Why do so many of today’s children suffer from emotional and physical problems? The parents’ state of mind appears to directly impact their child’s health, taking the concept of mind-body connection to a new level.

When spouses distance from each other in order to keep the peace in their marriage, their child may become the central focus of the family, which interferes with the natural weaning process that is essential to the child’s healthy development. The good news, however, is that parents can alleviate more of their child’s suffering than they think.

As a pediatrician and a minister, we see many troubled children from families in which the parents believe their marriage is good because they seldom argue or have conflict. But their relations are characterized by distance: the husband may work long hours or travel often, or perhaps he bowls in three different leagues a week. It’s almost as if the husband has “checked-out” of the marriage. Likewise, the wife fills this void by focusing her emotional energy on her children, frequently one child in particular. The two become best friends rather than parent-child, thus blurring the boundaries as the child matures.

This emotional enmeshment between parent and child may program the child to internalize the stress of others and manifest it in physical or mental symptoms. It’s as if this child becomes the “identified patient” who bears the symptoms of the family’s unrest. Typically, these children are high achievers: well-rounded, nice kids with an approval-seeking, people-pleasing personality type. These kids carry the world on their shoulders, taking on the problems of others. It’s as if they have learned to “love Thy neighbor,” but forgot to love thyself.

So how do a parent’s mind and a child’s body connect? Since 1964 doctors have described Vulnerable Child Syndrome, where anxious parents of children who had a close call in infancy often over-parent, leading to a higher incidence of social and even physical symptoms in their child. There is a growing consensus, however, that today’s parents no longer need a crisis to trigger them to over-parent their kids. An anxious parent with a distant marriage may be predisposed to transforming any defect from a molehill into a mountain. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy which begets diagnosis and treatment that could have been avoided through calmer parents with a better marriage.

Perhaps the mind-body connection begins even as early as the womb. More than 200 medical articles address the concept of “fetal programming.” While a child is in utero, the mother’s stress hormones pass through the placenta. As the fetal brain and body develops within this bath of anxiety, the fetus may be programmed to overreact to stress. This may predispose a child to the emotional over-sensitivity found in depression, or the physical over-sensitivity associated with food or skin allergies, or the inflamed bronchial passages of asthma.

One modern response is that today’s common child ailments are 100 percent genetic. However, if these ailments were genetic, why do some children with the bad gene develop severe symptoms, while other kids develop mild symptoms or none at all? Furthermore, how could our nation’s gene pool have been flooded so quickly with these bad genes to account for the tremendous surge in these children’s ailments? Even accounting for better awareness and diagnosis of these conditions, these genes would take many generations to spread so thoroughly through society. One may debate how much anxious overparenting contributes to children’s mental and physical ailments, but it clearly is a factor.

So should we beat our breasts as lousy parents? Not at all. Instead, let’s take some preventive medicine and stop wringing our hands. We can pre-empt more of our children’s problems than we realize, or reduce the drama we attach to those problems. And we don’t have to settle for distant, sexless marriages that are drifting slowly to divorce.

We can re-kindle our passion and set a great example for our kids’ future relationships. Arguments do not kill families—all humans have a natural fight response, and anger is normal. What kills families is our flight response. When we distance from our spouse in order to keep the peace, our child may become the central focus of our lives, which interferes with the natural weaning process that is essential to a child’s healthy independence.

It’s time to move from a child-centered family to a marriage-centered family. If we create a committed, passionate marriage, it will produce healthy kids who go on to create their own happy, healthy families (and our fabulous grand kids). The best gift you can give your kids is to have a healthy marriage.
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Footnote: You can easily search “Fetal Programming” and “Vulnerable Child Syndrome” (place them within quote marks) at the National Institute of Health, http://pubmed.gov .

Dr. David Sherry is a professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania.
The Rev. David Code is an Episcopal minister, family coach, and founder of the Center for Staying Married & Raising Great Kids. He’s working on a book entitled, The Primal Family: Harnessing our Instincts in Marriage and Parenting.

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