capacity is an idea that applies to ecological and human systems, and refers to the ability of that system to manage change while maintaining integrity or without losing function. (Species extinction is one way to manage change – but it doesn’t maintain integrity for the species!) How great the adaptive capacity of a system is determines how well it can manage change.

How does this apply to parenting, and to children, and courage? The most fundamental human system is the individual. A person who is rigid physically, emotionally, intellectually – an inflexible person – is not going to adapt well to change. For many people, change is an alarming prospect; yet we know change will come no matter what. Strengthening our courage and our children’s courage may be a useful way to develop adaptive capacity. It’s also possible that it goes the other way – developing our adaptive capacity may strengthen our courage! Maybe it goes both ways at the same time. Maybe they are the same thing!

We have talked from the beginning about strengthening all six types of courage by trying new things. It may be that the process of trying new things – any new things – counts more than what the things are. Our willingness to experiment, break old habits, question our paradigms, risk making mistakes and greet change as a friend rather than an enemy may help us live longer and happier lives.

This is not about being changed by exterior forces, but changing from within as circumstances (our environment, our social relationships, our knowledge) changes. Nourishing our children’s adaptive capacity may be as important as nourishing their growing bodies. Adaptive capacity is now a buzzword in longevity research, sustainability, leadership studies and business. Let’s make it a buzzword for parenting, too.