“Human development is wild,” says Kaya de Barbaro.
It’s hard to disagree. We humans, the most complex and intelligent species on the planet, are also among the most helpless at birth, unable to even lift our heads without assistance. How we grow from feeble infants to (theoretically) sophisticated adults is the fundamental question asked by psychologists like de Barbaro, who studies early childhood development at The University of Texas at Austin. There, her Daily Activity Lab hopes to provide insight into the remarkable emotional and intellectual growth that children undergo and, more specifically, the role parenting plays in this journey.
An associate professor of psychology with a background in both cognitive and computer science, de Barbaro is combining wearable technologies and machine learning with traditional methods to capture a more complete picture of real-life parenting and how it impacts children.
“We’re interested in what caregiving looks like every day and what’s in the realm of normal,” she says, and thanks to new technologies, that “every day” is more accessible to researchers than ever before. Whereas previous child development studies were often limited by their lab settings, which don’t make for the most natural parenting environments, wearables allow de Barbaro and her colleagues to study parent-child dynamics in homes, playgrounds, and beyond.
“Used to, we’d bring people, usually a mom and her baby, into an empty room, we’d sit them on a blanket with two cameras pointing at them and some toys and say, ‘Play as you normally would.’ But there’s nothing really normal about that. Then we’d make all these conclusions from that 15-minute interaction,” de Barbaro says. Now she uses devices like LENA, a wearable 24-hour audio recorder tucked into a cute baby vest, to understand what happens in the world beyond the placid laboratory setting.
The LENA is able to capture multiple days’ worth of data, including not just every sound the baby makes but all the sounds around it. These sounds provide researchers insight into the experiences of babies and their caregivers. How much are parents talking to their babies? How many words do they say? How much television are the babies exposed to? How much multitasking are parents attempting? LENA hears it all.
Or almost all: To protect privacy, parents have the ability to stop recording at any time and to request the deletion of all or any part of a recording. Even so, the devices capture an enormous volume of detail.
With this level of access to real parent-child dynamics, what has de Barbaro gleaned from taping crying babies and their surroundings? Here are a few takeaways:
There is no perfect parent
One element de Barbaro and her team measure with audio recordings is “maternal sensitivity,” or a mother’s ability to notice and respond to her child’s needs. Basically, if a baby is crying or otherwise seeking attention, how effectively can mom figure out what’s wrong and address it?
What the data reveals is that there is more variation in the sensitivity of one mother over the course of her day than between two different mothers on average. No one is firing on all cylinders all the time, and factors in a mother’s environment can greatly influence her ability to attend to a child’s needs. Audio recordings can capture these myriad environmental interferences — other siblings competing for a parent’s time, rush-hour traffic, the chaos of preparing meals — allowing de Barbaro to examine how they affect maternal sensitivity. Her research has found that background media (e.g., TVs and phones) and tantruming siblings are particularly distracting.
The fact that even the most sensitive mothers are slower to respond to their infants while simultaneously managing a screaming toddler or trying to merge onto the freeway is an indication, de Barbaro says, that children are resilient to these kinds of “imperfections” in parenting: “Children of these highly sensitive moms are also experiencing less sensitive responses every day — and we know they are likely to grow up healthy.” But there is a line where lower sensitivity crosses into neglect. To help determine where that line sits, de Barbaro is working with UT colleague and attachment specialist Deborah Jacobvitz. They screen the children in de Barbaro’s studies at 12 months and again at 18 months to see if any are developing insecure attachments, a possible sign of neglectful parenting and a risk factor for future mental health issues.
Maternal mental health does impact kids, but it’s not entirely clear how
Studies conducted in labs have found that moms with depression are less responsive to their babies, but that’s not what de Barbaro’s home recordings show. When their recorded interactions were analyzed, mothers with depressive symptoms were no less sensitive to their children, on average, than those without. But children of depressed moms did display poorer regulation (i.e., they were harder to soothe) than others, indicating a link between maternal mental health and childhood development.
