Shanker – parenting and temperament

Basically what we want to look at is what does the dance look like if I have a permissive mom, an authoritarian mom, or an authoritative mom and we want to pair that with different kinds of children? So we look at, we have different temperament variables, so we look at the highly reactive child, the highly seeking child, and so the idea here is that a) we will see certain kinds of patterns emerging between these, you know, particular profiles, so let’s say permissive mom parent with reactive baby, but then of course all of our research here is driven by the fundamental question: how do we help? 

Well in fact now we’ve got some very interesting science starting to be done on parenting and it’s telling us a couple of things: first of all that there’s a huge cost in parenting, that parenting is stressful, and we even have research that’s now showing us the health costs associated with a highly demanding child. We also have some research showing us that not only is there a post-natal brain explosion in the child there is one in the maternal brain. Her brain is growing also, quite dramatically, in order to cope with the extra demands involved in raising a child. If I have a highly reactive child or I have a child with colic or, it’s no wonder that parent stress is going to go way up, and we might see certain patterns of parenting emerge as a defensive mechanism. Rather than pathologizing the parent what we want to understand is how can we reduce, by studying these things, how do we reduce the strains on the dyads, can we help the dyad become self-regulated and then the answer is that the better the dyad becomes self-regulated, the better the parents are self-regulated, the better the child is self-regulated.