Fostering Inter-Connectedness With Animals And Nature: The Developmental Benefits For Children. By Gail F. Melson, Ph.D. Originally published in People, Animals, Environment, Fall 1990, pps 15-17.
Gail Melson is an Associate Professor In the Department of Child Development and Family Studies at Purdue University.
Experiences of interconnectedness with animals and with nature may be an important context within which more nurturing children may grow to be more nurturing adults. I first will briefly underline the importance of studying this aspect of development and suggest some reasons why developmental psychologists and others who study children's development have neglected this topic. Using evidence from the relatively recent research in this area, I will trace out a research and theory agenda for studying ways in which nurturance may be fostered throughout the child's development, with particular attention to inter-connectedness with animals and with nature. Finally, I'll suggest some other developmental areas that may be affected by such inter-connectedness.
Importance Of The Development Of Nurturance
By nurturance, we mean, "fostering the developmental needs of another through provision of care, guidance and protection." We often think of caregiving as synonymous with nurturance, but note that this definition is broader, since responding to another's needs may involve a range of behaviors beyond caregiving. Moreover, caregiving may be intrusive, controlling and unresponsive to the recipient's needs. The second point about this definition is that it is explicitly developmental. We believe that nurturance develops; like other behaviors, it has the potential to become more skilled, differentiated and appropriate.
The importance of nurturance may be underscored by thinking of a number of societal trends which are accelerating into the next century. Increased longevity and medical advances mean we anticipate larger populations requiring more long-term care; the norm of the dual employed couple and the single parent head of household mean more children needing care by nonparental figures; the integration of people with disabilities into the mainstream of education and employment means we must incorporate greater sensitivity to individual developmental needs within the school and the workplace; and the conservative revolt against government provision of services and the taxes to pay for them means a greater reliance on voluntary citizen efforts. All these trends are occurring at the same time, as women are less available to perform traditional caregiving and volunteer roles. Because the need for nurturers is increasing at the same time as the traditional pool is shrinking, it is important to understand how nurturing others develops during childhood and how we can foster such development.
Children are traditionally thought of as recipients of nurturance from parents and other caregivers, not as nurturers themselves. Within our culture, there is emphasis on the individual ego or self as the unit of development, as reflected in the great psychological theories of development of Freud and Erikson, or in theories of human needs, such as Maslow's in which self-actualization is the highest order of human need. Historically, North American culture places a high premium on individuality, from our emphasis on individual liberties and privacy to our history of individual risk-taking through immigration to this country from other lands and to the West from the historic Eastern seaboard.
As a result, child-rearing values within our society tend to focus on the need to foster independence, initiative and assertion. The need for children to care for others, to learn how to contribute to the well-being of others outside of themselves is not well recognized by parents or by educators. However, new research on the development of attachment and its long-term effects challenge this view that parenting springs full blown upon the birth of one's infant. This research documents that early relationships create an "internal working model" or mental representation of parenting and being parented, which is carried forward in time and place to form a template for other relationships. This idea is now being fruitfully used to explain the intergenerational transmission of abuse. This line of research challenges us to look back at children as a sort of savings account into which nurturing and being nurtured experiences are stored for later withdrawal.
Other lines of research within psychology and education are adding fuel to the argument that nurturance develops during childhood. Researchers on infancy have documented the social, interactive nature of the infant from birth on and shown that all individualism is rooted in the establishment of secure interpersonal attachments. Within education, cooperative learning and supportive contexts as facilitators of individual achievement have been well documented. We have evidence that the social networks of children are important supports during stress, as social networks are for adults. Thus, from a number of research traditions, we are gradually coming to a new realization: nurturance develops during childhood, and this development is important both for optimal childhood functioning and for later adult functioning. Now that we have argued for the importance of nurturance as a developmental construct, let's briefly describe why connections to animals and nature are good places to study this development. First, pets are a common feature of children's households. Demographic surveys suggest pets are more common in households with children than in childless households, and parents report acquiring pets because of the presumed developmental benefits to children. Interviews with parents and children indicate that when pets are in a household, they generally assume great emotional significance, often being considered family members.
