Science Says
"Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain"
Sue Gerhardt's exploration of the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and biochemistry shed new light on lasting consequences - and tremendous opportunities - of early interactions between babies & parents:
We are shaped by other people as well as by what we breathe and eat. Both our physiological systems and our mental systems are developed in relationship with other people—and this happens most intensely and leaves its biggest mark in infancy...
The human baby is the most socially influenced creature on earth, open to learning what his own emotions are and how to manage them. This means that our earliest experiences as babies have much more relevance to our adult selves than many of us realise. It is as babies that we first feel and learn what to do with our feelings, when we start to organise our experience in a way that will affect our later behaviour and thinking capacities...
If we want to provide our children with good emotional foundations, in the form of a balanced stress response and good development of the pre-frontal cortex and other areas of the emotional brain, we have to think about what THEY need in the period when these emotion systems are developing. I think that infants need relationships that keep them in a reasonably stress-free state, with people who respond positively to them as potential, emerging personalities and pay attention to who they are becoming over time.
- Excerpts from the 2014 revised edition of Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain by Sue Gerhardt
