The Bond Between Mother and Child

Of course a baby loves its mother fiercely and will take whatever she gives. But every instance in a day that the baby wants mom and gets no one in a day care setting, the baby registers that the world is unreliable, and probably that the baby is undeserving of its cravings. Every time your toddler hears a bird and wonders alone or with other clueless kids what is that?, your baby loses brain connections dying to be made.

If a day care center can provide a loving, responsive person to hold your baby the three hours a day, minimum, necessary for optimal development, your baby will develop a good relationship to the other, but that other won't be YOU, the parent. If that's something that works for you, respect and honor the person who is building your child emotionally, intellectually, and physically. And keep that person in your child's life as many years as possible. After all, that person functions as mom.

please note: most day care centers provide one care giver to six infants, and the care giver won't be the only person with your child if your child is in full time day care. bottom line: standard day care cannot meet your infants needs.

Human infants evolved to require a certain type of care to develop well. This type of mothering is the level of care that science is now saying is critical for brain development. The characteristics of this mothering are long-term nursing and extensive holding. Marie Montessori, a person whose ideas are admired by perhaps most of us here, encouraged mothers to breastfeed for the first three years of her baby‘s life. Remarkable that she came up with the age science is now saying is so important. She wanted to keep mom very close for that long, touching and learning about her child.

It’s nature’s design: our breastmilk is low-fat - of course! When a baby’s food is low-fat, the baby must feed frequently. All species with low-fat milk hold their infants 24-7 through infancy. Now, the breastmilk is so important because only it provides essential amino acids necessary for optimal brain development. But the nursing relationship is important because it delivers what brain research shows is critical for proper development.

Despite what we see in the popular media, researcher have not found that listening to mozart will make a baby a math whiz, nor have they found that flash cards or “educational” infant care is useful. What has been learned is that the intellectual development of the brain runs parallel to the emotional development - they happen in tandem.

When an infant is born, it has 100 billion brain cells. By the time it is ten months old, there can be 1,000 trillion neural connections! But, these connections, which are made through sensory stimulation, are not permanent unless soldered in by more sensory stimulation in the context of a loving relationship with ONE caregiver.

Separation from mother is very upsetting to infants. They are programmed to avoid it with all their tools - cute looks and ferocious wails. Now, we know from experiments with rats that creatures will stop reacting to aversive stimuli when they cannot avoid the stimuli. That is, many people claim that lack of tears on the part of an infant indicates the infant is untroubled by separation from mom. In fact, the infant who doesn’t act upset to be away from mom has given up, has learned to take what it can get, rather than to ask for all it needs.

If separation from mom lasts more than 10 hours a week, we’ve known for 40 years that this puts the child at risk for an insecure attachment to mom, with all the attendant problems in relating to others. This research has been done by Bowlby, Ainsworth, et al. Now we know intellectual development is also impaired. When the baby is stressed by the separation, the brain produces cortisol. This chemical literally impairs brain growth.

The National Institute of Child Health and Development has been conducting a long-term study on day care in America. They’ve found that 90% of infant care is substandard. In fact, a day care researcher declared there are NO good infant day care centers in the state of Virginia.

Even in centers that meet cleanliness, education, and staff-ratio requirements, what has been found is that infants are rarely held, rarely spoken to, rarely stimulated. Their only contact with grownups comes when they are changed and fed. This is not what a baby’s day should be like, for optimal brain and emotional development.

What is good for an infant, and an infant’s brain is to nurse on demand and be held virtually all its waking hours, until it starts to walk. Touch is so important! We know definitively that touch influences brain growth. Neglected babies brains don’t grow much. You can observe the paucity of neural connections in the lower weight and density of their brains.

We know without a doubt that babies are wired for touch. Remember the terrible experiments giving monkeys wire mothers with food and carpet-covered mothers with no food? The monkeys stayed 23 hours a day with the carpet-covered monkeys. All the monkeys developed emotional problems, and the most severe were found among monkeys only given wire moms.

Now, all this touching and holding causes the neural connections to be made and to last. And, all this touching generally leads to the infant getting mamma every time it wants mamma. This creates the emotional wiring fundamental to the success of learning.

The mainstream media, which will sell you anything at any cost to society, and an off-track portion of the feminist movement who has the ear of media, have encouraged women to so divorce themselves from their childrearing roles, that we're not seeing what's in front of our faces, what our babies our losing with the "new parenting".

Just spend ten minutes imagining the natural life of humans - say before the rise of feudalism! Consider the lives of nomads and rain forest dwellers. Human babies evolved to develop in extremely close proximity to their mothers. This neurological need has not disappeared. The advancement of men and women's roles in this culture is not real, if it ignores the needs of the youngest men and women.