Giving Life after Birth

It is impossible for us to understand fully how a newborn child perceives and evaluates the universe around it. Like souls in the Greek underworld who drink from the River Lethe, then forget all that happened to them on earth, so we as grown men and women experience a kind of amnesia: We forget everything we experienced during the first hours, days, and months of our infancy.

The irony behind this dreamy blackout is that our days and months of infancy are supremely critical in forming the attitudes we bring into adulthood and in structuring the very roots of our personality.

We can only imagine what it is like to be a newborn. We can picture them, just arrived in this world. Perhaps it is the second week after birth. They see enormous, smiling heads gazing down, some wearing bizarre expressions and laughing with a rumble that must sound like thunder to the newly born. An infant’s senses perceive the bed it lies in is as a great expanse - as large as a huge room is to our perception. The light that shines from a nearby table lamp blazes as brightly as an incandescent star. Everything for newborns - neonates, as they are called in obstetric language - is new and alien: colors, sounds, and movements; the smell of milk and the mother’s warm body; the taste of food; a sudden draft of summer air; the first tactile contact with wool, metal, and earth; the first bath. All of these are familiar objects and experiences that the habituated senses of adults take for granted, but to the newborn’s elemental yet keen observations, all of these appear marvelous and fresh. For the first time, the second time, and even the third time, these sensory contacts with reality are wondrous to the child’s perceptions - but we parents and adults must also remember that they can be overwhelming and at times menacing. Whatever form they take - positive, neutral, or negative - they leave messages that are imprinted as clearly on a newborn’s nervous system as they might be carved in a piece of wood.

Whatever children see at this stage of development passes directly into parts of their highly suggestible mammalian brain, which in early infancy remains uninfluenced by the yet-unformed ego. The child does not attempt to make familiar that which is unfamiliar. It has no expectations of how the world should be or look or behave.

Instead, the newborn simply accepts what it sees as what is, avoiding all attempts, as Joseph Chilton Pearce phrases it, “to squeeze experience into a tight frame of stable reference.”

The fact is that the two angels with fiery swords who guard the gateway of our unconscious have not yet taken their places in our minds at this early stage - that is, we have not yet formed the ego desires, defense mechanisms, and Pavlovian responses we use as adults to exclude unpleasant information and classify the world into tidy categories. Our psychological firewalls and secret rooms and fortifications remain unconstructed. As a matter of course, then, we remain wide open psychologically and emotionally, allowing these initial impressions to emblazon themselves on the deepest layers of our unconscious minds, where they serve as the ground-floor building blocks in the rising citadel of our developing consciousness. For this reason and for many others, the events that usher us into the first minutes, hours, days, and weeks after birth are in many ways the most important days of our lives. We know this through studies of newborns and by studies of how immediate post-birth experiences affect children and how these children fare in the months and years that follow birth. The theme that runs through these studies is that the many nurturing activities that parents perform for their children - fall under a single umbrella concept that we have seen before: bonding.

Based on the most compelling obstetric and psychological evidence currently available, is information that parents can adopt to ensure that their newborn child receives crucial advantages, which so many infants in our day are denied. What can be done at the key moments after birth is quite practical: the small effects we produce with our hands, eyes, voice, body, and environment - those ways of interacting that bring an observable positive response – can determine a child’s destiny. Some of these suggestions and methods are obvious, and some are not. Some are easy to apply, while others take work or at least time, plus a willingness to run counter to popular wisdom that has often interfered with the fundamental biological imperatives that are so necessary for a child’s sound development. None of these methods are new; they are as old as time - simple, traditional, and often self-evident nurturing techniques that, for one reason or another, have been swept away from the modern nursery and made obsolete by a system pressured by the stresses of modern living.

