By: Dr. Gregory Popcak

You hear it a lot from Catholic families, “You have to do what works for you.”   I appreciate the sentiment.   People who say it genuinely mean well.   They are just trying to acknowledge the real challenges that accompany family life and extend sympathy to those who are struggling.  Who could argue with that intention?  Unfortunately, while the intention is good, the delivery leaves a lot to be desired.   Catholic families must be comforted, they must be supported, they must be encouraged and they must be helped.   But they must never be told that they are free to do whatever works for them.   Here’s why.

The family is the crucible of culture.   More than any other social structure, it is the family that passes beliefs, values, worldviews and traditions from one generation to the next.

Because of this, the Catholic family is called to be a unique creature; a prophetic witness in the world; a light shining in the darkness.   The Catholic family must stand out.  “From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more”   (Lk 12:48).    Catholic families have been given much by our Savior and His Holy Church, and MUCH is required of us.   Our mission is clear.  

The Mission of the Catholic Family

So what is the mission of the Catholic family?   Here is what the Church has to  say,

“By word and example, in the daily round of choices, and through concrete actions and choices, parents lead their children to authentic freedom, actualized in the sincere gift of self, and they cultivate in them a respect for others, a  sense of justice, cordial openness, dialogue, generous service, solidarity, and all the values which help people live life as a gift. “In raising children Christian parents must be concerned about their children’s faith and help them to fulfil the vocation God has given them. The parents’ mission as educators also includes teaching and giving their children an example of the true meaning of suffering and death. They will be able to do this if they are sensitive to all kinds of suffering around them and, even more, if they succeed in fostering attitudes of closeness, assistance and sharing towards sick or elderly members of the family. The family celebrates the Gospel of life through daily prayer, both individual prayer and family prayer. The family prays in order to glorify and give thanks to God for the gift of life, and implores his light and strength in order to face times of difficulty and suffering without losing hope. But the celebration which gives meaning to every other form of prayer and worship is found in the family’s actual daily life together, if it is a life of love and self-giving.”

Excerpt taken from  Evangelium Vitae.

How often do we ask ourselves…

What if these were more than just pretty words?   What if these words  were the mission statement for my Catholic family?  

How well am I living out the example of these virtues in my parenting life?  

Am I actively teaching my children to live out these virtues, by example, by fostering  their personal  relationship with Jesus Christ, and through direct catechesis?    

Does my family look different than the non-Catholic families on my block because of our family’s single-minded devotion to living out these virtues?  

What can we do to improve our prophetic witness as a Catholic family by living out these virtues more fully in our relationships with each other?”

We have a tall order to fill.   Of course, we are free to do what we believe helps us fulfill the above mission.   But  that is not the same thing as saying we are  free to do “whatever works for us.”   The world needs Catholic families,  not families that look like everyone else’s  except for the Catholic prayers  they say.    We must parent intentionally at all times with these virtues burned into our vision.   We are NOT free to do “what works for us.”     That is  the world’s way, not ours.    Catholic families  are only free to do what we genuinely believe proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ and best exemplifies the virtues listed above that define the witness and mission of the Catholic family.     That is the meaning of “authentic  freedom”—the ability to choose what is best and good and true and beautiful, not the ability to do “what works for us.”

Be Not Afraid

None of this is to make anyone feel guilty or lose heart.   We are all on a journey toward this ideal and most of us have not yet arrived.   In fact, most of us are very far from it.    Thanks to God’s grace, that’s OK.    But we cannot take our eyes off the map.   We can take the time we need to get there.   We can rest when we must.   We can have bad days where we wish for an easier path.   We can have days where we break down and cry a bit from being stretched more than we imagined we ever would.   And especially on those days, we must get support from other like-minded families and other like-minded sources of encouragement.   But we are not free to choose  an easier path.   We are not free to do, “what works for us.”   We are only ever free to do what serves the gospel and builds the Kingdom of God both in and outside our homes.     Everything we  do as parents, we will be called to reckon for according to the mission outlined above.   It’s a serious obligation that we must take seriously.

