412. Nature vs nurture: Understanding sensitivity, resilience, and what really shapes kids with Dr. Jay Belsky

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:00:00):

Their thought is when they don’t succeed, what did I do wrong? What MO did I not go down? What the get out of jail free card is no. It may be that this is person who isn’t very developmentally susceptible and therefore you’re doing everything right. It’s just not sticking or is sticking for a short term but it doesn’t adhere.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:00:33):

Not all kids are shaped by their experiences in the same way. The same parenting, the same environment, even the same family can have very different effects depending on the child. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Brun, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. Each week I sit down with leading experts in psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and child development, and try to translate complex research into practical, grounded insights that help you parent with more clarity and confidence. I am so honored to be joined this week by Dr. Jay Belsky. Dr. Belsky is one of the most influential researchers in the field of child development and his work has helped shape how we understand the relationship between nature and nurture. He is a professor emeritus at UC Davis and the author of hundreds of scientific papers as well as his most recent book published by Harvard University Press, The Nature of Nurture.

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In our conversation, we’re going to be talking about something called developmental plasticity. And in simple terms, that just means how much a child is shaped by their environment. Some kids are highly influenced by what happens around them. They’re more affected by stress, but they also benefit more from support and connection and other kids are a little less impacted. They’re more steady across different environments and it’s like they’re just a bit more impermeable. And perhaps most importantly, we’ll help you understand why having either high or low developmental plasticity isn’t automatically better or worse. It’s just one more piece of information to help you tune into the child in front of you. In this conversation, we also explore how nature and nurture work together to shape development. Why siblings raised in the same home can turn out so differently and what that means for what’s actually within our control as parents.

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And throughout the conversation, we keep coming back to what really matters, that it is so important not to get so hyper-focused on long-term outcomes that we lose sight of our child’s experience in the here and now. This episode is all about understanding your child as an individual, letting go of the pressure to get it exactly right and focusing on what truly supports healthy development over time.

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Hello, Dr. Belsky. I’m so excited to have you here today.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:03:01):

It’s a lovely opportunity for me. Thank you very much.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:03:05):

I’m really excited about this conversation. Your work has shaped so much of how we understand parenting and child development and you bring a really unique lens to that conversation. So I think a lot of what you’ve studied and written about is going to resonate with a lot of parents listening today. And I just want to jump in, maybe giving you an opportunity to paint a little picture of briefly the arc of your … If you could just synthesize in a couple of sentences of your entire field of body of work. But how did you end up getting from your initial orientation? You come from this lens of evolution and development and now you have this book, The Nature of Nurture. Where was your arc? How did you get there?

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:03:55):

Well, actually the evolutionary view was something that emerged in mid-career. I never planned to be a developmental psychologist. An accidental event, a serendipitous event changed the course of mighty rivers in my case, my life. I decided to become a nursery school teacher that led me to go to graduate school. That got me intrigued by science. I never expected to be an academic, but I turned into one. And my goal, like so many of us in the field, was to make the world a better place, to light a candle rather than curse the darkness, to understand what shapes children’s development. And my foundational presumption, ideology, bias was nurture. Didn’t give nature genetics and certainly not evolution any consideration. But over time, I came to realize, well, I’ve been an academic for 40 years. There are still many people who are going to deny the role of nature as defined by genetics, DNA, and differences between people.

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And I probably started out that way, but as a scientist, that became less and less viable if you wanted to be intellectually open-minded and lifelong learner like I did. One day, kind of again, serendipitously, somebody dropped off a paper recasting some of “the effects of nurture on development in evolutionary, not genetic, but evolutionary perspective, meaning emphasizing adaptation, natural selection, and the passing on of your own genes to make more life, which is what according to evolution, life is all about just making more life. That’s what living things are designed to do. And that made me rethink so much of what I had thought. And it’s frustrated me that that perspective hasn’t been added foundationally to the field of child development. We talk a lot about genetics, we talk a lot about neuroscience, but evolution really is sort of not very much engaged. And while I was intrigued by evolutionary thought, I wasn’t ready to endorse it.

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And what I knew as a scientist was that if a new eye set of ideas, a new research paradigm, a new way of understanding should supplant an old way, it should do several things. Perhaps the most important, it should lead to brand new hypotheses, which themselves lead to discoveries. And so for the only time in my career I struggled with coming up with a testable proposition, a hypothesis that nobody had ever considered that the standard developmental canon, the way our traditional thinking existed couldn’t explain if it turned out to be true and would never anticipate it. And I came up with the idea that adversity growing up under risky conditions should actually accelerate sexual development by affecting the timing of puberty. And that was sort of uncanny but also an incredibly long shot idea. But if it came out and it did, then that would convince me and I presumed others, and I was naive in that case to be honest, that that would convince me that this was a path worth going down.

