Part 2 of our conversation with developmental psychologist Darcia Narvaez about why young people are losing resilience

Part 2 of our conversation with author, psychologist and Professor Emerita at the University of Notre Dame, Darcia Narvaez, whose “evolved nest” theory is a clarion call to raise connected children who can then develop confidence and resilience in adolescence and early adulthood. 

What role have our education systems played in the deterioration of well being among students?

What we see in a lot of literature is this sort of dissonance, that we expect children to be resilient and independent, but we seem to strip away everything that would give them true independence. And it starts with preschool and, unfortunately, it's shifted in the last decade or two away from a play orientation where the child is building their social and emotional capacities with other kids and that was the kindergarten, right, and a lot of joyful experiences together which was to kind of grow the child away from just being at home with mom.

So that's a patriarchal society that thinks that moms and children should be at home together [which is] also species atypical. 

It's not helpful in the long run to have only that attachment to mom because then you're kind of stuck when mom disappears for some reason or other, whoa, it kind of ruins you, right. So that's why you need the multiple attachments to all those other nurturers I mentioned. So the kindergarten was intended to foster the social life of the child that wasn't happening at home when they're just at home with their own mother.

Professor Emerita of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, author and developmental psychologist Darcia Narvaez has put forward a theory of the "Evolved Nest" to help raise connected, confident and resilient children. 

(Darcia Narvaez)

But now people want to teach the young to read and the alphabet and all this, which is the wrong time because the right hemisphere of the brain is growing more rapidly in the early years. And that's when the social-emotional intelligences are seeded, primarily. And when you start to force reading and you're moving the child into the left hemisphere, this is speaking in general terms, and the left hemisphere is the one that's giving us all the problems of the world, the left hemisphere is detached from real life. I call it ivory tower thinking, and us professors love that. You know, it's easy to do. You don't have to think about relationships. You don't have to be emotionally involved. You just make up these things, these little abstractions. And that's what schooling is about, generally. 

When you push kids into reading early, you're pushing them into that ability, the left hemisphere orientation of detachment from relationships because you're just reading the words on this page, right, you don't have to be emotionally involved or relationally involved.

What young children need instead is to have the opportunities for full body, full immersion in the social world throughout childhood till age twelve. So we need a lot more freedom. The child should be directing their own education as much as possible. 

In Finland they do this much better. They have much happier children. They don't test them all the time. They don't constantly test them until high school, generally. 

So we need to restore the self-directedness of a child's life to them.

You have to support them all along the way so that they don't come to school as a defeated individual. They have to be welcomed as they are, helping them be prosocial instead of antisocial.

What role does technology—smart phones, social media, etc.—play in this antisocial behaviour, the disconnection that leads to isolation and depression? 

Well, we have to remember that brain development is critical in those first years of life. And when things are deficient, you reach adolescence and your brain is rebuilding itself. If they are missing foundational pieces, that's when the trouble will be most evident, especially if the child's been obedient and just fitting in well enough through early elementary school. 

In adolescence, though, then that's when the anxiety can come out more fully, suicidal ideation and other obvious problems.

And so, again, it's not enough to say, ‘Oh, look, it's the smartphones’. No, it started before then, because the smartphone effect on negative mental health is in a minority of students.

It's not everybody, right. If it were everybody, we would say, ‘yes, it's the smartphones’. No, it's some people more than others. 

Now, everybody pretty much is under-cared for, almost universally, but you can fix that in different ways.

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

If you play a lot — when I was growing up as a baby boomer, we were allowed to play all day long outside without supervision — that can mend some of the issues that were missing in that early phase. If you had a medicalized birth, for example, and were traumatized, play can heal you. Being out in nature can heal you. And what we've done to early childhood and middle childhood is we've pulled away those opportunities for self-healing.

And now we have the adolescents who are showing us that all along the way, the pathway that they've had is now coming to fruition — anxiety and depression — and it looks like it's the smartphones.

The smartphones push them over the top for some of them, especially if they've been bullied or if there's bullying on the phone and they don't know how to manage it because, again, they don't have the village of care around them, they don't feel accompanied, they don't feel like they matter, they don't feel like they have a purpose in life, which the community would otherwise be providing by their companionship.

