Part 1: American psychologist Darcia Narvaez wants a return to the ‘evolved nest’ — our children need it now more than ever 

This month, Ontario’s biennial student mental health and well-being survey was released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

More than 10,000 students in grades seven to twelve across the province responded to questions, revealing a simultaneous fascination with technology and the consequences of a disconnected world that continues to distance itself from traditional values around upbringing.

Almost 80 percent spend at least three hours a day on screens; 56 percent are preoccupied with their weight; 51 percent indicated a “moderate-to-serious level of psychological distress (symptoms of anxiety and depression).” 

In an effort to curb the negative impacts of digital immersion, Ontario and other provinces have introduced new rules for the coming school year to crack down on cell phone use.

But the deteriorating well being of young people revealed in the sweeping survey, and felt anecdotally by anyone who interacts with children and youth regularly, goes beyond the technologies shaping younger generations. 

The reality of a world whose changing climate is dramatically altering day-to-day life, the disappearance of entire job categories, unprecedented barriers to economic advancement and the predatory exploitation of social media by marketers and politicians, relentlessly push in on generations of young people. The growing pressure, for more and more of them, is too much. 

As the latest fix is rolled out by our education ministry next week, hoping to separate students from their phones, advocates for children point to a more fundamental shift at the root of their detachment and anxiety.

Darcia Narvaez is a pioneering psychologist, author and former professor who spent decades lecturing at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Minnesota. Now serving as Professor Emerita in psychology at Notre Dame she focuses on millions of years of mammalian development and successful evolutionary child raising practices.

Darcia Narvaez is a renowned developmental psychologist whose groundbreaking work on the “evolved nest” has sparked a rediscovery of the ways humans have successfully raised confident children for tens of thousands of years.

(Darcia Narvaez)

Her book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom, won the William James Award as the best book on general psychology.

She believes resilience against the pressures young people face is part of the moral and psychological architecture established early in life. 

Narvaez has spent years exploring this architecture and has put forward a theory she calls the “evolved nest”; a belief that children flourish then grow confidently into youth and adulthood when their early years develop alongside a “millions-year-old wellness-informed pathway of nestedness”. 

The Pointer sat down with Darcia Narvaez to talk about the unique challenges facing young people today and how we can collectively course correct to help successfully launch children into an increasingly complex world. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your view, what is the state of mental health, generally, among young people in North America today?

It’s quite distressed. It’s quite under the weather, we could say, compared to previous generations. And it’s trending in the wrong direction for anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, developmental delays. All sorts of things are going in the wrong direction and they have, in the United States especially, for the last few decades.

How might the ways young people are raised today, compared to previous generations, contribute to unique challenges they face?

I look at what I call the ‘evolved nest’ and we have pretty much abandoned most of it over the past decades in particular, but over the last few hundred years, from industrialized civilization. So at the big, broad-picture level we are not raising our young to be thriving, to be well. Instead of being on a wellness informed pathway, we have now moved very significantly to a trauma inducing pathway. 

It’s not really a surprise if you know how to raise a healthy human being, it’s not a surprise that we have so much illness and ill-being in the young and then across generations because we have been adding on, layering on the miss-care or under-care of our young and then you see it as they approach adulthood and in adulthood as well. 

Please explain the ‘evolved nest’ theory. 

We have identified nine components of the evolved nest. In those first few years of experience the evolved nest is to be provided by the community, not just by mother or mother and father, or even an extended family. It’s the neighbourhood, it’s the village that needs to be there to provide all these components, especially in those first three, four years when the brain is building itself around experience. The child is self-organizing how they’re going to be for the rest of their life based on how supported they are, and the evolved nest is identifying those components that help the brain develop in a way that’s going to lead to thriving, that’s going to lead to an ability to get along with others. 

It starts with pregnancy during gestation, the mother needs to be supported and feel that the child and she are welcome in the community, then that keeps her in a biochemistry that’s positive, that is growth promoting; rather than negative and distressing to the fetus which then would build a brain that’s oriented to stress reactivity.

Then birth needs to be very soothing. But we don’t provide mothers with a lot of support during pregnancy and birth is really quite traumatic now in our medicalized experience. Babies are quite distressed by all the rush to get the child and mother out within 26 hours; rush the mother through labour which is very distressing to both of them and that undermines the child’s sense of security which is fundamental. In that first year of life the baby needs to feel like they are always safe and secure and comforted and loved. 

And we do all sorts of things in that first year that are not helpful and promote a sense of insecurity and build a neurobiology then that’s oriented to being easily stressed out. When you’re easily stressed out the blood flow is shifting away from growth, is shifting away from your higher-order thinking, away from things that help you get along with others. You see it throughout life, when people have brains like that.