I applaud your willingness to be that family that bears God’s face and the Catholic vision of love to the world.   May God give you his grace for the journey.

By: Dr. Gregory Popcak

 

In my book Parenting with Grace, I have a chapter on taking small children to Church. The question of taking children to church, is an important one and one that parents often wrestle with. I have provided a few points that will help put this question in perspective.

The Church and her Children

1.   As far as Catholics are concerned, babies are not merely tolerated.   They have a right to be in Church.   If you are baptized, you belong.

2.   As a matter of Catholic social teaching, it is the duty of every Catholic to support the mission of the family to raise godly children:

“Economic and social policies as well as organization of the work world should be continually evaluated in light of their impact on the   strength and stability of family life. The long-range future of this nation is intimately linked with the well-being of families, for the family is the most basic form of human community.”  (-US Bishops)

Read more here.

Failure to do so is a serious offense against both  charity and the dignity of the family.   If you have ever scowled at a parent of a crying baby at Church. I recommend you confess your hardened heart.   “Whatever you do to the least…” (Mt 25:40).

3.   While I respect the intention behind it, a  parent who leaves a child at home “until they are old enough” is being unjust regarding the child’s religious education.   Education begins unconsciously before it begins consciously.   Your baby  or toddler needs to be given the opportunity to learn the rhythm, sights, sounds, and smells  of the Mass before he is conscious enough to understand the Mass.   Robbing a child of this sensory education makes catechesis that much harder later on.   Spirituality is primarily a sensory call (from God) that leads to a transformative response.   Robbing a child of that early sensual experience of God and His Church is a very serious impediment to future catechesis and spiritual development.

4.   There is a difference between a fussing baby and a screaming baby.   As a matter of courtesy to the other worshippers, parents should always remove a child who is being loud and  cannot be consoled after about a minute or so.   That noted, everyone else around the family with a fussy child has an obligation to either put on an understanding, sympathetic smile or pretend you don’t notice and trust the parent will handle it.   As Jesus said, to the apostles who were pushing the kids away, “get over your bad selves.”    As a Church, we do not believe in contraception and we certainly should not be promoting contraceptive sanctuaries.

Helpful Tips for Moms and Dads

–Sit in the front.  This is counterintuitive, but  kids behave better when they can look at what’s going on instead of  some other parishioner’s butt (which is, afterall, what’s on their eye-level).

–Don’t sit in the cry-room from the start.   Although I understand, and support, their intended use, in practice, most cry rooms are counterproductive. Go in only for as long as you need to, if you need, then go back to your pew.   You and your child will get more out of the experience.

-If you have to remove your child from the sanctuary, hold him the entire time you are in the cry room or the back of the church.   DO NOT under any circumstances let him down.   If you take the child out and put him down and play with him (or, God forbid, let him run around) you will teach him—through simple Pavlovian conditioning—that he NEEDS to cry to get the fun times that happen when he forces you to leave the sanctuary.     Let your child have a minimal amount of freedom of movement if he  allows you to stay  the pew, but none if he makes you leave the sanctuary.   If a little one is really that out of control, he isn’t able to get himself back online anyway.   If he makes you leave, by all means be loving, sympathetic, compassionate, and affectionate, but DO NOT PUT THE KID DOWN.   When he’s quiet, return to the pew.

-Bring some quiet, soft, preferably religiously-themed toy-like things.  By all means, for children under, say, 4-ish, bring these things to church.   Keep them in a special “going to Mass bag”   that the child doesn’t get to see unless you are in church.   That will keep these activities special.   Regarldess, try to put these things away before the consecration.   At the elevation, point to the host and  whisper something like, “look at the miracle!   Look at Jesus. Say, “I love you Jesus!”

–Don’t do mass in shifts.   The Mass is for families.   When parents say they aren’t “getting anything out of Mass” when they bring small children they are missing the point.   What you get out of Mass when you have small children is the joy of passing your faith on to them.     That’s what you signed up for when you became a Catholic parent.   Yes, it can be tough, and yes, you may certainly do other things to get your spiritual needs met, but Sunday mass is for your family.   Go as a family.

