Dear ninibee:
The following is a beginning of my research. I plan to continue Wednesday morning when I am rested. I understand that you may not be in the mood to read this post (or the next), maybe you are not focused enough, maybe you just don’t feel like it, and that’s okay. You don’t have to read it and you don’t have to respond to its content. It is not like a college class where you have to pay attention, do homework and pass a test. Read it if and when you feel like it, and respond to the content of what is to follow, or not.
Because you observed your mother being uncomfortable touching babies, it could be that she didn’t touch you often when you were a baby, and it could be that her touch was not gentle or prolonged, that she touched you as if you were an object: quickly and in a matter of fact kind of way, wanting the contact with you to be done and over with as quickly as possible. Also, being uncomfortable when she touched you and when interacting you otherwise, probably showed in her face and in her voice. You were able to observe her discomfort when you were a baby and a young child, just as you were able, as an adult, to observe her discomfort with other people’s babies.
I don’t know if and how your father, and/ or a nanny or a household worker that touched you when you were a baby, and what were their facial expressions and tone of voice when they interacted with you.
What follows are quotes from two sources that are very relevant to the topic. I will add and elaborate on what follows tomorrow.
hello motherhood. com: “Healthy, effective contact with your baby includes cuddling, gentle massage, stroking and holding your newborn”, “Lack of physical contact can prevent normal development and can even lead to higher rates of illness or death in infants”, “The first contact a newborn has with you, his mother, sets off cascades of hormones in his body that benefit his health.. Your touch can lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in his body, leading to better sleep patterns in infancy and a tendency to be less fearful or inhibited later in life”, “contact.. promotes bonding and makes the baby feel more secure and relaxed. Touch.. facilitates the bonding process from the first moments after birth. Healthy bonding.. helps your infant develop better psychologically and socially later in life”.
Scientific American. com, how important is physical contact with your infant?: “Touch and emotional engagement boost early childhood development, but can children recover from neglectful environments? Many children who have not had ample physical and emotional attention are at higher risk for behavioral, emotional and social problems as they grow up…
“some children from deprived surroundings such as orphanages, have vastly different hormone levels than their parent-raised peers even beyond the baby years… children who experienced early deprivation also had different levels of oxytocin and vasopressin (hormones that have been linked to emotion and social bonding)…
One of the things infants learn early in life is that their actions affect others’ responses—they sense that they’re active agents in their environment.. They learn that probably most readily through other people because people are responsive to babies. Babies catch on very quickly that their actions get a predictable response—you know, ‘I smile, Mom smiles back’—not all the time but most of the time. They develop a sense that ‘I’m a causal agent.’
“There’s research that shows babies like to be imitated. We interact with babies much differently than we interact with peers. We tend to imitate behavior back to them in an exaggerated way, which is exactly what babies need, and it helps them learn about their own emotional experience. Seeing it reflected back helps them understand themselves at a very basic perceptual understanding…. If the mother was depressed and therefore not emotionally engaging with the baby, those babies are at risk because those babies are not learning about themselves…. The more experience babies have with someone who is going to be emotionally engaged with them, the better off they’re going to be…
Read more from this special report: The Mother-Baby Bond
“It’s not that anything is cut in stone. I don’t want to give the impression that if babies don’t get this they’re marked for life. This early understanding of self and early understanding of other is developed through interaction. It teaches babies basic lessons that they have some agency in the world, so that allows them to explore the world and feel like they can affect their environment as opposed to just being helpless to whatever happens to them. We’re basically a social species, and we learn those things through interacting with others.”
anita
Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 