The fascinating question on how parental attachment progresses during the early postpartum period can be answered only by minutely examining what happens between parents and their newborn during this crucial time. What pulls them together, ensuring their proximity through the many months during which infants are unable to satisfy their own needs? When they are together in the first hours of life, multiple interactions simultaneously occur between mother and child. Each is intimately involved with the other on a number of levels, which lock the pair together.
The mother and baby elicit behaviors in each other that are naturally rewarding. For example, the infant’s crying is likely to trigger the mother to pick him up. When she picks him up, he is likely to quiet, open his eyes, and follow her movements. When the mother starts the communication by touching the infant’s cheek, he is likely to turn his head, bringing him into contact with her nipple, on which he will suck. His sucking in turn is pleasurable to both of them. This is a necessarily oversimplified description of these interactions; the behaviors do not occur in a chain-like sequence, but rather each event triggers several others. When we look closely, we see a fail-safe system that ensures the proximity of mother and child.
The renewed interest in this early period after birth has been stimulated by several provocative observations of both mother and infants. Perhaps the most dramatic example of these observations is the ability of newborns, if left quietly on the mother’s abdomen after birth, to crawl from abdomen gradually up to her breast, find the nipple and start to suckle. Investigators have also noted that if the lips of the infant touch the nipple in the first hour of life, a mother will decide to keep her baby longer in her own room during her hospital stay than another mother who did not have contact until later.
Other researchers have shown that the normal infant, when dried and placed nude on the mother’s chest and then covered with a blanket will maintain his or her body temperature as well as the elaborate, high-tech healing devices that usually separate the mother and baby. The same researchers found that when the infants are skin-to-skin with their mothers for the first ninety minutes, they cry hardly at all, compared to infants who were dried and wrapped in a towel and placed in a bassinet. It seems likely that each of these features—the crawling ability of the infant, the sensitivity of the mother’s nipple, the decreased crying when close to their mother, and the warming capabilities of the mother’s chest—are adaptive and were built into human beings several hundred thousand years ago during much more stressful times, to help preserve the infant’s life.
In addition, when the infant suckles from the breast, there is a large outpouring of twenty different gastrointestinal hormones in both the mother and the infant, including cholecystokinens, which stimulate growth of the baby’s and mother’s intestines and increase the absorption of calories with each feeding. The stimuli for this release are the mother’s nipple and the inside of the infant’s mouth. These responses were essential for survival thousands of years ago when periods of famine were more common before the development of modern agriculture. This presentation describes these new findings and why all mothers should receive early contact with suckling in the first hour and rooming-in (two components of the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative). New observations in the area of parent-to-infant bonding will be shared with implications for changes needed in the care of the family in the perinatal period.
Editors Note: MISS Foundation supports attachment parenting techniques and believes in the magic of touch!