The Scientification of Love

In the short, information-rich overview of bonding entitled The Scientification of Love (see link in left column), French medical writer and researcher Michel Odent provides an encapsulated explanation of how the circuit of love that flows between mother and newborn (and on a larger scale, between romantic lovers and even close friends) operates behind the scenes - more or less “in the boiler room,” on a hormonal and unconscious level. According to Odent, parental bonding is simply love in action, while love is potentially parental bonding: the two, he tells us, are one and the same but viewed from different perspectives. He also tells us why and how this magical welding of hearts - this bonding - must take place right away in a child’s life, in the hour of birth and in the days and weeks that follow. If these bonding activities are absent, Odent warns, there is disruption in the genetic scenario that eons of evolution have engineered into infants for their harmonious growth and development. We know that a child learns basically from what it sees and experiences, not from what it is told. It requires a visible model to jumpstart the hormonal aids that nature has built into the hard wiring of its being. A salmon, studies confirm, is hormonally hard-wired to swim upstream and mate, but it will do so only if it sees other salmon performing the same journey. The early mother-child bonding exchange is similar. The care and nurturance - or lack of these - that newborns see and feel from their parents become a primary determinant not only of how well these children mature, but also of how successfully they will one day parent and love their own offspring.

Odent writes: “Of all the different manifestations of love - maternal, paternal, filial, sexual, romantic, platonic, spiritual, brotherly love, not to mention love of country, love of inanimate objects, and compassion and concern for mother earth - the prototype of all these ways of loving is maternal love. What is more, evidence points to a short and yet critical period of time just after birth, which has long-term consequences so far as our future capacity to love is concerned. We disregard the consequences of ritualizing, interfering with, or otherwise neglecting the physiology of that critical period at our peril. (For more on this subject see pg 167 in The Art of Conscious Parenting.)

Youthful violence. A team of doctors at the University of California in Los Angeles studied 4,269 males born in a Denmark hospital. Tracking the history of these males over the years, they found that the main risk factor for youthful crime stemmed from birth complications - but only if coupled with rejection by the mother at birth or by the early separation of mother and child.

Autism. Autistic children have no ability to bond with other human beings or interact socially either with children or adults. They are incapable of making meaningful eye contact and often cannot speak at all. Many seriously autistic people spend their lives watching endless hours of TV or performing ritual behaviors.

In one study a Japanese researcher found that the incidence of autism among children born in a certain hospital was abnormally high. It also turned out that this hospital induced labor routinely in mothers who were a week before their due date and that during labor, it regularly used an assortment of obstetric procedures and medications, including sedatives, anesthesia, and analgesics.

Researchers Niko Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize winner and his wife Elizabeth studied autistic children for many years, concluding that specific obstetric procedures contribute to this condition. These include deep forceps delivery, anesthesia at birth, resuscitation at birth, the artificial induction of labor, and the lack of eye contact between mother and child that results when newborns are separated from their mothers immediately after delivery.

The Five Fundamental Needs of a Child Immediately Following Birth

According to Joseph Chilton Pearce in Magical Child To Magical Teen (see link in left hand column), in order for the bonding process to proceed seamlessly, five basic sensory-motor functions must be awakened and set to work in a child immediately following birth. Each of these functions corresponds to one of the five senses. Writes Pearce: “The job of birthing is to activate this sensory system in its entirety, and get the processing of information functional in the shortest possible time. . . . The infant cannot provide himself with any of this sensory activation after delivery. All of it must be done for the newborn, and his system is designed with the expectation that this will be done...”

The inner blueprints of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell will then be given their necessary stimulus, their model content, from the physical world, anchoring the bonding bridge in the new domain. The necessary functional structure of brain/mind and body will rapidly unfold, and birth will be complete.

While each of these functions is switched on in a different way, Pearce tells us; all five require a single, universal action to trigger them: placing the newborn infant in physical contact with the mother. Pearce goes on to say: “Activation of the senses takes place automatically and spontaneously simply by introducing the infant to the mother in skin-to-skin contact immediately after delivery. Millions of years of biological encoding ensure the instinctive response of each to the other from this point on.” Once enclosed in this maternal cornucopia of warmth and affection, the infant’s brain starts to receive signals that the trillion-celled kingdom over which it is destined to rule is waking up - time to get to work! Once the sensory reflexes of the neonate are activated, the brain starts relaying its own neurological messages, and infant development moves out of first gear into second and third. Life accelerates. In his famous work Man on His Nature (see link in left hand column), Sir Charles Sherrington describes the brain activity of a person waking from sleep. His passage could as easily be used to describe the first waking of the neonate brain:

“The great topmost sheet of the brain, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of traveling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is starting to work, and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving, yet meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns. Now, as the waking body rises, sub-patterns of this great harmony of activity stretch down into the unlit tracts of the brain stalk. This means that the body is up and rises to meet its waking day.”

