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Editor: In A General Theory of Love, you and your co-authors cite several western parenting practices (separation at birth, separate sleeping rooms and bottle feeding) and explain how they are responsible for many of our society's current problems and are extremely detrimental to our children's emotional health. Can you elaborate on these practices and give parents confidence to challenge these current methods of parenting and reclaim the way humanity has raised children since the beginning of time?

Lewis: Modern American values demand early independence in our children and portray reliance on others as a weakness. These are the cultural assumptions that underlie common practices like separating mothers and infants at birth, discouraging women from breast-feeding, and placing infants and young children in separate rooms to sleep at night. But science is discovering that our cultural emphasis on separateness is unhealthy, because our brains are wired for togetherness. Dependence on others is not an illness that needs curing. Instead, togetherness is the natural condition for which our bodies and brains are designed-the condition they require, in fact, to function normally. Nowhere is this natural dependence more evident than in our children, whose fragile bodily rhythms need the stabilization that parents provide. Research shows, for instance, that mothers regulate the nocturnal brain and body rhythms of infants when the two sleep in close proximity. Not only is this regulation normal, it may actually be lifesaving: separate rooming deprives young children of vital regulation that sustains their delicate rhythms of breathing and heart rate. Although it sounds outlandish to American ears, exposure to a parent can keep a sleeping baby alive. The U.S. has the highest rate of sudden infant death in the world. Our habit of forcing early separation between parents and children may be an important reason why this is so. A young child's nighttime reliance on parents to regulate bodily rhythms is just one example of a broader rule: healthy independence comes from satiating dependence, not forbidding it. Children rely heavily on parents, to be sure. And when they are done depending, they move on - to their own beds, houses, and lives. When we allow them to depend, we allow them to draw upon our strength, and to become healthy and strong in their own right.

Editor: The research you cited in your book makes a very strong case that learning takes place more readily when there is an emotional connection to the subject being studied and an emotional connection to the teacher. Your book also explains the two paths of learning in the brain: that teaching our children facts leads to knowledge, but the accumulation of experience leads to wisdom, and that both are critical to a child's success. How can parents and teachers use these new findings to better educate children?

Lewis: The division between knowledge and wisdom is ancient and very real. Neuroscientists now know that there are two separate learning systems in the brain-one that supports the explicit learning of facts, and one that supports the acquisition of intuitions from experience. Our Western society strongly promotes the utility and importance of fact-based learning, and often dismisses intuition as imaginary or inconsequential. The thinking or cognitive brain (very powerful and advanced in human beings) learns from facts. But the emotional brain (far older than the thinking brain) learns only through the intuition-based brain system, not the fact-based knowledge system. If we wish to raise wise children, therefore, we must not neglect the second half of their education. Textbooks are the warehouses of facts, but wisdom is stored in art: in music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance. Robert Frost once said that a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. So, too, with all art forms. A story or a song can convey an emotional lesson with a power that explicit instruction can never match; the arts speak directly to the emotional brain in its own language. Our age is in love with science and fact because of the marvels they create, but for the sake of our children, we must not lose sight of the equally great marvels that art can provide.

Editor: Dr. Lewis, you and your co-authors, Dr. Fari Amini and Dr. Richard Lannon, are clearly very concerned about the amount of time our children are spending with "electronic caretakers"--television, video games and computers. We know about television and it's damaging effects, but do you believe that computers can be harmful to young children?

Lewis: Thanks to advanced scientific investigation of the brain, we now know that children require sustained emotional contact with parents for normal brain development to occur. Given that fact, should we be alarmed at the enormous amount of time our children are spending in the company of computers? Absolutely. A child's electronic caretakers - television, videos, computer games - are the emotional equivalent of bran; they occupy attention and mental space without nourishing. Computers do not deliver an emotional connection (and they probably never will), but they do keep kids occupied and reasonably quiet while they're not getting what they need from parents. And that's the danger. We know that adults are quite vulnerable to the emotionally detrimental effect of computers: several studies have shown that computer use in adults actually causes depression and loneliness, because it takes people away from the emotionally nourishing time they spend with family and friends. Children are almost certainly more vulnerable to this effect than adults are. However enticing their entertainment value, mechanical companions are simply unworkable relationship substitutes for adults and children alike. And that makes the current push to place computers and the Internet in every classroom disturbing, to say the least. Ensuring the presence of at least one attentive adult in every learning environment would be infinitely more valuable. Many children already do not receive the individualized attention they need from an adult in the classroom. Increasing the emphasis on computer learning can only further decrease the time available for human contact-to our children's great detriment.

Editor: For almost all of human history, education took place at home, by a loving and devoted parent, who was emotionally attuned to the child's individual needs. In light of this new brain function research, can an even stronger case be made for homeschooling?

Lewis: Indeed it can. From the dawn of the species until the most recent sliver of history, human life meant life within a family-families worked together, played, learned, ate, sang, lived and died together. With the advent of agriculture came mass aggregation in towns and cities, and job specialization, but the family remained the center of life around which all else revolved. But the Industrial Revolution took both work and education out of the home. Economies prospered as the family structure weakened. In the post-Industrial West, most children and adults spend their days with relative strangers, nights and weekends (at most) with family. Now the Information Age is demanding a more thoroughgoing surrender of family ties-longer work hours, less time for relationships, less time for children, more time spent gazing at electronic screens and less time spent looking into each other's eyes. Is this state of affairs compatible with the emotional needs of human beings and the educational needs of children? Certainly not. A child's brain thrives on individualized attention from attuned adults: that emotional connection is an indispensable vitamin that he needs as surely as he needs food, water, and oxygen. Many parents are rightly concerned that this vitamin is precisely what children cannot obtain in today's schools, with their increasing chaos and distraction, increasing student-to-teacher ratios, increasing impersonality. Teaching, as it was practiced within the family for thousands of years and is still practiced by the best teachers today, is not simply the delivery of facts. Teaching is connecting with children, tuning into them, exciting them with your own enthusiasm, reading their faces and eyes to discover what they do and do not understand, and approaching them as living, individual minds. The depth of their devotion and their preexisting connectedness with their children naturally positions parents to be extremely effective teachers, if they choose to be.

Editor: We would like to end the interview with a very telling paragraph from Dr. Lewis' book, A General Theory of Love:

"The thick marbles walls of libraries and museums protect our supposed bequest to future ages. How short a vision. Our children are the builders of tomorrow's world--quiet infants, clumsy toddlers, and running, squealing second-graders, whose pliable neurons carry within them all humanity's hope. Their flexible brains have yet to germinate the ideas, the songs, and the societies of tomorrow. They can create the next world or they can annihilate it. In either case, they will do so in our names."

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