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So I was intrigued by evolutionary thinking. I was intrigued by the possibility it could add something very fundamental going from black and white to color is the way I put it in my new book, but I wasn’t yet convinced I had to be sold by scientific evidence and lo and behold, work continually to show that. And then I had another insight from putting on evolutionary lenses and seeing the world that way, which is … And we never really talk about this. We presume that children are developmentally plastic, susceptible to environmental influences, but we never ask ourselves, why should that be?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:08:02):

Wait, I want to stop you for a quick second because when you start to talk about developmental plasticity that they’re sensitive. If we give them good, they take it in. If they are faced with bad, they take it in.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:08:17):

Exactly that’s the standard.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:08:19):

And what you’re saying is historically we’ve just assumed that that’s a given for all children.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:08:25):

I’m saying something more subtle. We haven’t asked ourselves, why do we believe that? Why would we be made that way?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:08:34):

Right, because that could potentially really risky for our species. If you’re thinking from an evolutionary lens, right? It’s all about survival of the species. If everyone’s susceptible, then we risk everyone getting wiped out by the same problem.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:08:52):

Well, if everybody’s susceptible and tomorrow turns out different than today, that if later life is not consistent with early life, then it’s like we thought we had a key to open the door to life and it doesn’t fit. And so I realize that the future’s inherently uncertain. Every financial advisor will tell you that. That’s why you don’t put all your money if you’ve got it to invest in stocks or in gold or in property or in anything else. But the wisest thing to do is to diversify.

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And so that led to the notion that not only should nature diversify children in terms of the degree to which they are or are not shaped by their developmental experiences in childhood, but that should be true and this is really important to the parents who are listening within families because families, although we don’t think about this in the modern era, are investors too in their own future genetic legacy. We don’t think in those terms in a modern world for the most part, but that doesn’t make it not so. Nature has done the thinking for you and so it makes sense that if … Think of it this way, if every kid you raised turned out exactly how you wanted them to, what would happen if what you were preparing for them for didn’t come to be later in life. They’d all go over the metaphorical wartfall.

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And so you’re a genetic investor without even knowing it and you’re diversifying your progeny, not by doing anything consciously, but your body’s taken care of that. And what that fundamentally means for so much of the work we do as people interested in nurture is that if you don’t distinguish those who are more and less susceptible, you’re going to either underestimate or overestimate the effects of experience. And in fact, one of the great critiques of those of us who are fascinated and at some level believe in nurture is that, oh, if you look at the research, the effects are really small, especially compared to genetics. But that’s partly because we haven’t sorted the wheat from the chaff. We haven’t distinguished those who are more and less susceptible. And the minute you do vala, you discover that for some how you care for them, how their peers treat them, how the school experience and neighborhood experiences they have are massively important and for others they’re not.

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And the irony, of course, is that we all have anecdotes about that. That kid, I couldn’t do anything, he just was who he was, or another anecdote like that kid just sucked the marrow from the bone and took everything in the environment he could better or worse and became like that, but certainly our developmental science failed to appreciate that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:11:54):

Got it. Okay. Going back to this original sort of thing that we were laying out, which is one of the sort of misappreciations of nature is that we all start from the same place and if we have a good environment, we benefit and we have a tough environment we can struggle, but there is what you’re saying is it’s not just that simple, there’s these extra sort of this other axis of if you are innately biologically just sense the nervous system build, brain body, whatever, that sort of basis, there’s groups of kids randomly assigned at birth basically from some of their genetic makeup, but you don’t always guarantee because you could have two kids from the same parents that are different in this way, that some are more susceptible, those kids that suck the marrow from the bones or absorb the most of the shock when stuff’s not good and those are these highly plastic kids, highly susceptible kids.

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And then there are kids who are just lower on that spectrum of susceptibility, meaning life just kind of rolls off their back, which could be really good if they’re in an adverse environment, resilience.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:13:23):

This is why being developmentally plastic is not inherently good.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:13:28):

Right, because if you’re developmentally resilient or whatever in a really great environment, you’re also not really taking full benefit of that. You hit a sort of a ceiling.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:13:40):

I was just about to say that this completely rephrases or makes us think differently about the whole notion of resilience. Resilience isn’t inherently good. Resilience is great if you’re growing up under a lousy environment, but if you’re growing up in a really supportive one and you’re resilient, you’re not going to be affected. And you know what? After we came up with this theory and showed this in studies, people started looking at this in interventions and experiments to influence kids and lo and behold, what they discovered was that there are kids who … The interventions are evaluated like on average this worked. Well, it turns out even when it works on average, it doesn’t work for everybody.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:14:25):

Right. It doesn’t work average amounts for every person. It works in the aggregate across different people, some better, some not at all. And the average is, okay, it works.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:14:35):

You see in the book, the class average could be B+ and nobody in the class has a B+ because it’s just an average. But I want to revise one of the things that I didn’t think about, but a previous person on your show, Tom Boyce, did with Bruce Ellis and that is my assumption was that this individual differences in developmental plasticity, some more, some less susceptible, was a function, as you implied, your biological makeup. What Tom and Bruce … I never even thought about the possibility that your experience could induce greater and lesser plasticity.

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They never thought about the possibility that you could be born more and less susceptible. And so that’s why we came together once and wrote an integrated paper to say, Plasticity is both born, that is you’ve got more of it and I’ve got less of it and it’s made. You’ve got more of it because of experiences you had and the other person has less of it because of the experiences they had. So we really have people who are born to be more and less plastic, susceptible to environmental influences, and other people who are made to be more and les plastic. And one of the things that does is it makes development much more complicated than we’d like it to be.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:16:02):

Yes. I mean, this is like the … I mean, obviously a lot of the people who are listening are parents, right? But also a lot of people who are listening are therapists and anyone who’s gone to grad school for therapy knows that the constant question is, is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it nature? It’s a constant debate. I mean, your book is literally called The Nature of Nurture. It’s this messy blend and interaction, action, interaction of the two. Not like you not disentangle them, but they are self-creating. They self-inform the development of the other. It’s so messy.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:16:43):

I once wrote a paper. I was asked to write a paper for a clinical journal I’d never heard of because I don’t read them. I’m not a clinician, I’m a patient. When people ask me on a plane, “Oh, so you see patients?” I say, “No, I am a patient.” And the theme of the paper was the idea of differential susceptibility children vary, even adults vary in their susceptibility, that it’s kind of for clinicians, it’s kind of a get out of jail free card because every clinician, if they’ll admit it and I’m sure only, and I’m sure they do, is that sometimes you succeed and sometimes you don’t. And most of the time because of how they’re trained and who they are as humanitarian people, their thought is when they don’t succeed, “What did I do wrong? What MO did I not go down?”