Help Yourself!

For more information on how you can get the most out of your parenting experiencing while providing your child with what they need, be sure to pick up  Parenting with Grace.  Find any of the above information challenging? Talk to your PaxCare Tele-coach  and get the help you need to succeed.

By: Dr. Gregory Popcak

A new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships highlights the long-term psychological and relational consequences of the cry-it-out method (the method, derived from conventual wisdom, which posits that babies learn to “self-sooth” when the parents leave the baby to cry itself back to sleep during the night. More information on how this can be unhealthy for infants, read here). In particular, the new study looks at the tendency of insecurely attached adults to feel threatened by otherwise healthy, intimate relationships.  The study is one of hundreds that look at the effects of insecure attachment in childhood on adult relationships.  In order to understand how the two connect, a little background is in order.

Three Types of Attachment

Previous research shows that there are three, basic attachment styles: Secure, Anxious-Ambivalent, and Avoidant.   Secure attachment is just like it sounds.   It represents a child (and later an adult) who is confident in interpersonal relationships, someone who knows how to be intimate and vulnerable (in a healthy way) without losing himself.  The anxious-ambivalent-attached child (and later, adult) is insecure in relationships, tends to be clingy and nervous of being abandoned or failing to connect successfully with others.   The avoidant-attached child (and later, adult) wants to be in a relationship, but tends to act as if he or she could take you or leave you once in a relationship.

What determines which category a child (and later, adult) will fall into is the consistency and response time with which moms and dads respond to infant cries:

“…giving babies what they need leads to greater independence later…The fact is that caregivers who habitually respond to the needs of the baby before the baby gets distressed, preventing crying, are more likely to have children who are independent than the opposite(e.g., Stein & Newcomb, 1994). Soothing care is best from the outset. Once patterns get established, it’s much harder to change them.”

Read the rest of this insightful article here.

Children whose cries are responded to promptly develop secure attachment.   Children whose cries are responded to inconsistently (i.e, time to response or consistency of responding at all varies) develop anxious-ambivalent attachment.   Children  whose cries are consistently ignored develop avoidant attachment.   This is not a theory.  These findings (both how a child comes by their attachment style and the long term relationship effects) have been established by hundreds of studies conducted over decades and, in some cases for decades (as with some of the 30year + longitudinal research done on attachment styles and adult relationships.)

Attachment Affects Adult Intimacy

Now, we flash forward.   According to research from the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, people with an anxious-ambivalent attachment style (the ones whose cries were inconsistently responded to in childhood) can expect to be fearful in otherwise healthy, intimate relationships as adults.

…insecurely attached individuals, compared to the securely attached, perceive potential close relationships as socially threatening vs. rewarding. Although we all evaluate what we will get out of our interactions with others, anxiously attached people are more likely to perceive social interactions as threatening. “Anxious attachment seems to revolve around concerns for negative evaluation and rejection,” MacDonald notes.

So should anxiously attached individuals fear rejection when initiating a new relationship? Is their perception of threat justified? Not exactly, says Dr. MacDonald. In the beginning of a new relationship there is no objective evidence that others view anxiously attached people as less attractive or of lesser value. MacDonald goes on to explain, “The problem is when people with anxious attachment start acting on their fears of rejection, for instance asking for reassurance over and over and over again. Those kinds of patterns can create self-fulfilling prophecies where the partner starts to tire of providing that kind reassurance.” In other words, anxious individuals are not inherently more likely to be rejected that anyone else. Unfortunately, their constant fears of rejection lead to behaviors that make it difficult to sustain a satisfying relationship for everyone involved.

