Dr Sam Wass interview

22 October 2015

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What is your job title, and what’s your role on the show?

I’m a research scientist, and I’m based at the Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. My role on the series is as one of the scientists who analyses the behaviour and development of the children.

 

The three scientists come at this with different approaches, don’t they?

Oh, very different. It’s been really fascinating to see how different people approach the issue differently. Elizabeth, who’s a clinical psychologist, looks at it from the point of view of typical and atypical development, whereas Paul works pretty much exclusively with typically developing children, and I shift between the two – I do some research with typically developing children, and some with children with clinical disorders such as autism and attention disorders. So we all have different approaches. Do you emphasise that every child is different, or do you look for patterns, or do you draw lines between where a diagnosis starts and stops?

 

Do you and the other scientists have disagreements? That must be good material for the programme.

Yes, it’s really fascinating. The producer loves it when we start to have a little debate about whether a particular behaviour should be viewed in one way or another. One of the big things is that I’m a researcher into attention, concentration and emotion regulation, so I do a lot of research into what we call arousal levels – how fast your heart is beating, how physically active your body is, and how that changes during the day. One thing I see a lot of is how something little can happen, and that can stress them out, and their heart-rate will change, and that will maybe cause them to go off and poke someone in the eye, and then they’ll get told off, and that will upset them more, and then they get into this cycle of naughty or oppositional behaviour. The way I see it, when a child is naughty, it isn’t so much that they’re naughty because they don’t know how to be good, but because they’ve lost control of their own behaviour. Whereas Paul in particular would tend to come at it from a more psychological level. He’ll understand a child’s behaviour because they want to achieve this or they’re testing that. I understand a lot of things at the level of the body, Paul will tend do understand things at the level of the mind. It’s really fascinating to hear different explanations for the same pattern of behaviour.

 

Having filmed the one-off last year, why did you decide to come back and take part in this series?

Personally, the stuff that I feel very evangelical about is that, as adults, we have a tendency to view children’s behaviour through our own eyes. When a child does something that we don’t want them to do, we tend to assume they understand what they’re doing, so we can be inclined to label behaviour as intentionally naughty. This programme allows us to see these secret moments, to track the course of a child’s developments through a sustained period of time. We can understand more what the world feels like from the point of view of a child. I think this is really important – it encourages adults to view the world from the children’s point of view.

 

Did you have any fundamental beliefs challenged or changed by the fresh perspective given to you on the programme?

The thing that has astonished me most about the programme is the amount of development that you see between these ages of four and six. The children when we first see them are at a very raw stage, they don’t really understand very much about themselves, or about how they come across to other people. They don’t understand very much about how to hold or maintain friendships. They live very much in the moment, aware of what they’re feeling, what they want, but that’s all they really keep track of. By the time they get to six, it’s incredible, the amount of development that’s happened. Suddenly they’re very, very aware of group dynamics, they’re all desperate to be the leader, they all want to be the alpha person in the group. They’ll say things that they don’t actually mean, just to create a good impression on other people. They go from being unable to deal with complex, multi-group interactions, to aged six, when it’s what they live for. That’s how they decide whether they’ve had a good day or a bad day, based on whether they’re popular in a group. It’s because they start school. At four, they’re not very used to being in a group, they spend a lot of time with parents – but by six, they’re spending all day, every day in big groups. So the age range on this programme is absolutely perfect. And it’s fascinating that the change comes naturally to some children, while others find it really, really challenging. You can have social catastrophes flying around left, right and centre. That’s sometimes funny to watch, sometimes heart-breaking to watch – but the thing that’s always amazing about these kids is their resilience.

 

Have you enjoyed the experience? From a non-scientific viewpoint, do you enjoy the emotional aspect as well?