Secondly, domestic animals and pets as well as plants depend for their development on the care provided by the humans responsible for them. They signal their development needs in fairly clear ways, and they provide immediate feedback when their needs are not met. Moreover, domestic animals and plants provide immediate and forceful positive reinforcement when their needs are met. There is developing evidence from studies of adult caregivers that providing care to others and seeing their needs met is positively reinforcing for the caregiver. Caring for others, in short, is good for your health. For children, as well as adults, experiencing the positive effects of your care on others, may promote feelings of self-efficacy and positive connectedness, which are powerful reinforcers.
Thirdly, we have evidence that nurturing animals and plants may be particularly beneficial for boys. This is because caring for babies and young children becomes associated in children's minds with "women's work" or "what mommies do" as early as 3 years of age and by age 4-5, boys become less interested in infants and their care and even avoidant of babycare experiences. However, we have found no such association in children's minds when it comes to caring for pets or for plants and no sex differences in behavior as children develop. Because pet care is "gender-neutral," it may be a particularly useful training ground for the development of nurturance in boys.
Dimensions Of Nurturance
Now that we've seen in a general way why animals and nature may be a positive context for the development of nurturance, let's take a more systematic look at existing research. To do this, it is useful to distinguish three broad dimensions of nurturance. First, we can examine emotion, which may range from interest in something out side oneself to desire to meet the developmental needs expressed by this other and distress when these needs are not met. Here, we are studying children's affect, feelings and emotional investment in animals, particularly, pets.
Second, we can study the dimension of behavior, what skills children have in nurturing others and how they apply those skills. Here, we are examining the behavioral repertoire children have in relation to domestic animals, especially pets and beyond that, how they apply that repertoire to situations of developmental needs. This taps the child's responsiveness, his or her ability to apply behaviors as appropriate and in response to the needs of the other. With respect to pets, plants (and babies), responsivity involves the ability to "read" nonverbal cues to assess need and then to select behaviors that will presumably meet that need.
The third dimension is cognition, the ideas and knowledge that children have about the object of nurturance, its needs and how to meet them. This dimension taps children's ideas about animals and about nature and their thoughts about how they can nurture them.
What do we know about these three dimensions of nurturance as applied to animals and to nature? First, with respect to emotion, we have documented in our own studies of children from a wide range of family circumstances and social class backgrounds that children express strong attachment in general to their household pets. This emotional investment is relatively high by the preschool period and appears to increase moderately as children get older. (We have studied up to age 12.) Despite the overall high levels, there is considerable individual variation, so that one may say some children are highly attached to their pets, while others are only moderately attached. (Almost no children are indifferent.) Children who are highly attached spend more time with their pets, doing both caregiving and other kinds of activities, from playing with the animal to "confiding" in the animal. Our findings suggest that strength of attachment is associated with empathy and positive feelings of competence as well as fewer behavior problems at school for children making life transitions, such as kindergarten children who have recently made the transition to public schooling. For older children, in second and fifth grades, for example, very high attachment to pets is not associated with empathy and is sometimes negatively associated with feelings of competence. In other words, our findings suggest that emotional investment in pets may promote well-being and nurturance training (as exhibited by empathy) during times that children are making difficult transitions. At other times, when children are expected to be oriented more outside the home and toward peers, very high attachment to the pet may be a symptom of difficulties in these areas.
With respect to behavior, we have evidence that children who have pets in the home are involved in a range of regular caregiving activities such as feeding, walking, grooming, playing, cleaning living quarters, etc. These activities involve assessing the needs of the pet and developing skills to meet those needs effectively. Boys and girls do not differ in their involvement in these nurturing behaviors toward pets, but they do differ in their nurturing behaviors toward younger brothers or sisters or toward babies outside the family. Girls spend more time caring for younger siblings or other babies than boys do, and this gap increases as children approach adolescence. Thus, there is evidence supporting the hypothesis that pets (and perhaps other domestic animals) are indeed gender neutral avenues for learning nurturance.
We also have evidence suggesting that pets may be a compensatory avenue for nurturing when others are unavailable. Comparing children with both younger siblings and pets to children who have pets but no younger siblings, the latter spend more time playing with and caring for their pets than the former. With respect to cognition, several studies suggest that children with or without pets are developing a storehouse of ideas about the developmental needs of common household pets and how to meet those needs. Children who have pets in their home, however, know more about how adult animals care for their young. And children with a stronger emotional tie to their pets have more ideas about what their pet is like and how pets may be cared for. In our interview studies, we have been struck by the extent of children's knowledge about their pets and their care. They are clearly building an "internal working model" of this relationship and their role in it. It is not known if this mental representation is carried forward to influence other relationships of care, but this is a pressing research question.