So we’re seeding in our medicalized birth and the practices that parents are told to practice like ‘leave your baby to cry so they learn how to sleep independently’ or ‘leave them alone in the crib or playpen and make them independent’ or ‘babies are resilient’. All these myths are killing us.

Babies who are not breast-fed show signs of depression in the first week of life. Formula companies tell us that, ‘oh formula is even better than breast milk because we put Vitamin D in it’. Breastfeeding is made very difficult in high-income nations. 

And then there’s touch, affectionate touch. Babies expect to be carried around, and rocked and skin-to-skin on their parents, on their caregivers, whoever they are, and that is going to build a body and brain that works well. They need that. They have to learn how to breathe when they’re outside the womb. They have to learn how to maintain a heart rate that’s healthy. All sorts of systems are setting themselves up based on the experiences they’re having. 

When they’re left alone they can’t self-regulate, so they get all sorts of dysregulated systems (because there are sensitive periods for the development of various systems) when they are tuning up, so you end up with young people who are so dysregulated in preschool even, they can’t even get along, they get too aggressive, they just melt down because they didn’t have that early life co-regulation, that presence by the community welcoming them into the village.

Then there’s play; self-directed play, so this is not organized sports, it’s the ability of the child to run around, climb trees with others, play chase or tag, and wrestle and all that. That's growing the brain in all sorts of ways as well. 

Then there's alloparenting (nurturing by people other than the parents). So again, I keep mentioning this is not a mom-only thing or a mom-and-dad-only thing. This is a village of care — and that includes responsiveness.

Responsiveness to the needs of a baby means that you're keeping them in an optimal arousal condition. So you don't want them to be dull and sleeping all the time, which unfortunately our medicalized birth does to the babies because they give too much drugs to the mom during labour, and then the baby can't even wake up to breastfeed, and they're kind of dead to the world sleeping a lot, or they're screaming a lot because they have all this trauma that's built up in the body that was not alleviated by skin-to-skin contact right after birth between mom and baby.

That responsiveness, though, is keeping the baby in a good state for growth. Parents have gotten so anxious. They won't put their kids outside to play. And then screens have moved in to take the place of playing face-to-face. 

And then, finally, healing practices. We need to regularly meet together, communally, ideally, to mend ourselves. We get out of sorts, physically, mentally, relationally, and we need to get back in tune with one another.

Industrialization introduced many barriers to the evolved nest; but what has technology done since the advent of the smartphone 17 years ago and social media alongside that? 

Well, we really have to go back to the advent of television because this is when people were starting to worry about children sitting in front of a screen. It was convenient for the parents to just go set them in front of the boob tube… Instead of going out and playing chase and tag and climbing trees the children are just sitting there numbed essentially, and that was the major conclusion among researchers.

With the smartphone, however, a lot of that activity of play and being in the natural world and hanging out with older generations, which is what we need also, all that's replaced with the screen of various kinds, video games, other computers. 

We don't provide the nest, we replace it with screen activity of various kinds and then you've got deficits, you've got undercare and then you're putting the children into environments that are not conducive to growing our human capacities. They then dumb us down and now we've got video games, we've got smartphones, we've got TikTok, and you get even dumber, and speedier, essentially. 

In terms of the nature deficit in particular, what happens to the developing brain when it is deprived of the connections provided by the evolved nest?

So first, in the initial few months of life, before language starts, the baby has to learn how to get along with nonverbal signals and to start and stop conversations with grunts and looks of the eye; they have to share eye gaze, they have to take turns. All this stuff happens before language really begins and it's really important because those are really social skills for our social and emotional intelligences. So there's something there about that social interaction of looking people in the eye.

There was a study a couple years ago on autism and the researchers concluded, or suggested, that babies by six months, they could actually diagnose autism. They recommended that parents spend time looking in the eyes of their child, instead of the phone. They're pushing them in a stroller and they're looking at their phone or the child is over there in a playpen or something. So looking in the eye, those kinds of interactions, adults are getting kind of dumber this way too. 

So in terms of nature, it's similar. We should be putting babies out in the park to just watch and listen and see the animals and listen to the winds and not interfere with their experience.

Part of the issue in the industrialized world, the way we think we're supposed to raise children, is pretty much interfering all the time, telling them what to do as if we are the teachers of who they're going to be.

And that's backwards. They know. They have a moral compass. They have a compass of learning that they inherit through evolution. They know how to learn. And adults tend to interfere and then make them afraid. ‘Oh, don't do that’. So what the young child needs is the ability to explore and feel and learn from body immersion and whatever experience they are in (instead of having parents constantly interfere in the child’s experience, and expression of that experience, from a young age).

Part 2 of our conversation with Darcia Narvaez explores the role of our education systems, the failures of over-medicating struggling children and difficult discussions many fathers and mothers should have about their own parenting style.

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