Natural Family Planning International

How do you avoid poor attachment with your baby?  (continued from previous blog)

Dr. Ken Magid, a clinical psychologist for 20 years, said that “second to killing someone, isolation is the worst thing we can do” and, therefore, that babies need to be nursed, rocked, swayed, and held.  According to Magid, nurturing is the key.  Having a good outcome for your child begins by “being wanted” as an infant and “being wanted” starts at the breast of the mother.  High-risk children have experienced trauma in their lives, and it usually happens during the first year and a half of life.  The trauma is due to severe stress, said Magid, and these high-risk kids place little value on their lives and no value on other people’s lives.

What researchers have learned is that stress harms brain cells.  During stress the body gives out large doses of cortisol.  Cortisol can shrink the part of the brain responsible for learning.  Cortisol can also stunt the brain cells’ ability to communicate with each other by causing the connecting dendrites to atrophy.  Brain cells die in both humans and animals when neglected by their mothers.   That’s the bad news.  The good news is that the mother’s physical presence or contact with her baby protects the baby against these harmful effects.

Isabelle Fox, a psychotherapist for 35 years, compares the effects upon a small child when a total stranger takes care of him to the lack of care of one spouse to another spouse.  She says:  “How important would any married person feel if his or her spouse was seldom home when needed or paid a stranger to take him or her out for dinner or to a movie?”  The child taken care of by others similarly can feel he is of little value to his parents.  In a parenting magazine, The Nurturing Parent, last summer, Dr. Fox asks:  “Is there a noticeable difference in the child parented by a consistent, nurturing caregiver in the crucial pre-verbal years of zero to three years of age?”  She answers “Yes!   I have seen the benefits of a consistent, responsive caregiver, and the disasters when this does not occur.”

I know people, and I’m sure you do also, who are hurting because they feel they have no family that cares about them or who feel their parents show no interest in them.  This situation can be very painful for anyone, even as adults.  As Gerald Campbell [mentioned in last week’s blog] said, “Americans have an aloneness that cannot be tolerated by the human heart.”    And to repeat from last week’s blog,  the proper care of a little one can be summarized with three key words:  Availability, Responsiveness, and Sensitivity.  And those three forms of care by the mother occur more easily with breastfeeding.
(Sheila Kippley:   These last four blogs were part of a keynote address given at LLL So. Calif. State Conference, May 1998.  I feel the importance of the mother’s presence to her baby during the early years  needs to be repeated every few years.)