He probes the emotional life of infants
Arrogant with youth and Ivy League degrees, Ed Tronick, then 25, took a job at a day - care center in the Bromley - Heath housing project . He was there for postgraduate work in the psychology department at Harvard, and he was there to develop a new day - care program. Instead, it developed him.
"I thought I knew all about infant development from my classes, but I saw babies do things that I knew they couldn't be doing," he says. "I just needed to understand, what can a baby really do?"
Quite a bit, it turns out. Tronick, now chief of the Child Development Unit at Children's Hospital Boston, was one of the first researchers to explore the emotional capacities of infants and to show that babies are profoundly affected by their parents' emotional states and behavior. He's also explored how parental depression and drug use affect infant development.
"It seems obvious now, perhaps," says Tronick, 64, also an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the School of Public Health. But when he entered the field in the 1970s, there was a romanticized model of the mother - infant relationship, what Tronick calls, "the Madonna and Child idea."
This held that a mentally sound baby would always be "emotionally coordinated" with its parents and would, essentially, act perfectly if its parents followed the correct formula. Over years of research, Tronick argued that development is not such a smooth process. "What's normal is that a child accomplishes something, then gets disorganized around that. You need internal struggle to let things emerge." Hence the sleepless nights and crying fits of a baby that has just learned how to walk.
Tronick conducted much of his research by watching slow-motion videotapes of mothers interacting with their babies. He spent painstaking years recording every head movement, every gesture. He also developed an experiment called the "still-face" paradigm, in which the mother freezes in front of her child, eliciting increasingly strong reactions as the baby attempts to win back her attention. The experiment is now a textbook standard in the child development field.
One of Tronick's most exciting areas of research has been in the ways different cultures raise their babies -- he's lived among the Efe tribesmen in Zaire and among Peruvian shepherds in the Andes, observing how radically different child-rearing methods affect infant development.
"The babies grow up to be culturally appropriate," says Tronick. So the Efe, for instance, are able to function well in groups, while the Peruvians are better at relating to a lone individual. "We really are not the same."
Tronick isn't a pure researcher though. His warm blue eyes bespeak a social conscience (he was active in the anti war movement in university ), and he helped found the Touchpoints program to train clinicians who work with families to better handle child development issues.
"I live in a laboratory," he says. "It's too easy for researchers to go off into the abstruse." In part to remedy this, he just announced that he's accepted an additional position in the psychology department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, where he'll be working with urban families who often lack mental health resources. There, he'll be researching his current big question: How do infants learn to cope with stress?
"In daily life, a child builds capacity to deal with stress," says Tronick. "What happens, though, if the child is under chronic stress? These kids become really vulnerable. They become aggressive. Their cognitive skills suffer." Using physiological tests like measuring heart rate and the nervous system, his lab will be studying the implications of stress and neglect. He sees it as a chance to bring his decades of work out of the lab and into people's communities, just as he did when he was an arrogant kid at Bromley - Heath.
"There are people here who are really struggling," says Tronick. "I want to take my work of the past 35 years and use it in a practical setting."
Hometown: The South End.
Family: Wife, Marilyn Davillier, a clinical social worker and therapist. Daughter Anna Yarbrough, 28, a middle school teacher in Weston. Son Uri, 31, a glass artist at Cleveland Institute of Art.
Hobbies: Tennis. Enjoys going to Red Sox games (his office overlooks the players' entrance on Yawkey Way).
On different cultures' methods of child-rearing: "I believe 'they' really are different from 'us.' Is one better or worse? Every culture has its pathologies, but now we're coming to appreciate that we can learn something from others." 