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And what the get on the jail free card is no, it may be that this is person who isn’t very developmentally susceptible and therefore you’re doing everything right. It’s just not sticking or is sticking for a short term but it doesn’t adhere and that gets us to the difference between sensitivity and susceptibility.

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That is think of two kids playing in the playground and all of a sudden there’s a car accident on the street, boom, there’s this big loud noise crash and they both jump up scared. Okay, they’re both sensitive. They both had an immediate reaction like most of us went to a very loud, surprising noise, but only one of them internalize it. Does it stick to them and they become anxious or more anxious and worried and that kind of thing and that’s susceptibility. So I think it’s really important to distinguish sensitivity and susceptibility because sensitivity is really the short term response and susceptibility is the longer term consequence. So you can have a short term response with or without a longer term consequence.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:18:50):

So this actually brings me to a question I’ve always been curious about and I’m so happy to have you here, like literally the source I can ask you, but I’ve always been a little confused and I’m going to try to describe this. I’m a visual thinker and I know we’re listening in a podcast, but I’m going to try to describe this so people who are listening can kind of picture what I’m talking about. The way I kind of conceptualize what you just described is an axis, like an X axis. Okay. Right? So maybe the X axis is susceptibility, how much the environment gets in permeability and then sensitivity being the Y axis. So going up and down is like how sensitive is the system? So does that mean there are four quadrants? There are kids who are high sensitivity and low … Can you be high sensitive, low susceptibility?

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:19:40):

Absolutely. So let’s go through it. It’s a good question. So you can be high sensitive and you can be high sensitive and high susceptible.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:19:47):

Ok.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:19:47):

You can be high sensitive and low susceptible. Can you be low sensitive and high susceptible? I don’t know.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:19:56):

Yeah.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:19:56):

But I think you can be low and low. The low sensitive and high susceptible…

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:20:03):

Those feel like kind of oxymorons to be both low sensitivity and high susceptibility.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:20:09):

I was about to say, development is so complicated. Some of those probably exist, we just don’t notice it. I would say a goal in communicating our understanding is at some level to simplify, but we have to keep appreciating and be sensitive and susceptible to the fact that things are more complicated than we would probably like them to be. And we can only handle so much complexity and myself included.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:20:42):

But then let’s simplify it though, because I do. The reason why I was trying to understand it as a quadrant is because my brain is trying to simplify it, but I’m also like, okay, let’s say there’s probably people who are low sensitivity and high susceptibility, meaning they really don’t have big responses to the world, but they also can absorb a lot of benefit if they need to, or a lot of not so great stuff if they need to. That’s right. But regardless of what type of the four quadrants you are, I would imagine that there’s, this is where I get really nerdy a Z axis, like an extra, like another dimension, like now we’re in a sphere and it’s fit versus not fit, like how much does the environment or the relationship in the family systems can adapt to and meet the needs of the child versus a bad fit further out on the spectrum of like, now we’re in a place where this is where you maybe see adversity or stress.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:21:48):

You’ve put in a parameter here, which is what kind of life is the child exposed to? You can provide sensitive supportive care two different ways. One, it’s just who you are and you just throw it out to every kid you got and the other is you’re sensitive to their differences and you adjust it accordingly. So you’re really talking about what is the lived environment like for that child.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:22:22):

Wait, really important distinction is not necessarily like, is it free from adversity or free from stress that’s a good environment. I think what you’re just describing is there are maybe now we’re getting into attachment, which is what I love to talk about, but like is there a world in which there is a fit in the environment and that could be facilitated by the relationship of a primary attachment figure, a parent, a loving person. So even if the environment might be adverse, that protection of the parent to create fit to say, “You have this need. I can sense that you’re different from your brother in this way. You kind of need a little bit more of this or a little bit less of this and I can adapt and modify my expectations for you or the way the environment’s set up to meet you where you’re at.”

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:23:09):

Okay. Let’s step away for a minute from what we’ve been talking about because you just pointed to what I think is we’ve long though this, but what I’ve been struck by over the last 10 years is what is an outpouring of all too often disconnected research that shows that adverse environments don’t have adverse consequences, especially for susceptible kids if they have care environments are sensitive and supportive of them and that’s true of parenting, how parents behave, it’s true of how friends behave, it’s true of what neighborhoods are like. In other words, even if you’re susceptible and you’re growing up in adversity, let’s say your father’s an alcoholic, your mother, your grandmother, your teacher might buffer or protect you from the expected adverse negative consequence of that. And we see this, I am struck over the last two, three years of I’ll pick up a paper and it’s about peers. I’ll pick up a paper and it’s about fathers. I’ll pick up a paper about this and that, and it’s the same take home message, which so yes, now that kind of buffering is going to matter more to a susceptible kid than a non-susceptible kid.