Yes indeed. One of the things that has been really fascinating is that in our regular editorial meetings, we’d find ourselves getting really passionate about which kids we thought we should focus on. And the reason is because that’s the kids you identify with the most. So the thing that’s been incredible for me is that you just see elements of yourself, and you see elements of people you’re close to, in these young children. Exactly the same challenges I’m still fighting within myself now, as a 36-year-old, they’re just discovering. It’s sometimes hard. There are a couple of kids I’ve identified with so strongly that I’ve wanted to go and see them and say “I feel I know you so well,” and they don’t know us at all. We’re stuck behind this glass window. But it’s been really lovely to see these early precursors of yourself and people you know in these children.

 

Do you ever meet the kids?

No. It’s very odd, because you listen to all their secret conversations, and we really watch them very, very intensively. Paul and I would always go and grab our lunch and then sit hunched over the monitors watching the kids having their lunch as we had ours. We’d listen to every little conversation they’d have. So you feel you know them so well by the end, and yet you walk past them in the corridor, and you want to say hello and greet them like a friend, and yet they have no idea who you are.

 

What advice would you have for parents who have kids of this age?

My advice would be to try and see the world from your child’s point of view. Try to understand how the world feels different for them to the way it feels for you. Try to understand that when your child is being naughty, it’s not because they don’t know how to be good or because they’re deliberately being naughty. When a child is oppositional, they’re not doing it for the reasons adults might. They do it because their internal, physiological ups and downs are so intense. When something upsets a child they can spiral out of control, and lose control over what they say or do.

 

What was most special about watching these children so closely in this way?

As adults, it’s inevitable that many of our interactions with children tend to be quite functional – do this, don’t do that, eat that, go there. It’s also inevitable that, as adults, when we interact with children we only see one side of them – the side they show to adults. But children have another side to them – their most real, honest side – that is only seen when they’re playing, on their own, or interacting as equals with their peers. Suddenly there’s no-one telling them what to do, there’s no obvious ‘senior’ partner, and they get to be in charge for a change.  Getting to watch this ‘secret’ side to children lets us see so much that we wouldn’t see, otherwise. One thing that struck me on the programme was realising how when we, as adults, plant an idea in the minds of children, this idea can go on to take root, and be elaborated on, in their imagination. For example, we might teach a child about the idea of heaven - but then the child will go on to discuss heaven with their friends, exchanging knowledge with each other and building, in their imagination, on what they have been told. We saw at another time how a child had watched something one night on the news (a train derailment), and then the next day he came in and told his friends about it, and they had a whole play session based around it, exploring and building on this seed that had been planted in his imagination, the night before.

 

How has this experience informed your own work as a scientist?

My research as a scientist involves trying to understand how stress, excitement, and intelligence interact in children. Mostly we record, and observe children during relatively brief visits to my lab, in Cambridge. Having the opportunity to watch such a wide range of different children, so closely, in naturalistic contexts, has suggested a number of lines for my future research. I have had the opportunity to observe, for the first time, how children’s stress and excitement levels are continuously changing throughout the day – how getting told off, or having an argument with one of their friends, can have knock-on effects on how a child is behaving 10 minutes later. I have also seen that some children are more stable, less ‘stressable’ and excitable, than others. Importantly, though, it doesn’t seem always the case that the most calm, and docile, children are the best-performing ones. Sometimes, it appears to be the brightest, and most knowledgeable children, who are the ones who’re ‘always on’ – always on the look-out for new things to look at, and for new stimulation – and the most sensitive to getting told off.

Another thing that I’ve really noticed during filming of the series, that I’d never noticed before, is how some children (not all) are incredibly sensitive to context. In certain situations, such as a noisy nursery, you can see, over the course of an hour, how their movement patterns get progressively faster and faster, and more chaotic – and by watching carefully, you can predict when a crash is going to occur before it happens. As a scientist, noticing this has got me interested in trying to work out why, exactly, this happens for some children, but not for others – and what can be done to help them.

 

The Secret Life Of 4, 5 and 6 Year Old is on Channel 4 from Tuesday 3rd November at 8.00pm