Neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis says we can pretty much predict who will end up on a dysfunctional pathway from the time they are 3, adding it’s a choice we make not to do anything about it.
With less than 30% of our genes are set when we are born, the brain is mostly moulded by the environment it encounters, he writes in his new book, What Were You Thinking!?: understanding your child’s changing brain from birth to adulthood. And the most crucial period is the first 1000 days after conception, when the brain is biologically working out its own capabilities.
The biggest driver of brain development was a baby having what was called a dyadic relationship — a predictable and responsive relationship with one other person, Wallis said. This attachment, which was usually with their mother but which could be with a father, a grandparent or another primary caregiver, helped children regulate their nervous system, relate to others and fully develop their frontal cortex — the part of the brain considered the hub of most higher functions.
On the other hand, trauma or neglect could leave children in a constant state of stress, making it difficult for them to learn, manage emotions and control their behaviour. Long-term, these people were far more likely to go to prison, experience teenage pregnancy and break rules around boundaries and drugs.
The reason we could predict many life outcomes at age 3 was not that people couldn’t change, he said. It was that most people who experienced an abusive or neglectful childhood never received an intervention that significantly changed their situation.
Part of the problem was our election cycle was three years, whereas the development of young people was a 20-year process. No-one, including politicians and policy-makers, "committed".
Another was that New Zealand was a punitive society and while punishment might work for most of the population, traumatised people were not usually thinking about consequences.
More than 80% of the prison population were infants who were uplifted from their families in the first 1000 days of their life, Wallis said.
For those entering foster care, the system required them to be placed with a temporary carer before ending up in a permanent home. This meant the relationship with their primary caregiver was severed at least twice, but that was the best case scenario — on average they would be placed in eight different foster homes.
His criticism was not directed at Oranga Tamariki staff, many of whom went above and beyond, but at the government which failed to fund the Ministry for Children sufficiently, he said. The organisation largely worked to a health and safety model, where simply keeping a child alive was viewed as success. It didn’t really focus on psychological damage.
"They would say they’re concerned about the child’s holistic wellbeing and of course they are giving some concern to [that]. But I just think they’re so grossly underfunded and so scrambling for a bed for the night that they don’t have the luxury of thinking about continuous relationships and setting up foster family networks."
Providing therapeutic treatment for young people in foster care and the youth justice system could turn things around, he said.
"We’ve got to stop thinking that being a government is just about economic wealth because that only serves the top sector of society."
"That top sector are going to be very affected if we don’t address the underbelly. The people who are going to be doing home invasions and waking you up with a gun pointing at your head in the middle of the night, they don’t come from nowhere. They come from a background of trauma ... "
It also took more taxes to keep a criminal in prison than to care for a child.
No family would be comfortable with one of its members being mistreated, provided the others were okay, he added. They would want everyone to receive a certain standard of care.
"The same thing needs to apply here."
"We need to all start giving a s ... and I think most people do. I think the government fails to represent the people ... "
Wallis doesn’t approach the topic as a distant expert; he lived it, on the sharp end. Raised in South Otago, he was in and out of foster care, surrounded by chaos. However, he said those risk factors were mitigated by "resiliency factors".
While some foster children were moved from one end of the country to the other, his placements were all in Milton, which meant he could maintain contact with his mother. His step-father was sent to prison when he was 9 months old, giving him a "period of calm". Autism allowed him to see patterns and to succeed at school. Having ADHD enabled him to "look an adult in the eye and tell them to f ... off".
"You’re way less likely to be abused or molested if you fight back."
Most importantly, he benefited from close relationships. A neighbour acted as a "nana" after seeing that his mother — a widow with three young children — wasn’t coping. His history teacher defied her principal, fostering him when he was 15 and couch-surfing so he could complete high school.
A newborn had a brain that weighed less than 400g. But by the age of three, it was about 1200g or 85% of its adult weight.
This meant the fastest, cheapest and most successful way to raise a "wonderful" human being was to focus on the first 1000 days. And the "number one" way to improve outcomes was to have a parent stay at home, ideally for the first three years but especially for the first 12 months.
The father and foster parent is aware that raising a family in a cost-of-living crisis often takes two incomes. More than half of New Zealand children are in out-of-home care before their first birthdays; two of his own children were in the same position.
However, he hopes that highlighting the importance of the dyadic relationship will encourage parents to "move towards that end of the spectrum".
If no family member could be at home in the first year, the child could find that connection with a home-based carer.
Alternatively, parents could choose a centre which offered primary care, meaning there was primarily one person responding to the infant — changing their nappy, giving them their bottle, putting them to bed.
Where those options were not available, going to a childcare centre, on its own, would still not lead to negative outcomes.
"It just means when I get them home, I’m going to make sure I don’t have media in the background to distract me, so I’m giving my child my full attention."
Research showed how much money your child will earn at age 32 could typically be predicted, based on the number of words spoken to them per day by their main caregiver between the ages of zero and one. But it was not about the words used, he said.
"You could be making up your own language, blowing raspberries, pulling stupid faces and flaring your nostrils ... As long as you’re interacting with the baby, it’s engaging all the interactive areas of their brain ...
