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The answer to the question posed in the title is commonsensical to many, whether they be professionally trained child developmentalists or not. "Of course how a baby is cared for matters to his later development", many will claim. "In fact, it is crucial and critical for his later psychological well being. Sensitive, loving, supportive rearing results in a person feeling secure, being able to love and co-operate with others and even succeed occupationally." Freud, after all, linked the early mother-infant relationship to the capacity to love and to work in adulthood.
One thing that fascinates me is that what is common sense to some is more or less idiocy--I am being purposefully hyperbolic here--to others. "Any fool knows", these (professional and lay) naysayers will claim, "that how a child is treated across the first year or two (or more) of life matters little to the kind of person he ultimately turns out to be--so long as we are not talking about truly abusive care." In fact, some of them will argue, again on a common-sense basis, that "it would make no sense for life-span development to be shaped by what happens to a baby, a toddler or even an older preschool child." Life is long and adulthood is far away in time from the early years, so evolution would never craft an organism whose future functioning was influenced in important ways by experiences had at the hand of his parents--or others--very early in life. "It is what happens much later in life that determines the kind of people we become", these critics of what might be called "early experience fanaticism" often argue. Of course, there are those who contend that even such later life experiences don't matter a wit, as who we are and who we become is coded in our genes. It is nature, not nurture that shapes us.
I have long been intrigued by the "early experience question", most likely because it was my belief that what happens to you early in life shapes, at least in part, the kind of person you become that got me into the field of child development in the first place. This belief , though, was somewhat late in coming to me. After declining admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, having desperately desired to attend this institution from at least the age of 7, and subsequently concluding that I did not want to study international affairs at Georgetown University where I enrolled as a freshman in the School of Foreign Service, I became intrigued with the issue of the effects of early experience almost by accident.
It is an interesting story so I will tell it, not as an exercise in navel gazing, but to make a point I am going to challenge in future blogs. The point to be challenged is that it is later life experiences, not early ones, that matter most to who we become. In my case, I was sitting under a tree at Georgetown, depressingly pondering my existence, having lost interest in the study of international affairs, suffering from what I subsequently came to appreciate was a classic "identity crisis" as defined by the famous child psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. Bottom line: I was lost, existentially that is. I simply did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up and did therefore not know who I was or what I wanted in life.
But fortuitously--though some of my academic colleagues may differ!--a fellow player on the university soccer team walked by in the manner of the Pied Piper. He had, as I recall, about a dozen 4-year olds in tow. "Where did you get them?", I remember asking as he walked by. Over his shoulder he called back, "From the University Hospital day care center; they are always looking for volunteers." And so began what was to turn first into a passionate interest in children and childhood, then a scientific interest in how early experience shapes later development, and thereby a career in developmental psychology.
But is the lesson of this personal tale that early experience does not matter? This is a question to be taken up in greater depth in future blogs. While randomness certainly played a role in my life--after all, where would I be today had this teammate not walked by?--one should not lose sight of the following facts: (a) I was in the midst of an identity crisis; (b) I asked my teammate where the children came from; (c) I followed up on his reply by becoming a volunteer at the day care center; and (d) I thereafter decided to transfer to anther college so that I could study child development.
Were these actions by me affected by my early developmental experiences? If they were, then saying that my life has been mostly shaped by experience in young adulthood would misrepresent the complex forces at work in it and the lives of so many of us (who are fortunate to live in a world where life choices really exist). But my purpose is not to turn this blog into an analysis of me, so you will not be hearing much more about my developmental experiences in future postings. I have simply used my own life to both illustrate a point that is common sense for some today--that what matters is not early but later life experiences--in order to begin a discussion of exactly the opposite and what others regard as common sense: early experience matters!
