Carrie Lauth: Yeah. Well, in your book, you talked a lot about the research that has been done about the developing brain and what does that imply for the parenting behaviors?

Robin Grille: Oh, the new brain research I have to tell you is the most exciting branch of new discoveries that I have ever come across and it really… Look out for this because it will change the world, the things that we are learning about how the brain develops. There are all kinds of implications.

For instance, we are learning that any act of tenderness and affection towards a small child, even an older child, literally causes a cascade of the well-being hormones in the child’s body and around the child’s brain such as oxytocin. That is a hormone. It is a brain chemical that brings about deep feelings of love and empathy. Enough of it even leads to states of bliss.

Ecstatic states that if you are a breastfeeding mother, you will probably observe that in your baby.

Carrie Lauth: And in yourself.

Robin Grille: Because breastfeeding in particular…

Carrie Lauth: And in the mother.

Robin Grille: And in the mother. In both. The action, the sucking action from the baby and the physical contact causes a lot of oxytocin to be produced in the mother’s body, also in the baby’s body, as well as in the breast milk, if the breast milk gets charged with oxytocin.

Now, there are two good things about this. One, that of course the more oxytocin the better because it goes from well-being to happiness to joy to bliss, but also oxytocin is literally... it is like a fertilizer for the brain. It nourishes the brain and causes the brain to grow, the brain of the child.

Quite specifically in the areas of the brain that regulate emotion, so that the more oxytocin a child gets and the baby gets it is like the healthier their brain is going to be and the areas of the brain the enable a human being to be loving and full of empathy for other humans, for other people, for empathy for our life, those are the areas of the brain that are being nourished by oxytocin. Now, to me I think that is probably the single most exciting discovery in the history of science and the most important discovery.

Carrie Lauth: Yeah. Well, one of the things that I loved about your book was that I have noticed a trend in parenting books over the last several years that kind of leaned towards the nature assumption, in other words that it really does not matter how we parent our children, they are going to basically turn out the same and your book really flies in the face of that.

Your messages that parents matter not only for our own children and what kind of adults they turn out to be, but what kind of parents they turn out to be and what kind of citizens they become and what kind of society we build as a result of that.

Do you want to comment more about that, about supporting parents and protecting children is really what is going to create change in our world?

Robin Grille: Sure. Look, I have read some of the books that try to tell us that parents do not matter all that much and children are born as they are going to be as people for the rest of their lives and I found such gaping holes in their reasoning. I found them to be quite disappointing.

The only value in those books that I saw is that they really demonstrate that parents are not the only… Parents are so important and because we are closest to our children particularly when they are babies, we are their universe; however, parents are only one piece of the puzzle.

Yes, children will be very strongly influenced by peer groups as well one of the reasons being is that… But most of that brain growth and development happens in the first three years of life up to seven years.

However, there is a new surge of brain growth that happens again during adolescence, which makes us more open and vulnerable again and that a lot of that personality does get, on a more superficial level, it does get shaped again by interaction with their peers as adolescents. So, it is true that parents are not the only factor.

However, I can tell you that by far, by very, very far the bulk of science has now made it very clear that although genes do influence our temperament, they are neutral insofar as our emotional intelligence. When there are problems such as dysfunctions, painful problems like depression, anxiety, you cannot just bring that down to the gene. That is very strongly influenced by our environment. A lot of social problem are very strongly influenced by our environment.

In fact, there is no gene at all for violence. People that have a hyperdensity for violence have been found to have very different brains to other people, the part of the brain that regulates emotion has been damaged, has been corroded by high levels of emotional trauma in early childhood because…

Carrie Lauth: Yeah, it is like which came first, the chicken or the egg. Did the brain changes come before the violence or was it the opposite?

Robin Grille: No, it is quite clear now that the suffering of the child comes first. What happens when the child experiences a lot of emotional stress, for a baby and a small child, the greatest bristle by far is separation.

Carrie Lauth: Yes.

Robin Grille: If they are separated from people they are attached to like their parents or carers. That is what long hours in daycare facilities are quite damaging.

Robin Grille