That a mother’s depression or anxiety can be transmitted to her child is well established — children’s mental health often resembles that of their parents to a degree unexplained by genetics alone — but how it is transmitted is murkier. In de Barbaro’s recordings, it is not that depressed mothers were slower to respond to a crying baby or less likely to provide comfort. It may be that the differences lie in mothers’ physiological attunement or their reactions to infant needs conveyed by more subtle means than crying, she says, factors yet to be explored in home settings.
The connection between mothers’ and children’s anxiety is similarly evident and mysterious. De Barbaro notes two everyday behaviors that might contribute to it. For one, an anxious mother might use more fearful speech around her child, a kind of worrying out loud, that teaches the child to worry too. Or she might limit the child’s exposure to new experiences because of that worrying, starting a cycle of anxiety and avoidance. Either of these, both, or something subtler still could lead a child to be more skittish of the world around them, de Barbaro says, but more research into the everyday behaviors of anxious mothers is needed.
Dads could stand to help out more
“People routinely ask me ‘Why do you study maternal sensitivity? What about the dads?’” says de Barbaro. “Well, unfortunately the data is that moms are still doing most of the work.”
Her studies have found huge variation in how responsive fathers are to their children. While mothers responded to children 80% of the time on average, the most involved dads responded more than half of the time, while others were largely absent.
De Barbaro suggests that this finding could serve as a call to action for dads, since greater paternal involvement is good for both children and mothers. Surveys de Barbaro has conducted to measure maternal mental health show that it’s strongly correlated with a mother’s perceived level of social support. Unsurprisingly, moms who feel they are parenting with little or no help report poorer mental health, so it’s likely that dads pulling their childrearing weight could be beneficial to mothers.
Cellphones are changing parenting
In a 20th-century psychology experiment called the “still face,” adults presented infants with an unresponsive blank stare instead of normal facial expressions. The result? Some very confused and distressed babies. Infants are accustomed, if indignant, to being ignored while parents attend to real-world tasks, but they seem to find the simultaneous presence and absence of the still face unsettling. Unfortunately, the still face is the expression we often assume while scrolling on our phones, and some studies suggest this too is stressful for infants.
“Cellphones have changed so much of how we move through the world and undoubtedly of how we parent,” says de Barbaro, who also notes that cellphones differ from other kinds of parental distractions. “From a young child’s perspective, the phone is a very abstract, invisible kind of engagement,” she says. “The child doesn’t have much access to what you’re doing on the phone. You’re there, but you’re also just gone.”
Because of the ubiquity of cellphones, de Barbaro suspects that children are growing accustomed to the intermittent detachment of parental scrolling and may not be too emotionally impacted, but excessive phone use presents other concerns for the developmental psychologist. Her research has shown that mothers talk less to their children when their phones are on, which could be detrimental to children’s language development. However, de Barbaro also points out that cell phones can provide resources and connections to community for overwhelmed and isolated mothers, so the answer isn’t as simple as “turn them off.” “I think we need to be aware of the fact that phones can take our attention away from our children,” she says. “At the same time, if we continue to engage with our kids and attend to them when we’re not on our phones, that’s probably the most important thing.”
Parenting isn’t always uphill
With everything she knew academically about the difficulties of raising children, de Barbaro braced herself for suffering and exhaustion when she had her first child. But there was something she wasn’t prepared for: joy.
“Nobody talks about how joyful and amazing parenting can also be,” she says. By “nobody” she primarily means researchers and the popular press that reports on their work, which tends to focus more on the hurdles of parenting than on the pleasures. Yet de Barbaro regularly observes joyful interactions from the parents and children in her studies and hopes to be able to systematically capture that joy — and its effects on child development — in future studies.
“People just light up. You see these joyful smiles between the baby and parent,” she says. “That joy between parents and children is a really important predictive factor for children’s wellbeing, we’ve just studied it less than the challenges.”