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But I would always add this, what are the critiques of thinking about and when I’ve spoken about this around the world, I often get this comment, “Oh, so what you’re saying, if a kid’s not susceptible, we just don’t have to worry about him. We don’t have to care for him. We don’t have to invest in him, et cetera.” And I say, “Absolutely not.

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” Every kid, and here’s where I start, never asked to be here, every kid has a decent quality of life coming to him, of safety and security, whether or not that’s going to have a developmental consequence or not. Why? Because that’s what everybody would like and second to repeat, because they never asked to be here. So this is not a license for neglect.

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Having said that, I think if we have limited services to provide and we could distinguish, and I think we have a long way to go on that, the more and less susceptible, then we’d get more bang for our buck by going to the more treating the more susceptible. But again, that’s not a license to neglect the less susceptible. And I think that’s really important. And in fact, I go off on this in my book a little bit, which is I think one of the negative consequences of the developmental science, be it attachment theory or social learning theory or whatever, is that we have made longterm consequences the be all and end all of what’s important. And as a result, we’ve simply neglected the quality of everyday life.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:26:08):

Right. We like to intellectualize and kind of plan future forecast. There’s a here and now.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:26:16):

And the risk is we mess up. Not intentionally, but it’s kind of like we’re out of balance between the here and now and the tomorrows.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:26:24):

Yeah.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:26:25):

And we cannot lose sight of the here and now.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:26:34):

Jumping in quickly here, because as we’re talking about how different kids are differently shaped by their environments, it’s worth naming something that a lot of parents feel but don’t always have language for. If you have a child who is more sensitive, more reactive or more easily overwhelmed, you’ve probably noticed that the typical parenting advice doesn’t always work. The same strategies that seem to work for other kids might fall flat or even make things feel more intense and that’s not because you are doing anything wrong. It’s because your child’s nervous system may need something different and that is exactly why I created Parenting by Design, my guided program for increasing behavioral and emotional regulation in sensitive kids. In it, you will learn how to customize your parenting approach and tailor it to suit the needs of your unique child’s brain, body, and temperament, which can be the game changer you need when nothing else feels like it’s worked.

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So how do we do this? You start with eight video modules, which you’ll have lifetime access to so you can watch them whenever is most convenient for you and you can go back to them anytime you need a little refresher. Plus you’ll also get a suite of handouts and cheat sheets I created specifically for parents of sensitive, spicy and strong-willed kids that walk you through exactly how to tailor these strategies to fit your unique child. So if you’re ready to move beyond the parenting scripts and tricks and hacks that don’t seem to work for your kid, then check out parenting by design. You can find the link in the episode description wherever you’re streaming this episode, or just go to drsarabren.com/parentingbydesign to sign up and learn more about this program. That’s drsarabren.com/parentingbydesign. All right, now back to my conversation with Dr. Jay Belsky.

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I’m wondering as we’re talking, I’m like, okay, let’s bring it back to parents. Because I think I can see how we’ve talked a little bit about how understanding differential susceptibility and the difference between sensitivity and susceptibility and how some kids are going to just be more receptive to both the good and the bad and some kids are just not. And of course that means we’re not going to neglect the kids who aren’t sensitive and aren’t susceptible because they just seem like, “Eh, they got this. They don’t need as much.” I mean, I definitely, it’s interesting because I have two very different kids.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:29:12):

Everybody has two different kids.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:29:15):

Right? There’s nothing like having a second child to realize how little you actually did to make them who they are because at first, I always joke because my son is more of my dandelion, although he’s very interested. I don’t really know. There’s like a whole … I got to map them out on this new grid I created in my brain, but he’s sensitive, but he’s not particularly susceptible. He has big feelings and he’s super tuned in, but he’s kind of go with the flow. He rolls with things. My daughter, very sensitive, very susceptible, like very, very. And she was Second. So I have my first and he’s just like this easygoing kid and I’m like, “Oh God, I’m so good at parenting. I’ve had myself on the back.” And then I have my daughter, I’m like, “Oh, okay. I’m doing all the same things I do with my son and they don’t do anything to help her.

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She needs so much more, so much different stuff.” And it was humbling, but also a little taught me some self-compassion of like, okay, I can not think I’m so wonderful because I have an easy kid, but I can also appreciate that I didn’t cause my other kid to be super sensitive either and I’m not failing. She just needs different and more of everything. And so…

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:30:48):

I can tell the same story and I do in the book, which is my first one was as difficult as the baby could be. In fact, I came away and people are shocked when I say this, wondering why there’s not more child abuse, because I felt like throwing that kid against the wall any number of times. So I was glad we had him because we could cope within. And the next one was easy peasy. And what I always wondered about, and I’ve never seen a study of this, is are you better off having the nightmare first and the easy one second or the easy one first and the nightmare second?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:31:28):

I don’t know. I really know. I’m very interested. And then I have the people who have two tough ones, two high sensitive, high susceptible ones. I was joking because a very good friend of mine has two that are both really, really tough and I was sort of joking. I was like, well, at least one of mine is a bit of a shock absorber. So if one’s having a hard time, the other one’s like, “Okay, well I can kind of modulate her or myself or I could just go do something, whatever.” Whereas with her, she was saying, “Yeah, if one is having a tough time, it ignites the other one, which ignites the other one. And now it’s just chaos and I feel so bad.” So yeah, having both or more than one kid that’s really sensitive is tough.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:32:14):