Now, while this post-birth sensory dance is taking place, the adrenal glands continue dutifully to pump adrenalin into the child’s bloodstream in order to keep the infant aware and awake long enough to make eye contact with the mother and begin breastfeeding. As they pump, the adrenals wait patiently for an order from the brain to shut down. Once these glands are quieted, the newborn can then settle into a gentle sleep, its sensory functions operative and the first all-important few minutes of bonding with the mother completed.

If a newborn is whisked off to the nursery immediately after birth, however, and is prevented from making prolonged skin-to-skin contact with the mother, nature’s built-in neurological plan becomes sabotaged.

None of the chemical reactions that are programmed into the child and that are timed to go off as soon as mother-child physical contact is made are not activated. Consequently, a shutdown message is never sent to the adrenals and the brain fails to deliver instructions to the baby’s five senses concerning what to do next. Without this cease-and-desist order from the chief, adrenalin continues to pool in the child’s system until it reaches a critical mass. Eventually, it sends the infant into various degrees of shock. Statistically, if the five sensory faculties are not aroused via contact with the mother within approximately forty-five minutes after delivery and if the adrenalin flow is not quelled during this time, the infant’s sensory-motor system closes down, reverting to a prebirth, uterine state of consciousness. If this occurs, infants really do become the insensate, somnambulistic blobs that earlier developmental psychologists thought they were. The infant’s natural adaptation to the world, which should be galloping ahead, instead comes to a halt - or perhaps we should say that it never gets out of the starting gate. (More on this – see pg. 173 in our book)

Post-Birth Closeness

For many years, Western hospital protocol has demanded that newborns be taken away from their mothers and run through a gauntlet of medical procedures. By the time the mother is “allowed” to hold her baby, the precious forty-five-minute window of opportunity had often passed.

Today, happily, things have changed, and in many hospitals newborns are given over to the mother immediately following delivery. Even if a mother chooses not to deliver a newborn according to the principles of the new conscious parenting, the opportunity for post-birth closeness and bonding still exists. In it, a mother can perform the post-birth techniques described above, and further, parents can work with a hospital that allows rooming-in. T he benefits of these simple acts can have profoundly positive effects on a newborn for the rest of its life.

The Pleasures and Treasures of Co-sleeping

In our age of euphemisms, the pleasant term “nighttime parenting,” coined by Dr. William Sears, actually comes with several disguised recommendations. The most controversial of these, often heard from natural childcare advocates and pediatricians friendly to the new parenting techniques, is the suggestion that for the first few months following birth (and some would say for the first few years), it is best for children to co-sleep with their parents.

Around the turn of the century, Freud insisted that children who witness “the primal moment” accidentally - that is, those who catch sight of their parents making love - can become traumatized permanently, leading to a life of deep sexual confusion. As a result of this and other concerns, in our culture, the marriage bed is considered inviolate and anything that comes between spouses under the sheets is marked for removal. This “anything,” of course, includes a child.

Also related to this taboo is the American axiom that children must become autonomous of their parents as quickly as possible. One month old is not too soon to begin. Independence is what this country was founded on, after all, and it is best for the new citizen to start off early. Moreover, regardless of how much the infant may kick, scream, and cry when placed in a separate room, parents are obliged to bite the bullet and maintain nighttime separation. Otherwise, as some experts insist, the child becomes spoiled, manipulative, and clingy. Insistent and, some might say, harsh means must therefore be applied when children attempt to insinuate themselves into the parental bed. “The parents have to be firm and committed to returning the child to bed,” insists R. Ferber in his book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems. “Parents have to learn to ignore crying until the child falls asleep. Sometimes children can cry for a couple of hours.”