In summary, evidence exists that involvement with pets is related to all three dimensions of nurturance development. Other aspects of development also may be affected by involvement with domestic animals. In providing nurturance to another whose needs we meet and who is dependent upon us, we are also experiencing a situation of relative power and relative powerlessness. For children who are generally dependent and powerless, the experience of dominance and power may provide experiences of mastery and self-efficacy. What is less recognized is the fact that experiences with animals and nature also provide the opportunity to redefine ideas about power and mastery within the context of nurturance and care. We can use these experiences of children with animals and nature to move from a utilitarian definition of power to an interconnected definition of power.
Secondly, experiences meeting the needs of animals provide unconditional positive affect to children. The nonverbal mode of communication not only may sharpen the child's ability to decode nonverbal signals (we know that rejected children are deficient in this), but also may provide children with needed tactile stimulation and "contact comfort." Anthropologists like Edward Hall have termed our culture a "noncontact" culture; cross-culturally, our children, particularly young children, may be receiving very low levels of tactile support.
Thirdly, involvement with animals and nature may have an evolutionary basis, echoing Konrad Lorenz's argument that the "babyish" profile of the young of all species innately evokes a nurturing response from humans. There may be physiological - that is, hormonal and neurological - changes tied to the sensory feedback we receive from the natural environment. We now know that exposure to light and dark have profound psychological consequences mediated by their sensory impact. Perhaps it is time to launch studies that consider lack of involvement with animals and nature as a form of sensory deprivation.
Many research questions remain. First, does involvement with animals and nature affect all children in similar ways? There appear to be age and sex differences in the impact of involvement with pets. Should research proceed using a basic needs or a deficit model? In other words, is interconnection with animals and nature something that all children need at higher levels than they are presently getting? Or does such interconnection function in some remedial way to provide experiences for children at risk for optimal development?
Second, does involvement with animals and nature function in different ways during different developmental periods or life transitions? Are animals primarily. "transitional objects" in Winnicott's terms? Do they provide support during difficult transitions but become crutches that may interfere with other aspects of functioning?
Third, how does involvement with animals and nature interact with other family and contextual variables? No influence on development acts in isolation, particularly from family, neighborhood and culture. Animals may provide children lessons in cruelty and exploitation if that is how they are interpreted and presented. Children may become involved with nature as a force to be tamed and destroyed rather than to be valued. Studies of environmental awareness as it develops over childhood document that interconnectedness and nurturance are only one of the possible ways that children may orient themselves to the natural world. Some children develop a more utilitarian, exploitative orientation to the environment. It is important to discover the antecedents of these views.
The importance of family, neighborhood and community means that we must be cautious in attributing positive developmental outcomes to the salutary effects of animals and nature alone. A positive family environment may amplify and reinforce the positive lessons a child receives from involvement with animals. It is also possible that involvement with animals may "buffer" the child somewhat against family stresses, but what kind of involvement and how much is necessary to have an inoculating effect, if indeed any is possible, is not known.
These are but a few examples of the many substantive research issues that remain. There also is need for greater methodological rigor in order to document what is deeply believed and what many see "works." There is lack of prospective, longitudinal and experimental studies (with appropriate control groups) to address issues of effects, not just correlations or associations. To say that emotional attachment to pets is related to empathy, as we have found, cannot imply that pets cause children to be more emphatic, since already emphatic children may have the skills to foster deeper attachments to their pets.
The beneficial effects of pets is a social stereotype, as any look at advertising supports. This means we may get socially desirable responses from children and adults when we question them about their pets. Hostility, jealousy, dominance may not be expressed although felt. There is need for more sensitive, non-reactive measures of research on children and pets.
Despite the need for more and more rigorous research, I think we are ready to make two simple but compelling claims. First, we need to promote nurturance in our children if we are to live in a more nurturing society. Second, positive interconnections with animals and nature are one of the ways in which nurturance may develop.