So what do you do if you recognize this behavior in you or your partner? MacDonald says it’s important to realize that your own fears about rejection are just that: fears. But they are fears that can be overcome if you step back and reinterpret what’s going on in the interaction. Further, although a relationship with a secure person can help an anxious person resolve some of these issues, the best advice, according to Mac Donald, is to deal with these issues in therapy. “Spending time with a therapist is in many ways a way of resetting your attachment system,” said MacDonald. He goes on to explain that the therapeutic relationship is set up in such a way that people can explore and reevaluate the root of these emotional insecurities in a safe environment.   (read a summary of the research here.)

Attachment and the Catholic Parent

So, let’s pull this all together.   What does Jesus tell us is the fulfillment of the law?   “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.”   Likewise, what does the old catechism tell us we were made for “to know God, to love him and serve him in this life and be happy with him in the next.” Both of these classic truths teach that we were made for intimacy with God and others—first and foremost.

The Theology of the Body further asserts that we were made for love and that even our bodies were created to support and encourage the call to  both be loving persons  and create “communities of love” in our families and in the world.   In short the Catholic vision of love teaches us that we were created to live in intimate communion both in this life and in the next and that God not only gives us the grace to do this, he even creates  our bodies to serve these ends.

I want to be clear that I am not saying that there is only one Catholic way to parent.   Catholic parents are free to do what they think is best and they don’t need my approval, one way or the other.   What I am doing, though,  is presenting data that would appear to show that there are some ways that parents can do a better job of cooperating with God’s grace and the way God actually constructs their children’s brains and bodies so that their children develop their full capacity to be intimate—both with God and the people God places in their lives.

Sadly, it would also appear that many of the common parenting practices that Catholic parents buy into cause them to work at cross purposes with the radical call to intimacy that our faith challenges us to take up, to the degree that a simple thing like letting a child cry it out in infancy could lead to that child becoming an adult who is suspicious of otherwise healthy, intimate relationships.   No doubt this news is shocking to many parents, but literally hundreds of studies over decades of research back up these claims.   Parents who are interested—and even parents who are irritated—would do well to read up on both attachment theory and the theology of the body.   By all means, make up your own mind. But at least do your homework before writing this off.   The stakes—your ability to facilitate your child’s capacity to love God and others—are just too high to take this stuff lightly.

For more information on creating a family around the principles of the Theology of the Body, check out Parenting with Grace: The Catholic Parents’ Guide to Raising (almost) Perfect Kids.

By: Dr. Gregory Popcak

The Theology of the Body teaches us that the body has an innate self-donative meaning.  That is;  we are, literally, wired for love and connection, and that God’s plan for relationships can be discerned by prayerfully contemplating the bodies God gave us.  Science is actually backing this claim up, and is giving us some important insights into what—given this mindset—is God’s intention not only for adult pair bonding (i.e., marriage and sex) but parent-child  bonding as well.   This line of thought has significant ramifications for important parenting questions like, “How do we get our babies to sleep!”

Sleep Training & Self-Soothing

It is conventional wisdom that infant “sleep training” teaches babies to “self-soothe.”   These are comforting ideas to tired moms and dads who are eager to be great parents and get a decent night’s sleep but what does it mean for a baby to “self-soothe” and is it even possible for infants to exhibit this skill.

Proponents of self-soothing point to the fact that after several days of sleep training—which involves parents incrementally delaying  their response to an infant’s night-time crying—the baby decreases the time crying and, eventually stops and goes back to sleep.  This is what happens, and it has been assumed that the baby is able to return to sleep because of “self-soothing.”  The problem is,  until fairly recently, a researcher never had a way to test the “self-soothing” hypothesis and that’s an important problem.

While, again, its a nice idea that would be lovely if true, infant self-soothing makes no sense from a developmental psych perspective.   For anyone—you, me, any human being—to self-soothe, two  skills are required: self-talk and intentional, conscious redirection.  When you are upset, to get yourself back under control, you need to be able to 1) Talk yourself down (“Calm down, Greg.  You can handle this.  It’s going to be OK.”)   and 2) You need to be able to intentionally direct yourself to engage in some self-soothing activity (e.g, make a plan to solve the problem, do something that reduces your stress, etc).  The problem is that babies don’t have either of these skills.  Children don’t develop any self-talk capacity until at least 4yo (usually later) and although babies do have some soothing rituals like thumb-sucking, it is not known how effective these strategies are.   New research is showing that the answer is, “not very.”