“Children may vomit with crying and so parents need to be prepared to go in and clean up the child and change the bedclothes quickly and, with the minimum of fuss, put the child back to bed, and walk out.” (I had a client who had been traumatized by this kind of treatment when an infant and continued to cry and vomit for weeks until he gave up. We found after some time in treatment that this trauma was what was underlying his life-long depression) Due to these and other cultural beliefs, the notion of an infant sleeping in the same bed with his or her mother and father is stigmatized with overtones of the sexual, the incestuous, and the overly dependent.

Notwithstanding the fact that in most of the non-Western world, children sleep regularly in the same room or the same bed with their parents, apparently without suffering the traumatizing of witnessing “primal moments”. Euro-American culture is decidedly opposed to such behavior, and in some cases, it is appalled at its mention. Yet in many countries, co-sleeping is considered mandatory for the health of the child, and the lack of it is looked on as a somewhat brutal error in basic parenting. Indeed, among the Japanese, where group harmony is considered an all-important goal, co-sleeping is part of the fabric of society. Caudil and Weinstein state: “In Japan, the infant is seen more as a separate biological organism who from the beginning, in order to develop, needs to be drawn into increasingly interdependent relations with others.” In America, the infant is seen as a dependent biological organism who in order to develop, needs to be made increasingly independent of others.

Renowned psychologist T. Barry Brazleton adds, “. . . the Japanese think the U.S. culture rather merciless in pushing small children toward such independence at night.” According to an article in Developmental Psychology, women in southern Mexico and Guatemala, when informed that American babies are forced to sleep alone, responded with “shock, disapproval, and pity,” thinking that this method is “tantamount to child neglect”.

We must note here that co-sleeping is not necessarily a make-it or break-it part of a child’s formative life. Infants who sleep in a separate room, and who are otherwise bonded with their parents and well cared for in the new parenting style, tend to develop in normal, healthy ways. At the same time, studies show that co-sleeping may very well be an aid - perhaps a major one - for eliminating anxiety in newborns, accelerating the bonding process between parent and child, making nighttime breastfeeding more practicable, and giving the infant a sense of peacefulness and security.

According to pediatric research, then, what practical advantages result for parent and child from co-sleeping? Though the question is complex, it is worth noting the following experiments and observations, many of them performed at the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame and from studies carried out there by James J. McKenna, Ph.D.

Greater sense of bonding, happiness, and safety: Imagine how much you as a three-year-old child would have preferred sleeping between your mother and father in one large bed rather than lying frightened and lonely in the exile of a separate room. No doubt, like most young children, you spent many long, dark nights crying for your parents. Was this reaction an example of how “spoiled” you were at this age or how the development of your all-important independence would have been threatened if your parents “gave in” and allowed you to sleep in their room? Or did it simply reflect how profoundly you needed your mother and your father at this age during the precious hours of sleep - how much you needed their presence comforting you, warming you, loving you?

One cross-study of English children demonstrated that on a test scale, those prohibited from sleeping with their parents were more fearful than those who slept with at least one parent each night. The same researcher determined that solitary-sleeping children presented greater discipline problems when grown and dealt less proficiently with stress than those who were co-sleeping as children.

A study of eighty-six children conducted on an army base showed that those who co-slept with their parents received better student evaluations from teachers than solitary-sleeping children. The authors of this study recorded that, “contrary to expectations, those children who had not had previous professional attention for emotional or behavioral problems co-slept more frequently than did children who were known to have had psychiatric intervention, and lower parental ratings of adaptive functioning.”

One of the largest studies on infant co-sleeping, carried out in New York and Chicago and involving more than fourteen hundred subjects taken from a rainbow of ethnic groups including Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, Dominicans, and Mexicans, found, among many positive results, that adults who were raised as infants sleeping in the same bed or room with their parents boasted extraordinarily strong feelings of happiness and satisfaction with life.

For more on co-sleeping and its relation to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) see pg. 184 in our book.