In my article titled, “Boys of All Ages Need Physical Nurturance from both Mom and Dad”, we discussed the developmental importance of boys receiving skin-to-skin nurturance and physical affection at every stage of their development. A crucial component of physical nurturance is emotional attunement—when parents are sensitively attuned to the emotions of their child and assist their child in regulating those emotions through their own calm and soothing responses to the child. Research indicates that mothers play an especially crucial role in sons’ mental health, by how emotionally attuned a mother is to helping her son regain emotional homeostasis, especially through her facial expressions.
A study by Weinberg et al. (1999) found that six-month-old baby boys showed an inability to regulate their emotions when their mothers showed a “still face”—or a flat, non-responsive expression—for just two minutes. Babies of both sexes were distressed by their mothers’ “still faces” and both girls and boys struggled with recovering from the brief distress once their mothers suddenly resumed play. However, boys had more difficulty than girls coping with their mothers showing the “still face”. The study also found that the more mom played with her baby boy, the more likely he was to show serious distress with the sudden “still face” of his mother. This important study also showed us that boys are born more
emotional than girls and boys look to their mothers to help them emotionally self-regulate.
In addition to the Weinberg et al. study, a few other studies highlight the importance of early emotional attunement between mothers and sons: Baydar and Brooks-Gunn (1991) found that when mothers worked during the first year of their children’s lives, the boys in the study suffered more worse behavioral problems than the girls. Sinclair and Murray (1998) report that depression in mothers leads to hyperactivity and other behavioral problems in boys. Fearon et al. (2010) found that boys are more vulnerable than their sisters to having behavioral problems as a result of insecure attachments with their mothers. Secure attachment is the ability of a child to connect fully with his loved ones without skewing toward being guardedly aloof, anxiously clingy, or erratically vacillating between the two
extremes. Secure attachment is the direct result of parents who immediately and with sensitivity respond to and meet the emotional, physical, and developmental needs of the child.
Along with physical affection, emotional attunement is foundational to a secure parent-child
attachment, and a chronic unresponsive facial expression on mom harms attachment. A recent study by Project ABC shows that babies become distressed at dad’s “still face”, too. The engaged facial expressions and emotional sensitivity of mothers and fathers toward their sons helps boys to understand, cope with, and regulate their emotions, and attune with others as they grow—and for a lifetime.
References
Examples of “still face” experiments:
Ed Tronick’s studies with moms and babies
Project ABC’s study with dads and babies
Weinberg, M. K., Tronick, E. Z., Cohn, J. F., & Olson, K. L. (1999). Gender differences in emotional expressivity and self-regulation during early infancy. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 175.
Weinberg, M. K., Beeghly, M., Olson, K. L., & Tronick, E. (2008). Effects of maternal depression and panic disorder on mother–infant interactive behavior in the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm. Infant Mental Health Journal: Official Publication of The World Association for Infant Mental Health, 29(5), 472-491.
Baydar, N., and Brooks-Gunn, J. (1991). Effects of maternal employment and child-care arrangements on preschoolers’ cognitive and behavioral outcomes: Evidence from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Developmental Psychology, 27(6), 932.
Sinclair, D., & Murray, L. (1998). Effects of postnatal depression on children’s adjustment to school. British Journal of Psychiatry, 172, 58–63.
Fearon, R.P., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M.J., Van IJzendoorn, M.H., Lapsley, A.-M., & Roisman, G.I. (2010). The Significance of Insecure Attachment and Disorganization in the Development of Children’s Externalizing Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Study. Child Development, 81, 435-456.