She just disproved my presumptive claim, which is everybody has different kids. I think for the most part they do because from an evolutionary standpoint, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fundamental first order is there has to be variation for natural selection to take place. That is we have big animals and small animals now will the environment reward and enable the big animal or the small animal to flourish. Well, if they’re all big and there’s not much food in the environment, they all go over the waterfall. So variation is the raw material of evolution and since again, we come back to the future is uncertain, having kids who are different is your way of playing the best hands you can in an uncertain future market of life. Again, not that any of us are thinking about this or creating this, we’re not left to our own devices, thank goodness.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:33:16):

Right, right. But also we’re also, I think for better or for worse, we’re also only talking about two variables of all the things that get differentiated, right? We’re talking about sensitivity of our biological sensitivity to stimuli coming at us and us having a really intense physiological arousal, our stress response, how sensitive is our system. We’re talking about susceptibility to the environment. How rigid are we? How boundaried, how impermeable are we? Versus how open and malleable are we?

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:33:54):

I call them more fixed and more plastic. In fact, I know Tom well, I’m envious of their terminology of dandelion and orchard, but it carries a risk. There aren’t two types of kids. What we have is a bell curve.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:34:11):

Yes.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:34:12):

So we have kids who are more susceptible and we have kids who are less susceptible. We have kids who are intermediate between the two. So dandelion and orchid are terrific metaphors if we don’t reify them as a way, as a heuristic, as a way of making a point, it’s great. And again, I wish I had been that imaginative and I wasn’t, but I think it’s … And Tom agrees, I know, entirely with his point.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:34:43):

I agree. I think that we … And this is the thing because we were talking about these quadrants, but the reality is it isn’t like four squares and they’re categories, there’s four separate categories. It’s really, it is this sphere with all these access points and a kid could be anywhere in that three dimensional circle. And there’s that point to your point of diversifying our genetic makeup as an evolutionary advantage is like we are going to have children if you have more than one kid, guarantee you your kids do not occupy the same point on that sphere. They’re different. They’re going to be different in lots of different ways and we’re talking about two of the variables, but I’m sure there’s infinity more, like lots of temperament pieces, lots of emotional pieces, cognitive pieces.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:35:39):

Ok, let me complicate, let me riff on that to add some complication, which is where my work was going at the very end of my university career because the thing I always wondered about from the moment I recognized the hypothesis of kids will vary in their developmental plasticity and their susceptibility to environmental influences, there will be variation in that. Well, was that domain general or was that domain specific? What do I mean by that? Well, let’s say you were highly susceptible to the discipline your parents gave you in terms of how much self-control and self-regulation you develop and let’s say you were very susceptible to it. Will that mean that you would also be very susceptible to, let’s say, music instruction and music capability?

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Maybe yes, maybe no. It gets very complicated very much. And so I was very hesitant to go there until the very end of my career. And in fact, what we discovered was that there were kids who were highly susceptible to the effects of parenting, good, bad, or indifferent. Okay, take childcare quality and childcare quantity something, I don’t know if you know my history there, but it’s very controversial that there was evidence that kids who spent more time, more months, weeks, and years and hours in childcare as we know it and have it in this country, which is questionable, lots of things, that they were more likely to be aggressive and disobedient, not psychopathically, but to a degree. We also had discovered that kids who were in better quality care, more attentive, responsive and stimulating care ended up somewhat more linguistically and academically and cognitively skilled.

(00:37:36):

Again, these aren’t big effects. So we asked ourselves, are the kids who are most affected by time and care, the ones who are most affected by the quality of care, and that turned out to be more true than not. But there were kids who were highly susceptible to the amount of time in care, but not to the quality of care. And there were other kids who were highly susceptible to the quality of care, but not to the quantity of care. So that just complicates…

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:38:04):

Ahh! My brain’s exploding, but I have to ask, are there some mediating variables that we’re not measuring in a study like that? For example, if a kid has, like if the parent mental health, for example, is of a certain situation and the ability for the parent to provide the child’s kind of readiness to separate into the care, if there’s difficulty separating, then time spent in care could be really challenging.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:38:36):

My answer to this question is it’s open season on hypothesis.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:38:41):

Oh, I’ve done my dissertation. I’m not going back to research ever again.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:38:45):

Well, if you remember a very famous book that was all over the place quite a while ago now, a now deceased scholar named Judith Harris called The Nurture Assumption. And Harris, who had her own interesting and unfortunately sexist history of never being able to make it in the field as a credible scientist and ended up just being a textbook writer, but at the very end, toward the end of her life almost, she wrote this really impactful book that made the argument, it’s not parents who shape us, it’s our peers. And this was a big debate in the field and all of a sudden it dawned on me and we looked at this, couldn’t it be that some kids grow up very adult parent oriented and susceptible to parenting and other kids grow up highly susceptible to peers. And when we looked at this in the data, we discovered that just like I just said, there were kids who were highly susceptible to both or not very highly susceptible to both and there were kids who were highly susceptible one and not the other.

