University of Guam Associate Professor of Counseling Dr. Stephen Kane recently published an op-ed piece in the Guam Daily Post on the importance of positive caregiving for infants.

The article is titled, How Families Ought to Be.

He argues that the first 24 months of a person’s lifespan is the “most important age range” because those are formative years. People usually recreate in adulthood the emotional and psychological climate learned during that time. Positive or negative experiences in infancy can greatly impact how a person develops into an adult, he explains.

The article is related to a paper written by Kane titled Bonding by Aggression: A Contextual Examination of Relational-Ethics and Anxious Attachment. The paper was also accepted into the 14th Annual Conference of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy held in March in Sydney, Australia.

In it, Kane describes the methods both healthy and conflicted families use to achieve the same goal: keeping the family together.

“I’ve been working with families for along time,” Kane said.  “Healthy families use better techniques such as love and compassion to keep the family together. Insecure families are afraid of their own insufficiencies and therefore use criticism humiliation, or verbal aggression instead of love.”

A licensed psychologist, Kane is a professor and Chairperson of the Master of Arts in Counseling graduate program at the University of Guam. He’s had extensive experience in community mental health and provides individual, marriage and family therapy. Kane wrote the article in response to a New York Times Sunday Review article titled, Yes, It's Your Parent's Fault.

Read Kane’s op-ed.