"The way I try to summarise it is the more often in the first year of life that your baby feels connected to you, the more frontal cortex they’ll have and the better off they will be for the rest of their life. The more often they feel alone, disconnected and scared, the worse their outcomes will be."
For children aged 3 to 6, there were benefits from attending early childhood sessions for two and-a-half to three hours a day, four times a week, but no advantages beyond those times.
Despite the importance of the first three years, New Zealanders tended to think early childhood teachers were babysitters, there to "change nappies and blow noses", he said.
"Actually, early childhood teachers see more developmental change and have to understand more human development than any of the rest of the sectors."
Many were "demonstrative and nurturing", which was seen as more feminine and therefore of less value.
"We also have a government and a public that think the earlier you start teaching a kid, the brainier they will be, so if we get a kid reading at 4 he’s going to be a genius."
In fact, there was no lasting advantage from learning to read at 4 as compared to 7 and it could even have disadvantages — curbing creativity, affecting a child’s self-esteem and increasing the chances of them experiencing anxiety later.
In contrast, there were many benefits to more natural, child-led play, he said, giving the example of a 4-year-old building a dam in a creek and failing multiple times before being successful. Adults might view the activity as a waste of time but the child was learning perseverance; another child starting school without this experience might try to solve something once, get it wrong and give up.
If anything, this period when children were in charge of their own learning should be extended and generally they should not start school until they were 6. This would give them at least a year to build their social-emotional skills before their frontal cortex became more dominant between 6 and 8 and they were ready for literacy and numeracy.
This was particularly relevant for boys because their brains generally did not mature as quickly as girls’ brains. But it was also important for children who did not have the "first-born advantage", he said, explaining the eldest child typically got more face-to-face language and attention and grew up more qualified and richer than their siblings.
"If you’re first-born and female, you’re probably ready for school at 4. A boy who’s not the first-born should probably start at 7."
The reason he was passionate about boys who were not the eldest child was not only because he was one. It was because they made up most of the country’s reading recovery classes, prison population and suicide statistics.
"If we start a boy who’s not a first-born at school at 5 and start putting pressure on him to do things like literacy, which his brain is physically incapable of achieving, then all he learns is that he’s dumb. And then he disengages from school."
Opinion about when the frontal cortex was fully developed had changed with improving technology, Wallis said. A current estimate was the mid- to late-20s. For males who were not first-borns, it might take up to 32 years. For people who were traumatised, the frontal cortex might never come fully online.
But it’s the changes that happen during adolescence — when the pre-frontal cortex is going through a major overhaul, temporarily reducing its efficiency, that inspired the title of his book.
"Parents say to their teenager, ‘What were you thinking?’ but we have to understand that they weren’t thinking."
"Their thinking brain is shut for renovations. They were in their emotional brain. So a more intelligent question to ask a teenager, to find out why they did something, is ‘What were you feeling’?"
His message to parents, then, is to listen to their teens and to reflect back their emotions before offering advice.
He also encouraged parents to smile more often because teenagers frequently thought adults looked annoyed, even when they weren’t. This was because they used their amygdala to read facial expressions and it was primed to see anger first.
At any age, there were things people could do to boost the brain’s ability to heal, adapt and learn new things. While caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and sugar were known to lower brain agility, activities that released endorphins, such as singing, laughter and exercise, could improve it.
Wallis, who still lives in Milton, is not a neuroscientist. His background is as an early childhood teacher, primary school teacher and as a university lecturer in human development.
After completing a masters of education, he also spent 15 years as a child counsellor. During that time, he noticed that — other than children aged under 3 — it was 11-year-olds who were most impacted by trauma. This was possibly because the brain was undergoing rapid growth and highly sensitive to stress. It could also be that they were child enough to think a problem was their fault and adult enough to "internalise it in deep story and language".
Given his experience, it would be safe to assume there are certain policies he’d like to see delivered in this year’s election.
At first, he declares it a waste of time to suggest any "because nothing’s going to happen". However, later he says it is a matter of "implementing the research" and using the same amount of funding in more appropriate ways.
Pay a parent up to 100% of their salary to stay at home for their baby’s first year, as many Scandinavian countries do, he recommended.
Allow them to use the government’s childcare subsidy to instead have the child’s grandparent stay home and care for them.
Ensure the foster care system is focused on long-term relationships and children remain within one family, even if circumstances change. This could mean if foster parents divorce or die, the child goes to a sibling of the foster parents.
Stop changing teachers every year because a long-term, positive relationship is important for learning and boosts resilience.
Acknowledge the reason many children cannot read is not intellectual delay but trauma and do more to address the "very real, very alive Once Were Warriors culture" in New Zealand.
"It’s not more reading homework that’s going to help. If their brain’s in a trauma state, they’re not going to access their frontal cortex ..."
The good news was it was never too late to trigger brain growth, starting with a dyadic [one-on-one] relationship.
However, people were "not liable to change in a prison environment", he said, and blaming dysfunctional families didn’t help.
"They don’t understand. They don’t have calmness. They’re traumatised themselves ... They’ve had it modelled growing up.
"But we know that we can heal that stuff and I’m a living example."