(00:39:52):

And we did the same thing looking at kids, the assumption is that the first five years of life is when we’re most developmentally plastic and susceptible, but what the adolescent scholars have taught us is adolescence is a second period of developmental plasticity. So we asked the question, is it possible that there are some kids who are highly susceptible to both developmental periods, highly susceptible to neither or one but not the other. And we found those too.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:40:21):

Right. That makes me think of what you were saying with how Tom Boice’s research was saying that sometimes the susceptibility is changed or enhanced or informed by experience. So like perhaps there’s something that like if you are more susceptible early on and it causes stress to the system, it might shift the amount of susceptibility either for some higher or for some lower in adolescence.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:40:54):

Again, it’s open season on hypotheses. It could just as well be genetic although there is an idea out there that if you’re … I think this is a very provocative idea. I deal with it in the last chapter of my book because it says that if you grow up in an unpredictable world, in a world in which today everything’s fine, tomorrow it’s not school one day is great, another day that you basically don’t commit yourself and commit is not a psychological idea here. It’s a developmental one. You don’t commit yourself to a developmental trajectory because you’re not getting a good signal of what tomorrow is likely to be.

(00:41:34):

Whereas other kids, if they’re susceptible, and this we’re talking about susceptible kids here, other kids, if they’re susceptible, they get a consistent message, like sucks, excuse the expression, or the world is a lovable place. They can commit to, “Okay, I’m going to make that a generalization about the world and I’m going to go that way.” So that raises the issue that one of the reasons kids might be more susceptible in adolescence is because it takes that long for them to get a tolerably consistent signal to say what the world is like. So we’re just adding, we had the two by two, we put another parameter in. Unfortunately for the parents listening, it’s kind of like it can be drowning in the complexity, welcome to my life.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:42:22):

Right. I know this is heady, but let’s, okay, let’s simplify this at least clearly we can’t simplify it. It’s complex, but let’s concretize it a tiny bit just so if anyone’s listening and they’re still listening and they haven’t their brain has not exploded, thank you for sticking with us. I hope this expanded your mind, not made it explode. I think we can all agree being able to predict what kind of kid you’re going to have is sort of futile, but tuning into the kid you have, accepting that your kid is going to be their own unique being that’s going to have some measure of high or low sensitivity, high or low susceptibility and a million other variables like cognitive ability, temperament, whatever. How do we give parents, one, permission to not be able to be the shaper of their kid? You do not have to feel responsible because you are not chiseling away the marble and creating this person.

(00:43:29):

They’re going to do it all on their own, right? The orchid, the dandelion, the tulip, whatever, the weed in the garden, the prized fancy flower, they’re all going to grow whether you do anything or not. The question is, what can you focus on that has some impact and what can you let go of?

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:43:50):

Okay. You’re describing something that, and you used lots of words, but you used a very good analogy there that I’ve often used a lot of words to try to communicate. But again, Alice Gopnik wrote a previous book, not about explore and exploit, but what she called it and this just knocked all the pins over the gardener and the carpenter or it could have been the gardener and the sculptor that there are parents who think that this is a piece of wood and I cut this out and I cut this out and I cut this out and I cut this out, okay, and now I’ve got this shape and that’s carpentry. The alternative is gardening, which you don’t make the flower, you enable the flower, you cultivate the flower, you weed around it, you fertilize it, you change the holder when it gets too big for it.

(00:44:50):

And so that’s really what we’re talking about here is how do you recognize who your child is and to the extent that it makes sense, you go with the flow. You don’t fight city hall. Now if your child … And one of the things we haven’t come to grips with here is some children are born more antisocial, more aggressive, more destructive than others and they may be so- called dandelion, fixed strategists. They are kids who are prepared for a mean and nasty world.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:45:24):

This is the high sensitivity, low susceptibility kids.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:45:28):

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:45:30):

Right. Like the kids that their experience is intense, it is volatile, their threat response is super, super reactive, but they’re fixed in their problem solving strategies and what comes in.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:45:44):

It’s like we said, being plastic is not always good for lousy life. Being fixed is not always good if you’re living in a modern civilization with norms and rules of the middle class and you fit a different environment. And I come to this because there have been clearly times in human history when the world was mean, nasty, brutish, life was short brutish and kids who were temperamentally and behaviorally and developmentally prepared for that without having to learn anything probably had some advantage in passing on their genes. And the kid I’m talking about now somewhere along the line probably inherited some of those. So the point is you can take the idea of see who your kid is, be responsive to the individuality in him, but there are going to be times and places where that’s not a wise thing to do. I mean, you’ve got a kid who runs around wild, you can let him run into the middle of the street where the cars are coming?

(00:46:49):

Certainly not. You’re going to grab hold of him and yank him back. You’re going to give him a long time out, you’re going to give him a talking to. None of that may work in the long run, but you’re not going to … But now on the other hand, if you’ve got a kid who is kind of mindless and sort of always in his head and will walk into the street, you’ve got to take that kid and say, “Hey,” and enable him, you’ve got to look both ways. You’ve got to know when you’re at the street. I mean, now we can use sensitivity in Mary Ainsworth in attachment to your sense, which is being sensitive is following the cues of the child and meeting him or her where she is and now we get a Vygotsky concept of the…

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:47:42):

Zown proximal development.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:47:44):

His own approximate development. Thank you. Which is if you want to move your kid along and he’s at step two, demanding step seven, just go right by him, but step three or even two and a half, or if he’s really can be stretched, three and a half is the place to go. In which case, what you’re trying to read is where can we move him to? I once had a friend, my first friend from childhood who had kids and I met him when he had his two daughters who were very sensitive. These kids were shy and as kind of clingy to their parents as three and four year olds and unknowingly, I thought I was giving good developmental counsel and my counsel was just let them be who they are. And you know what the research has shown in the last 40 years? No, you don’t let them be who they are. You push them somewhat. You don’t push them a lot, but you stretch them, you extend their zone of … You recognize that what we call the zone of proximal development.