So what happens in early life is this kind of undercare of the baby; ‘Oh, you have to make them independent’. But then the parents realize, ‘Wow, my child is so unconfident’, you know, when they're in preschool or elementary. And then the parents start to helicopter because the effects of undercare in early years is now the child is not as competent, unconfident, and the parents move in, and they start to helicopter and snowplough and lawn mow, whatever term you want to use. And then they're trying to help their poor child that was, you know, not helped in the critical years when they would have developed resilience, begun to develop what leads to true independence and confidence. So then they don't have resilience and the parents feel obligated to move in. And the parents are already so anxious from their own undercare.

What the data and the surveys are showing, all the deterioration as a result of what you are laying out so clearly, how do we collectively turn things around?

I do want to stick with the young people now because it seems like their brains have developed this way. They're locked into this system. How do we help them? There has to be a way aside from medication and trauma counselling, though things like that can help. But I wonder, where do we go from here?

In individualistic societies, we think, ‘Oh, come on, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What's wrong with you?’. Right. That's crazy. Again, we need the community to move in and what I did with my college students — because it was four out of five having mental distress of one kind or another — what I would do is teach them folk song games, helping the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is linked to all the major systems of the body, the parasympathetic nervous system, it's linked to overall health. When it's well-functioning you're looking people in the eye, you're laughing, playing; kindergarteners would get into it so much, they're screaming with delight, you know, and the college students are going, ‘Wow, really, life can be happy, whoa’. So it kind of shattered their belief that misery or anxiety is the human way of life. We would spend time outside, we'd go in the forest, feel connected, find a spot to sit.

In adolescence among many Indigenous American communities, the vision quest was one way to help children and adolescents, who were fully supported by everybody around them, but left free out in nature on their own for days, surrounded and protected by the whole cosmos.

We have a lot of adolescents who aren't so resilient to be able to do those things. But we could do them together as groups, and that's what I tried to do with my students, to get them into nature, to get them into play, in ways that are safe and feel fun. And then the right hemisphere will grow. The right hemisphere grows throughout life and when joy is experienced that will grow your empathy, your sense of connection, that you are a member of the universe. And you don't have to worry. You don't have to worry about death. You don't have to worry about what's happening tomorrow or what you did yesterday. You're here now. You are present. You are connected now — so to spend much more time in the now than in those things that make you anxious or depressed.

So many young people report feeling frustration and anger toward the systems, structures and institutions of their parents and grandparents. They want to replace all of it. How do we reconcile this? 

We often get into a moral goal. I'm going to do this for the community, but then, at the same time, we're destroying something on the side. So we get very narrow focused, which is the left brain, again. So I think it's fine to withdraw from the capitalistic way of being. It's destroying the planet because it's all about extractivism and grabbing everything you can and having no sense of a sentient world.

So that's the other part that is missing when we undermine our early life experiences of nature. Most children know until around age six when the cognitive shift occurs that everything's alive. They have agency, too, not just people. So to withdraw from the rat race, which is killing us, I think is actually a good thing. And you can find new communities.

People are doing this all over the world. And you're finding you're making a new community, a community of people who want to do things that are more respectful of the natural world. You just don't want them to do things that are destructive to others or to themselves.

I should say, though, that what happens when people who are caring for you as a baby are not cooperating with your needs, they're leaving you to cry, they're leaving you alone, you learn to be uncooperative yourself because you have to rely on the innate primate systems of survival, the emotion systems of anger and fear and panic. And they guide your life then, and you get very self-protective and you're going to be either in social situations oppositional to most things around you, you are not going to get along, or you're going to withdraw and just submit. This is what seeds authoritarianism: you under-care for the young. And the Nazis knew this, and they they said, ‘You know, if you break the child's spirit before age three they won't remember what happened but you'll be able to control them well'; you control them if you break them enough so that they submit immediately just like a highly abused person just goes into submission. 

But you can also see oppositionalism, where they go into dominance orientation, if they feel like they can win in that situation. Face-to-face self-protectionism looks that way.