Learned Helplessness and Physiological Stress

It turns out that after several days of sleep training the baby’s behavior and biology become un-hooked.   The sleep-trained child does stop crying, but research shows that  the child’s  stress hormone level remain as high as when he was crying.  If the baby was actually self-soothing, the cortisol levels would decrease as the crying behavior decreased.  But that isn’t what happens. Instead, the sleep-trained infant’s cortisol level remains high, but the  help-seeking behavior stops.  There is a disconnect between what the baby feels and how the baby acts.  In animals, we call this disconnect between the physiological stress response (i.e., high cortisol levels) and behavior, “learned helplessness.”

Learned helplessness is a well-established psychological fact. The classic learned helplessness experiments were done years ago and over 3000 studies later, learned helplessness is a foundational concept in the study of depression and anxiety disorders.  In the first experiments in learned helplessness, a dog was placed in a box that had a metal plate at the bottom.  A lid was placed on top of the box and a mildly painful electrical shock went through the metal plate.  The dog would try to jump out of the box, but be thwarted by the lid.  After several repetitions the dog stopped trying to escape the shock. He just lay there helplessly.  This continued even after the lid was removed.  The shock would be delivered but even though the dog could escape, he learned not to try to help himself—he, literally, learned to be helpless.   Superficially, you could theoretically claim that the dog learned some mysterious way to “self-soothe” and ignore the shock, but you would be wrong.  Physiologically, the dog’s cortisol levels were elevated with the shock, but the help-seeking behavior stopped.  This is the exact same dynamic seen in sleep-trained infants and that should alarm us.

Learned helplessness actually damages the human and animal brain’s ability to process stress and is an established risk factor for depression and anxiety disorders in later childhood and adulthood.

More Scientific Evidence  

A recent study reaffirms the topic of the article:

“Provocative new animal research suggests that the ability to manage stress is not genetically hardwired into our brain. Rather the brain learns from early experiences and develops pathways that prepare the brain for future challenges.”  

Read the entire article here

Good vagal tone  (note:   the vagus nerve resets the stress-out body to a normal unstressed state.   “Vagal tone”   refers to the efficiency with which the vagus nerve rests the body’s stress signs)  is associated with healthy emotional regulation and greater resistance to both depression and anxiety. Long term cortisol exposure is antithetical to developing good vagal tone.  What I am saying is that the idea of self-soothing in infancy is a convenient fiction.   What is the mechanism or process infants use to self-soothe?   How does this magic happen?   Everything I know about developmental psychology says that it isn’t possible.   Unless someone can provide me with a study that documents the process of self-soothing, I have to assume that the idea that babies can self-soothe is wishful thinking at best and junk science at worst.   There is just no evidence that it can be done.   So, if the baby isn’t self-soothing, what is  happening?   Well, the evidence would appear to show that what is happening is learned helplessness.   When cortisol levels are elevated  for a long-enough period  that help seeking behavior is extinguished in the presence sustained stress, that is learned helplessness.

One study indicates that sleep-trained children were easier than children who were not sleep-trained, but if the mechanism of action of sleep-training is learned helplessness, this makes perfect sense.   Parents typically report quiet children as better behaved. Children who have learned the pointlessness of crying through sleep-training  will be quieter and seen as better behaved by parents.   But is a quieter baby really a healthier baby?   Or is a quieter baby a depressed baby?  We don’t know because the aforementioned study refuses to look at the mechanism of action behind the efficacy of sleep-training.

If we take the  Theology of the Body’s  claims seriously,  that God’s intention for relationships is written into God’s design of our body, we need to listen to research that shows that sleep-training is antithetical to the donative meaning of the body.  Genesis tells us that, “it is not good for man to be alone.”  Science confirms that this is true.  Especially for infants.