(00:48:53):

In other words, being sensitive doesn’t mean just accepting and letting them be because they also have to fit into your family, into the neighborhood, the school and that kind of thing. So being sensitive and it’s really hard to calibrate.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:49:08):

It really is.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:49:08):

When have I gone too far? When have I not gone far enough?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:49:11):

Right. And you don’t have to get it right all the time. You won’t, you’ll totally always say you’re going to … The goal is bend, don’t break, give them stretches, but sometimes you’re going to stretch them too far and they’re going to snap and it doesn’t feel good and they’ll let you know. But I think your point is well taken. We need to accept and be interested and attuned to our kid, but we also need to say they might want to stay in this comfort zone, but this comfort zone does not allow them to develop certain skills that help them to kind of fit in the world that they have to navigate. I mean, I don’t think any of us are really okay with a kid’s world being very, very small unless that’s the maximum size their world can be. There are kids out there whose world out of necessity has to be really, really small because their zone of proximal development is fraction.

(00:50:03):

It’s very, very, very small and that’s okay. I think it’s so important. You were saying before like as therapists sometimes we’re like, there are some kids or adults that we work with where it’s like, no matter what I do, they don’t get better. And there are parents who have kids that no matter what you do, it feels like they don’t get better. But what I wanted to say to that point was better is relative to the child in the room, right? And so what we might compare a kid who struggles with susceptibility and that flexibility to a kid who’s highly flexible and highly susceptible and say, like you said, they might be at step one and I’m looking at a kid who could go from one to seven and I’m like, “Wow, I need to get this kid to seven. And if I don’t, I’m failing.

(00:50:51):

This kid is rigid, this kid can’t do it, they don’t fit.” But what I think you’re really saying and I think is really, really, really important for every therapist and every parent who works with these tough kiddos to recognize is getting them from step one to step 1.25 is good work. It’s good for them, it’s good for you, needs to be registered as success. Does it mean we stop at that because it’s hard? No, we try to go now to 1.27, 1.28, maybe we get to three, but the more you can help a child, even the ones that really struggle with susceptibility and really struggle with being very rigid, they can expand. It’s just we have to modulate our expectations of the speed at which and the extent to which they expand.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:51:42):

And this is, in principle, hard.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:51:47):

Yes.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:51:48):

Now the more stressed your life is, the more chaotic your household is, the more dangerous your world is, it becomes ever harder because none of us are saints and so doing this is really difficult, especially in this day and age, the burden on parents to be perfect, the internalized sense of, I have to be perfect. I wonder sometimes why Americans like baseball or used to anyway. And in baseball, if you bat 300, that’s a good batting average. Nobody’s batted 400 since before my childhood, a guy named Ted Williams. Maybe life batting 300, maybe raising kids batting 300 is damn good too. Yes. So realistic expectations for yourself and for your kids being able to forgive yourself when you strike out there’s nothing wrong with apologizing to your child. You’re not basically saying you’re not the authority. It’s the idea that you have responsibility and you have authority and you exercise it judiciously, not as an authoritarian or not neglectfully and that again is the balance. And there are times when you may have to be an authoritarian when he runs into the street and only a 20 minute timeout or lockup is essentially is necessary.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:53:19):

Well, see, I would say for the kids who are constantly running into the streets, they’re high intensity, they’re high arousal, low, like I always joke like Ferrari motor tricycle breaks, right? They move fast and they get hot fast and they go quick and they’re also low susceptibility in the sense that like you explaining to them over and over and over the dangers and giving them consequences, it doesn’t work. For them, I think the role of the parent in that case is not to say, “Oh, well they’re high sensitivity, low susceptibility. There’s only so much I can do. It’s never going to change.

(00:54:02):

I have to get louder or bigger or harder or stronger.” I think it’s saying, “No, I have to be a more sturdy container. I have to know that my kid’s going to run to the street every single time.” And so I have to anticipate that and I have to prevent it from happening. Again, you’re never going to prevent it all from happening. You’re going to miss it. You’re going to miss the hit or the kick or the so many things with the explosions. But if you know this about your kid, this is about developmentally appropriate expectations, developmentally appropriate scaffolding, you kind of just need to be … It’s way harder to parent these kids, like so much harder. I work with so many of these parents and I want to give them like the biggest hug because I’m like, you deserve to be told that you’re doing harder, more difficult, more demanding work than the average parent because your kid is not in the middle of the bell curve.

(00:54:52):

And so your work is not middle of the bell curve work. So I’m writing a book right now called Kids Who Don’t Fit, and it’s all about this idea of like the bell curve, like more about motion regulation, about the kids that don’t … How so many of these parenting strategies are designed for kids that live inside the middle of the bell curve and that when parents use them with the best of intentions with kids who are super sensitive or rigid, like those high sensitivity, low susceptibility kids, it’s just, they don’t work. And these parents literally feel like they’re either failing at parenting, there’s something wrong with their kid or there’s something wrong with their relationship and they feel so despondent because those are the people that tend to come to my office, those parents, right? The kids who no matter what we do, nothing seems to help and they are so hot all the time, they’re so dysregulated.