The oppositionalism is also among adults. It just looks different in children, right, and adolescents and young people. Oppositionalism is just part of the inability to get along, to cooperate, but it can be good if the system is kind of killing you.

How has parenting changed?

If you're not raised with babies, how would you really know how to calm them? You don't know that. You don’t know that just putting them on your skin will calm them. I had a student in my lab who went to a family party and there was a baby nobody could console. And he knew that skin-to-skin contact mattered. So he lifted up the baby and put him on his neck because that was the skin that was available and the baby calmed down right away.

Knowledge is important. How do you respond in a respectful, responsive way, and not an intrusive way and not a detached way to a baby?

It takes practice. The young parents are often not the primary caregivers anymore. Half the time, typically, other carers are holding that baby, just like it was traditionally in our societies. But now, the way that looks is very different. It is no longer the community of carers that is nurturing and supporting the baby when the mothers, the fathers are off at work from their 20s to 40 or 45, when you're building your identity, your work, your CV, your resume. When you're under-cared for you're put in a crib all by yourself. We didn’t evolve that way, mammals have not evolved that way. We evolved to kind of sleep in piles, sleep on top of each other, next to each other, to be with each other all the time. 

And now, instead, we have built these people who don't want to be with others. We now have a high rate of single adults, single adults who don't live with anybody, who don't get married, who don’t want to be with anybody. That's not how our species has evolved, but suddenly that’s what we’re seeing. 

We are super social beings. That's how we evolved. But we are creating people now who withdraw from those attachments.

What do you think of our institutions today, even academia, governments that seem to pursue policies and practices contrary to what your research shows they should be doing?

It's very sad and distressing. Even in developmental psychology, which I've worked in for decades, there's a resistance to the evolved nest because, ‘oh, I've never heard of that. It can't be true'. Because people are in their silos. They just know what they were trained to do.

And when you go from college immediately to graduate school, you get into one lab and you're doing that narrow little piece of work and then you publish in that as much as you can and you just tweak things usually a little bit to get another publication and you don't see the big picture, you have to be interdisciplinary. 

I call the evolved nest a transdisciplinary idea. It comes from anthropology, from evolutionary systems theory, from clinical studies, developmental studies, and you can see when you look across the fields, what happened, what went wrong? We forgot who we are as a species that there's a wellness informed way of being, or there's the trauma-inducing form, which we're on. And people need to step back, see the big picture in order to take it in. And it's really hard when you're in your silo and this is all you know and you hang out with the same people and you publish in this journal that likes its narrow view. It's really hard to shift.

With governments, I think that there's clearly a fiscal argument that could be made that if they work to implement some of the research that we've been talking about, it has these profound benefits on young people's mental health, and then they're going to be saving millions, if not billions of dollars down the line on various social and economic costs.

It’s like climate change, right, it's not just that we save money by eliminating the economic burden of carbon and having to clean it up and the health effects and what not. The way to win most people over, unfortunately, and I don't subscribe to this, but this is just a fact: to get the banks and to get governments and to get energy companies on board, you have to make the economic argument that, no, there's trillions of dollars to be made from alternative energy, from renewable energy. So getting rid of carbon just makes good economic sense. 

I see this in the same way with my work, that if we want people to be healthy, and I don't mean in a derivative sense that they're just going to be productive for capitalism; I mean that in a very broad sense, that in the best ways, we want people in society to be positively productive and making sure they are healthy is the best way to ensure this.

And I think some governments around the world do a better job of this, promoting breastfeeding, ensuring parental leave and other benefits, supporting parental education and positive early child education, keeping parents and children together, having midwives instead of a medicalized hurry-up kind of birth.

The United States has no paid parental leave for parents after a baby's born. And they are lobbying against it because they know that if you have parental leave, you're going to breastfeed more and you're going to lose profits for the infant formula companies that are invested in keeping babies and mothers apart.

For more information visit: evolvednest.org to learn about the “Evolved Nest” theory and how you can put it into practice.

Part 3 of our conversation with Darcia Narvaez will touch on strategies for parents to help create an evolved nest.  

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