Baby Hearts A Guide To Giving Your Child An Emotional Head Start

1 Nature's Contribution: The Biology of Emotions NEWS FLASH! There's More to "Mothering" Than Meets the Eye, Scientists Discover New York, New York. What happens when Mommy Rat runs away from home, leaving her litter of pups to fend for themselves? They get hungryvery hungry. No surprise there. But according to Columbia University professor Myron Hofer, there's a lot more than that going wrong when Mom "turns tail" and runs. In fact, hunger is one of the least of the abandoned rat pups' problems. Like a harp that stays silent without someone plucking at its strings, rat pups left without the cuddling, licking, and delicious smells and rhythms that constitute mothering in their world lack the ability to maintain many critical biological functions, the control of which is necessary for life itself. Their body temperatures drop, their heart rates increase, their breathing becomes erratic, their sleep-wake cycles are disrupted, their growth and stress hormones go haywire. In short, the result is true biological chaos, a level of disorganization that can kill. Researchers studying human mothering say there's an important lesson in all of this for us. Like the rat pup, the human infant may look like an independent little unit (especially in those identical little maternity ward cribs), but that's a serious, even deadly, misperception. The newborn human baby is dependent on our tender loving care for much more than food and diaper changes. Just like rat pups, human babies require proximity to a warm bodyone that breathes with regularity, strokes and cuddles, smiles and smellsto keep their biological systems in line. Or one could say, like the silent harp, human babies need their parents' love to create the sweet, concordant rhythms that make for the beautiful music that is healthy life. Biological Regulation: An Evolutionary Gamble Myron Hofer's work with rat pups is both exciting and exceedingly important. Instead of seeing motherhood through a veil of sentimentality, he has proved that what parents routinely do (or should do) with their babies is absolutely critical for their survival. There were earlier clues, of course, particularly in the many tragic cases of failure-to-thrive syndrome in orphanages, where food was plentiful, beds were clean, but anything approaching mothering was considered too expensive, too time-consuming, and totally unnecessary. These babies literally withered and died. And now we know why. Both the problem and the strength of the human baby is that she is a work in progress. If human babies were prewired upon entry into the world, there would be no capacity to change, to adapt to different environments, to learn. In other words, if human babies were only a product of "nature" rather than equally dependent on "nurture," human progress would have ground to a halt a long time ago. Instead, evolution took a chance, sending us newborn babies that are far from ready-wired, trusting that it could also nudge the big humans around these helpless creatures into providing them the attention needed to get their immature biological systems up and running in an organized, self-sufficient way. Parents as the "Gelatin Molds" of Early Development Human babies may arrive totally dependent on their parents to keep their biological rhythms working right, but they don't stay that way. Over the first nine months of life, the infant gradually becomes able to exert his own control over his breathing, heart rate, sleep-wake cycles, stress reactions, growth hormones, and the like. But it doesn't happen automatically. Again, this progress is not prewired. The active support parents provide the baby during those early months helpGoodwyn, Susan is the author of 'Baby Hearts A Guide To Giving Your Child An Emotional Head Start', published 2005 under ISBN 9780553382204 and ISBN 0553382209.