(00:55:52):

And it’s interesting because even though they are the kids that are the hardest to move, I really do find that if we modulate the same strategies to be more attuned to their nervous system needs and work the parent child relationship and that safety and then use the interventions that are like a less … I do a lot of teaching parents how to like show the safety instead of talk the safety because they’re in fight or flight, their prefrontal cortex and all that language center, it’s not processing anything meaningful. It’s just noise and it’s just adding to the sensory overload. So it’s a lot about titrating and like kind of mapping out your kids’ needs and using strategies in a different way and I do find that even those kids that are really hard to move past their zone of proximal development, they get better.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:56:53):

This is something else and that is that, do we have kids who are less susceptible or are they just less susceptible to what we’re doing and if we’re doing something quite different, more intensely, less intensity, intensely, would they be more susceptible?

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:57:12):

Right, like what’s their sweet spot?

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:57:14):

Right, right, right, right. So the less susceptible kids are less susceptible to what the average exposures are is what we’re picking up. But somebody once said this to me, well you have patients who CBT works because six, seven sessions and it works, but there are other patients that six, seven sessions aren’t going to work and they look unsusceptible. Now, do you want to do psychoanalysis for 17 years? I mean, that’s a little over the top.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:57:42):

Right. But I also would argue that like there’s very, I mean seven sessions of CBT is really only going to touch the middle of the bell curve people and people who can be cognitive when dealing with stress, which is very few people and I feel like that’s why I mean I’m biased, but I love CBT. I use behavioral cognitive and behavioral strategies all the time, but I don’t, they have to be embedded in a relationship to work.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:58:14):

And again, if you live in a high stress situation, dangerous, chaotic, conflicted, it makes it all the much harder.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:58:23):

Yup.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:58:25):

And again, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. We’re all going to make mistakes. A friend pointed this out to me once that we want all the kids to sit quietly in class and listen to the teacher and wait to get in line or to go to lunch or whatever it is and we neglect the fact that there are just differences in kids’ natural impulsivity. And so the kid who’s highly impulsive, not because he’s out to get you, but just because that’s the chords in his instrument, that’s how they’re strung, he’s got a much harder task than the kid who’s the violin with a nice soft instrument. And sure, I’d rather sit here. I don’t want to get up when they tell me to, but I get up and I go. I mean, and life’s unfair, somebody once famously said people didn’t like hearing it, but it’s true and children as you rightly proposed are some are easier and some are harder to care for and some parents are more and less skilled, some parents are more and less experienced and it gets complicated and don’t expect to be perfect of course and forgive yourself when you’re not, but just don’t make that, let that be a license not to be. That’s easier said than done.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:59:52):

It is, but it’s good advice and I think it’s hopeful and encouraging.

Dr. Jay Belsky (00:59:56):

I like to say this to parents who’ve listened and it might have gotten in A little heady, complicated, even intellectualized at a time. I always like to think with regard to even my students at university that I less want you to master what I’m talking about as I’m speaking about it. I want to plant the seeds of your mind so that you can reflect and think about it over time and decide, you know what, that makes good sense. I’m not going to buy that necessarily. So if I can stimulate your imagination and I think that’s all our goal here, if we can stimulate your thinking and your entertaining ideas you might not have otherwise, then we’ve succeeded and I hope that’s so. Thank you.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:00:48):

Me too. This might be an episode you have to listen to a few times to let it sink in.

Dr. Jay Belsky (01:00:55):

At delayed speed.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:00:57):

Yes. I really love this conversation so much. If people want to hear more about all of these ideas, if they want to read any of your books or connect with your work, where should they go?

Dr. Jay Belsky (01:01:15):

I actually have started a website that I’ll send to you and you can put up.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:01:22):

Okay, jay-belsky.com/. We’ll link to it in the show notes so that everyone can find it and we’ll also link to your book, your most recent book, The Nature of Nurture, you have another … How many books do you have?

Dr. Jay Belsky (01:01:39):

Well, that website discusses two books. The one is called The Origins of You, which is in collaboration about mostly other people’s work and very little about what we’re talking about right now where-

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:01:54):

Still a good book, I’ve read it.

Dr. Jay Belsky (01:01:55):

Oh, okay. Okay.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:02:00):

Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much. I could talk to you for hours. I hope one day you’ll come back on the show so we could keep talking about this. This was really, really interesting.

Dr. Jay Belsky (01:02:09):

Very willing to. Very willing to.

Dr. Sarah Bren (01:02:17):

Thank you so much for listening. I hope this conversation gave you a new way of thinking about your children and how you parent them. If you found this episode helpful, it would mean so much if you took a moment to leave a rating or review. It really helps more parents find the show and acces this kind of information. And if you want additional support parenting your sensitive orchid style child, you may be interested in my guided program, Parenting By Design, that will help you understand your child’s unique needs and give you practical tools you can use right away. Or if you’re looking for more personalized high touch support, my group practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group, offers individualized virtual therapy and parent coaching. We work with parents all over the world as they’re navigating challenges around emotion regulation, behavioral issues, and general getting through the day with kids who have sensitive systems and we do it in a way that’s really tailored to your child and your family.

(01:03:12):

You can find links to both parenting by design and my clinical practice in the episode description or visit drsarabren.com or upshurbren.com to learn more. And I’ll be back again on Thursday answering one of your questions in our Beyond the Sessions Q&A episode. And until then, don’t be a stranger.