 Loving
your baby
Everyone knows, at a basic level, that love is one of the
most important things you can give a baby, if not the most. In this excerpt
from Why Love Matters, psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt explains
why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life,
both emotionally and physiologically.
At one with one another
Physiologically, the human baby is still very much part of the mother's
body. He depends on her milk to feed him, to regulate his heart rate and
blood pressure, and to provide immune protection. His muscular activity
is regulated by her touch, as is his growth hormone level. Her body keeps
him warm and she disperses his stress hormones for him by her touch and
her feeding. This basic physiological regulation keeps the baby alive.
Babies need a caregiver who identifies with them so strongly that the
baby's needs feel like hers; he is still physiologically and psychologically
an extension of her. If she feels bad when the baby feels bad, she will
then want to do something about it immediately, to relieve the baby's
discomfort - and this is the essence of regulation. In theory, anyone
can do it, especially now we have bottled milk substitutes, but the baby's
mother is primed to do these things for her baby by her own hormones,
and is more likely to have the intense identification with the baby's
feelings that is needed, provided she has the inner resources to do so.
Managing emotions
Early regulation is also about responding to the baby's feelings in a
non-verbal way. The mother does this mainly with her face, her tone of
voice, and her touch. She soothes her baby's loud crying and over arousal
by entering the baby's state with him, engaging him with a loud mirroring
voice, gradually leading the way towards calm by toning her voice down
and taking him with her to a calm state. Or she soothes a tense baby by
holding him and rocking him, or stimulates a lacklustre baby back into
a happier state with her smiling face and dilated sparkly eyes. By all
sorts of non-verbal means, she gets the baby back to his set points where
he feels comfortable again.
Caregivers who can't feel this with their baby, because of their own
difficulties in noticing and regulating their own feelings, tend to perpetuate
this regulatory problem, passing it on to their own baby. Such a baby
can't learn to monitor his own states and adjust them effectively, if
mum or dad doesn't do this for him in the first place. He may be left
without any clear sense of how to keep on an even keel. He may even grow
up to believe he shouldn't really have feelings since his parents didn't
seem to notice them or be interested in them.
Picking up patterns
Babies are very sensitive to these kinds of implicit messages, and they
initially respond to what parents do rather than what they say or think
they are doing. But if parents do track the baby's states well and respond
quickly to them, restoring the feeling of being OK, then feelings can
flow and be noticed. They can come into awareness. Particularly if caregivers
respond in a predictable way, patterns will start to emerge. The baby
may be noticing that 'when I cry, mum always picks me up gently', or 'when
she gets her coat down, I will soon smell the fresh air'.
Expectations of other people and how they will behave are inscribed in
the brain outside conscious awareness, in the period of infancy and [these]
underpin our behaviour in relationships through life. We are not aware
of our own assumptions, but they are there, based on these earliest experiences.
And the most crucial assumption of them all is that others will be emotionally
available to help notice and process feelings, to provide comfort when
it is needed - in other words, to help regulate feelings and help the
child get back to feeling OK. Those children who grow up without this
expectation are regarded as 'insecurely attached' by attachment researchers.
Parents are an emotional coach
Parents are really needed to be a sort of emotion coach. They need to
be there and to be tuned in to the baby's constantly changing states,
but they also need to help the baby to the next level. To become fully
human, the baby's basic responses need to be elaborated and developed
into more specific and complex feelings. With parental guidance, the basic
state of 'feeling bad' can get differentiated into a range of feelings
like irritation, disappointment, anger, annoyance, hurt. Again, the baby
or toddler can't make these distinctions without help from those in the
know.
The parent must also help the baby to become aware of his own feelings
and this is done by holding up a virtual mirror to the baby, talking in
baby talk and emphasising and exaggerating words and gestures so that
the baby can realise that this is not mum or dad expressing themselves,
this is them 'showing' me my feelings.
Sue Gerhardt lives in Oxford, where she is a practising psychoanalytic
psychotherapist in private practice. She also works with the Oxford Parent
Infant Project (OXPIP), which she co-founded in 1998. This charitable
organisation provides parent infant psychotherapy to around 50 families
each week. For more information about the book, the author and OXPIP,
please visit www.whylovematters.com.
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