纪思道 2012年10月26日
两位总统候选人激烈辩论怎样才能让美国更强大。也许他们应该向老鼠学习。
麦吉尔大学(McGill University)神经学家迈克尔・米尼(Michael Meaney)发现，他实验中的一些老鼠妈妈会花很多时间舔它们的孩子，为它们理毛。另一些老鼠妈妈的则不会与它们的孩子过多亲昵。
Damon Winter/The New York Times
纪思道
这种自然差异会带来长期的后果。米尼的研究小组发现，当小老鼠长大后，那些经常被妈妈舔、梳毛的老鼠在迷宫中能更快找到出路。
它们更喜欢社交，好奇心更强。甚至可以活得更长。
米尼的小组对成年鼠进行解剖，发现舔舐会改变大脑的解剖结构，因此经常被舔舐的老鼠能更好地控制压力反应。
那么，与舔舐理毛相对应的人类亲密行为，如拥抱、亲吻孩子，读书给他们听，是不是也会让我们的后代，乃至整个社会，更强大呢？
明尼苏达大学(University of Minnesota)从70那年代起开展了一项将近40年的研究，他们跟踪了267个孩子，母亲是低收入人群、第一次生育子女。研究发现，这些孩子在人生最初几年受到的来自父母的关爱至关重要，几乎可以像智商一样帮助预测这些孩子能否取得高中文凭。
这也许能解释为什么贫穷往往会一代传一代。在贫穷家庭长大的孩子往往经受更多压力。他们更多是由单亲妈妈抚养长大，而这些妈妈本身也承受巨大的压力。其结果会影响到这些孩子的大脑结构，使他们很难在学校或工作中取得成功。
但这种恶性循环是可以打破的。实验给我们的启示是，解决贫困问题最事半功倍的方法，未必是住房补贴、社会福利，或者盖监狱，而很可能就是幼儿早期教育和父母关爱。
一些学者，如芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)的詹姆斯・赫克曼(James Heckman)和哈佛大学(Harvard)的杰克・肖可夫(Jack Shonkoff)博士，已经率先开展了这个领域的研究。他们持续几十年的卓越研究都被收入了保罗・图赫(Paul Tough)的新书《孩子如何成功》(How Children Succeed)。希望这本书能长期跻身畅销书排行榜！
图赫认为，我们有大量证据可以证明，保守派在一些扶贫的关键问题上的观点是正确的。首先，我们不能只谈福利或者税收政策，我们必须要考虑到文化以及性格的塑造。
图赫写到，“对很多弱势群体年轻人来说，没有什么消除贫穷的手段”比勇气、韧性、坚毅、乐观“更重要”。
然而，很多保守派错误地认为这就是结论了。
图赫写道：“研究告诉我们一个不同的事实。年轻人成功所需的坚强性格并不是与生俱来的，也不会奇迹般地出现，和运气、基因无关。我们也无法选择。它们植根于我们大脑的化学构成，是可以通过可以度量、可以预测的手段加以塑造的，和儿童成长的环境息息相关。这意味着，我们整个社会可以对孩子性格的发展有不可限量的影响。”
这里我们有一个例子，来自我最喜欢的一个美国反贫穷组织——护士家庭合作项目。该项目派护士定期走访一些有问题的、初次做母亲的妇女，从她们怀孕一直跟踪到孩子两岁。护士们会警告母亲酗酒、抽烟的风险，并鼓励她们养成关爱孩子的习惯，例如给孩子读书。结果出乎意料的好。对比成长于同样环境但未参加该项目的青少年，这些孩子至15岁时犯罪被捕的几率要小一半。
也许，我们终于找到了一个解决美国家庭问题的金钥匙。图赫引用证据显示，不良压力和缺乏关爱会在婴儿期损伤孩子的脑前额叶外皮，而这种损害往往在青春期才可以修复。
他提到了克瓦娜・莱尔马(Kewauna Lerma)的故事。克瓦娜来自芝加哥，她刚上高中时的成绩是C-，被捕过一次。后来，一个叫“同一目标”(One Goal)的组织开始帮助克瓦娜，培养她树立人生的目标、发掘潜能。“同一目标”正是这一系列研究催生的一个组织。
奥巴马总统和米特・罗姆尼，你们听着：克瓦娜的故事告诉我们，增强国力不仅仅需要投资建造军舰，也需要为我们的孩子投资。
在一场美国大学入学考试(ACT)测试练习中，克瓦娜的成绩在最末的1%中。然而，她开始集中更多精力在学习上，她的表现和考试成绩都开始突飞猛进。中学的最后一年，她的成绩就再也没有低于A-。
她上了大学。在大学里，她的弱项是生物。老师在课堂里讲的克瓦娜一个字都听不懂。所以，她每次都坐在前排，下课后盯着问老师每个词是什么意思。克瓦娜常会缺钱。有一次因为没钱，她两天没吃饭。但是她的生物学得了A+。
欢迎读者在我的博客On the Ground（英文）对本文进行评论。请在Facebook、Google+和Twitter上关注我，并关注我的 YouTube视频。
翻译：曹莉
附英文稿：
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Cuddle Your Kid!
