Why You Should Never Argue In Front Of Your Baby

The first words of a child in my family, despite the best efforts of that child's parents to provide an emotionally supportive home, were "F--- you." To this the mother replied, "I would have preferred 'Mama.'"

Taking the baby's utterance as a cue to conduct conversations differently, however, my older relative made a hard and fast rule of "Not in front of the children" for angry and off-color speech, and 30 years later the baby whose first word was an expletive is a healthy and well-adjusted adult. (Well, mostly.)

What is it about the use of angry and off-color language around babies that is so harmful to their future emotional development? And how can parents compensate for their mistakes? The answers to these questions are easier to understand after a little review of how infants acquire language.

Language Is More Than Words

Scientists theorize that infants learn language not so much word by word as boundary by boundary. After all, there's no way to tell an infant "This is a word." The infant has to some how figure how that language comes in tiny packages known as words and different words have different meanings.

In the process of figuring out where the boundaries in speech lie, however, the infant listens to more than just the words themselves. Babies are aware of rhythm, pitch, and the emotional context of speech (or signing). They respond the content of language holistically before they learn how to parse one word from another.

Simpler Language Isn't Necessarily Easier Language for Babies

I have a distinct, and, I think, real memory of my mother speaking to me as an infant. "Hippopotamus, Baby, can you," my mother never used baby talk, "say 'hippopotamus'?" 

I couldn't say "hippopotamus." However, when my mother, who had a second major in French in college, read me "Il n'est jamais sorti sans livre sous son bras, et il est souvent revenu avec deux," ("He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two") from Les Misérables, I understood what she was saying. This 30 years was before the musical, when reading the Victor Hugo novel to one's American infant in French in an English-speaking household was considered unusual Nonetheless, something in my brain immediately understood what she was saying and I can recall it more than 50 years later, even though I never became fluent in French.

A baby's brain is hard-wired to understand real, fluent, spontaneous speech better than single words spoken out of context. It doesn't even matter what language they are spoken in, if they are spoken with an identifiable context. When the affect (the sound) of speech is angry, violent, or threatening, however, the baby's brain works overtime. 

Taking Care Of A Baby May Make You Want To Lose Your Cool, But Don't

Babies learn language holistically. They understand the emotional content of language, and then figure out the meanings of individual words. When infants are around angry parents, there are a multitude of effects on the infant's brain.

Baby Brains Respond to Parental Discord 24/7

University of Oregon graduate student Alice Graham, along with her committee members Drs. Phil Fisher and Jennifer Pfeifer, conducted a study of infants from high-stress homes to see if exposure to parental conflict affected the babies' brain function. Graham conducted functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) of the babies' brains during sleep and then compared brain function to measures of emotional stress in the home.

Graham and her supervising professors found that the more parental conflict was expressed in the home, the more MRI showed activity in the caudate, hypothalamus, rostral anerior cingulate cortex, and thalamus of the brain, the regions of the brain activated by stress. These findings are consistent with an earlier study Graham conducted that found that parental stress affects the baby's vagus nerve, which regulates heart beat and digestion.

Infant Heart, Digestion, and Excretion Also Disrupted by Stress

Two years prior to Graham's studies using MRI to measure brain changes in sleep, she studied the effects of parental stress on the development of the vagus nerve in infants. The vagus nerve is part of the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that is not under conscious control that tells us whether or not we are "at home." Greater activity, or "tone," of the vagus nerve corresponds with greater ability to interact with the environment.

Baby girls become more sensitive to emotions of others. Baby boys become more vigilant. And aberramt vagus nerve function has implications for later life.

The vagus nerve regulates heart beat and appetite. Irregularities in vagal nerve function cause high blood pressure and problems in controlling appetite. And since the vagus nerve also regulates "fight, flight, or freeze" reactions, abnormalities in the function of the nerve can cause a lifetime of emotional stress in personal relationships and in adjusting to changing life conditions.

The bottom line of these and other studies, however, is plain, common sense.

And if you have already lost your cool in front of your child? Babies are resilient, but if you can't control your temper, get help for both you and your baby.