Lilo & Stitch: nature or nurture?
Stitch is an alien. While running from the Galactic Federation on a stolen spaceship, he precipitates on Earth. Stitch was created by a scientist, as a sort of weapon. He was called “Experiment 626”: he’s extremely strong and agile, and also very clever. That’s how others see him, as an experiment; a monster, an abomination. The Galactic Federation is hunting him down because he’s believed to be too dangerous. To be fair, he tends to cause chaos. When he enters Lilo and her sister’s lives, his destructive impulses do not go unnoticed. Lilo, wishing for a friend, tries to civilize him, but her attempts keep failing. Stitch seems to be too destructive to live a normal life. Everywhere he goes, he’s angry and smashes things.
But why is Stitch so bad? where does his badness come from? and ultimately, what makes us bad?
Are we the product of our genes or our environment?
To get the answer, we have to explore the nature and nurture debate, that started a while ago. Nature refers to all the hereditary factors that shape our body and mind, basically genes. Nurture refers to the environmental variables that shape us throughout our lives; our childhood experiences, our culture, our social relationships, our diet. Classically, two psychological approaches have diverged in their views on the matter: on one hand the biological approach, focusing on the impact of genetics, on the other hand behaviorism, believing that the environment shapes who we are. Turns out we cannot put these two factors on a scale, weighing the impact of each of them on our physical appearance and personality traits; in fact, nature and nurture interact in complex ways. Turns out our genes are not fixed but actually shaped by our environment. Epigenetics is the field that studies the complex interactions between genes and environmental influences.
Epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of traits
Epigenetics teaches us how our lives don’t end with us: the good and the bad, the joy and the trauma, they all survive somehow. It seems that not just our genes, rather every choice in our life will be inherited by the next generations. Studies on mice showed that mice subjected to extreme diets or stress display changes in their metabolism and heart, and those changes are passed on to their offspring. We know that women pregnant during the Dutch hunger winter who experienced food shortages had children with higher rates of obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia. But Isabelle Mansuy’s research revealed something unexpected even for epigenetics enthustiasts. Mansuy started studying the intergenerational transmission of trauma using mice models. In 2001, she began designing interventions in mice that recreated aspects of childhood trauma, like unpredictably separating mothers from pups and disrupting parenting in other ways. Predictably, pups of traumatized mothers displayed deviant behavior as adults, easily becoming bad parents as a result of their bad parenting, passing down a behavioral legacy. What is interesting though is that Mansuy also bred naïve female mice with traumatized males, and later removed males from the cage so that their behavior did not impact the females or the offspring. Then, she raised the offspring in mixed groups. Descendants of traumatized fathers displayed more risky behaviors and depressive-like behaviors. We still don’t know how the signals triggered by traumatic events become embedded in sperm and egg cells, and how it may work in humans. But it’s now certain that epigenetics has something to do with it. These are just studies on mice, but we know these mechanisms are also at work in humans.
A situated brain
Then, there’s evidence for the impact of social relationships on our personality. Our brain is a “situated” brain, that is an organ programmed to live in closed proximity with others and constantly shaped by that proximity, or social life, especially during sensitive periods –time windows during which the brain needs stimulation in order for certain functions to develop. Particularly, parenting behavior is necessary for the bonding structures in the mammal’s brain to develop. The main theme is that it happens through attachment. Ruth Feldman’s recent research in the neurobiology of attachment field illustrates how synchronized and constantly attuned are the mother and child’s biological systems. The immature brain, after birth, is oriented to social life by the presence and parenting behavior of the mother –and father in biparental species. It’s this early relationship which marks the mammal’s life, enabling successful relationships to develop and to be mantained. This is achieved through biobehavioral synchrony, that is a coordination between parent and infant’s systems involving nonverbal behaviors (gaze, affect, voice and touch) and physiological measures (heart rate, brain oscillations and hormones). If this type of bonding is disrupted, the consequences can be devastating. According to some authors, trauma is passed by the mother onto the child through chronic lack of attunement, neglect and lack of protection, that in turn cause hyperarousal and emotional dysregulation (Mucci, 2013).
Nicole LePera (2021) lists some common archetypes of childhood trauma, explaining how parent-child interactions can negatively impact one’s life causing traumatization and often personality or mood disorders:
1. Having a parent who denies your reality
2. Having a parent who does not see or hear you
3. Having a parent who vicariously lives through you or moulds and shapes you
4. Having a parent who does not model boundaries
5. Having a parent who is overly focused on appearance
6. Having a parent who cannot regulate their emotions
Children, growing up, need what is called a “secure base” from which to explore the world, that means an attachment figure which represents safety, who gives the child freedom to explore but at the same time offers protection and adequate emotional mirroring, that is validation of emotional states through verbal and nonverbal means. When this does not happen, problems start to emerge. John Bowlby, ostracized at first by the psychoanalytic community, understood this. He wrote:
“When children feel pervasively angry or guilty or are chronically frightened about being abandoned, they have come by such feelings honestly; that is because of experience. When, for example, children fear abandonment, it is not in counterreaction to their intrinsic homicidal urges; rather, it is more likely because they have been abandoned physically or psychologically, or have been repeatedly threatened with abandonment. When children are pervasively filled with rage, it is due to rejection or harsh treatment. When children experience intense inner conflict regarding their angry feelings, this is likely because expressing them may be forbidden or even dangerous.” (Bowlby, 1988. A secure base: parent-child attachment and healthy human development)
Why is Stitch so bad?
Elvis Presley, quoted many times in the movie, would sing:
“People, don’t you understand
The child needs a helping hand
Or he’ll grow to be an angry young man some day” (Elvis Presley, In the Ghetto)
Stitch was created as a weapon, an experiment. He didn’t receive any love because he didn’t have a family. Then, one day, he finds himself alone, on another planet, without a meaning, or someone to care for him. During the day he’s angry, he smashes things, he hates people; during the night he cries. He feels lost, just like the Ugly Duckling. With Lilo, he experiences love for the first time. He learns what it means to be loved and accepted; to have a family.
“ ‘Ohana means family; family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten”
Stitch’s creator, the mad scientist, echoes the voice of proponents of the biological approach; Stitch was created to be a monster, to destroy, so he can’t change. This perspective, though, doesn’t consider the importance of nurture on our psychological development. One cannot love without having been loved first; one cannot be good or regulate emotions in a void, without other people. It’s the interaction with others that appropriately mirror our behavior that shapes our capacity to regulate our emotions and ultimately to be good. Lilo is the only one believing in Stitch. And he earns her trust, demonstrating that you can learn to love. Therefore, Stitch’s goodness depended on him first finding someone to mirror his own affective states so he could learn how to regulate them. With Lilo, he learns what it means to be in a family and to care for other people. He finds meaning in his family, and he starts dedicating his energies into doing something good for the people he loves rather than destroying things and creating chaos.