October 26, 2012
AS the presidential candidates debate how to strengthen America, maybe they can learn from rats.
A McGill University neurologist, Michael Meaney, noticed that some of the mother rats he worked with spent a great deal of time licking and grooming their babies. Other rat moms were much less cuddly.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
This natural variation had long-term consequences. Meaney’s team found that when the rats grew up, those that had been licked and groomed did better at finding their way through mazes.
They were more social and curious. They even lived longer.
Meaney’s team dissected adult rats and found that licking led to differences in brain anatomy, so that rats that had been licked more were better able to control stress responses.
So, could the human version of licking and grooming — hugging and kissing babies, and reading to them — fortify our offspring and even our society as well?
One University of Minnesota study that began in the 1970s followed 267 children of first-time low-income mothers for nearly four decades. It found that whether a child received supportive parenting in the first few years of life was at least as good a predictor as I.Q. of whether he or she would graduate from high school.
This may illuminate one way that poverty replicates itself from generation to generation. Children in poor households grow up under constant stress, disproportionately raised by young, single mothers also under tremendous stress, and the result may be brain architecture that makes it harder for the children to thrive at school or succeed in the work force.
Yet the cycle can be broken, and the implication is that the most cost-effective way to address poverty isn’t necessarily housing vouchers or welfare initiatives or prison-building. Rather, it may be early childhood education and parenting programs.
Scholars like James Heckman of the University of Chicago and Dr. Jack Shonkoff of Harvard have pioneered this field, and decades of fascinating research is now wonderfully assembled in Paul Tough’s important new book, “How Children Succeed.” Long may this book dwell on the best-seller lists!
As Tough suggests, the evidence is mounting that conservatives are right about some fundamental issues relating to poverty. For starters, we can’t talk just about welfare or tax policy but must also consider culture and character.
“There is no antipoverty tool we can provide for disadvantaged young people that will be more valuable,” Tough writes, than grit, resilience, perseverance and optimism.
Yet conservatives sometimes mistakenly see that as the end of the conversation.
“This science suggests a very different reality,” Tough writes. “It says that the character strengths that matter so much to young people’s success are not innate; they don’t appear in us magically, as a result of good luck or good genes. And they are not simply a choice. They are rooted in brain chemistry, and they are molded, in measurable and predictable ways, by the environment in which kids grow up. That means the rest of us — society as a whole — can do an enormous amount to influence their development.”
Here’s an example: the Nurse-Family Partnership, one of my favorite groups fighting poverty in America. It sends nurses on regular visits to at-risk first-time moms, from pregnancy until the child turns 2. The nurses warn about alcohol or drug abuse and encourage habits of attentive parenting, like reading to the child. The results are stunning: at age 15, these children are less than half as likely to have been arrested as kids from similar circumstances who were not enrolled.
Maybe we’re beginning to crack the code of how to chip away at so many of America’s domestic problems. Tough cites evidence that while toxic stress or unsupportive parenting damages the prefrontal cortex in infancy, this damage can often be undone at least through adolescence.
He tells the story of Kewauna Lerma, a girl from Chicago who started high school with a C- average and an arrest. Then a group called OneGoal, which has emerged out of this wave of research, began to work with Kewauna and nurtured her ambitions and talents.
President Obama and Mitt Romney, listen up: Kewauna’s story underscores that strengthening our nation means investing not only in warships but also in America’s children.
On a practice ACT standardized test, Kewauna scored in the bottom 1 percentile. Yet she began to focus on schoolwork, and her grades and test results soared. In her senior year of high school, she didn’t have a grade lower than an A-.
She made it to college, where her toughest class was biology and the professor used words that Kewauna didn’t understand. So she sat in the front row and after class asked the professor what each word meant. Kewauna was short on money, and once when she ran out of cash she didn’t eat for two days. But in biology, she earned an A+.
没有评论:
发表评论