The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (20 page)

Do babies who drink pumped and bottled breast milk show the same effects? He couldn’t answer that question definitively but confided that, as bottle-feeding is a more efficient delivery system, bottle-fed babies are likely spending less face time with their mothers. Besides, all the women in his Belarus study who breastfed did so the traditional way, he told me—no pumping, no bottles. “I can tell you that there are no good data showing that the omega-3 fatty acids in breast milk lead to higher IQs. The bottom line is, we don’t know if it’s the greater time spent, the social interaction, or the physical contact.”
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To be sure, breast milk contains lots of biochemical compounds that have the power to change behavior, including prolactin, cortisol, and oxytocin. But the psychological benefits of nursing seem to have less to do with breast milk as a magic elixir and more to do with how much time is spent engaging the baby in affectionate repartee. If that’s the case, all the programmable breast pumps,
legally mandated “pump breaks,” pumping rooms, and human milk banks in the world won’t have the same effect on the baby’s brain as breastfeeding. Just as reducing road accidents has more to do with what the driver is doing at the wheel than with the gasoline he or she pours into the tank, much of the protective halo of breastfeeding may well come down to the neural boost parents and babies give each other when their faces are eight inches apart.

SOCIAL CONTACT AND THE BRAINS OF BABES

Unable to feed themselves or run away from a threat, to survive parental neglect or predators, human babies come into the world with innate social skills that create immediate chemistry with the adults around them. They turn their heads to fix a wide-eyed gaze on an adult’s face, calm their crying when they hear their mother’s voice, tightly grasp an adult’s finger, or rest a tiny hand on the breast that feeds them. From the first hours of life, newborns can also mimic an exaggerated look of surprise, or the pursed lips or protruding tongue they see in someone else, psychologist Andrew Meltzoff has found.
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These young babies, some just a few days old, are hardwired to connect face-to-face, and adults are similarly programmed to respond with alacrity to their crying, gazing, and cooing. This is an engrossing social duet, not a soliloquy.
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In fact, mothers’ voices exert a special effect on their children. More than thirty years ago, European cognitive psychologist Jacques Mehler discovered that one-month-old
infants got excited and sucked more vigorously when they heard their mother’s voice. These babies did not respond in the same way when they heard a stranger talking, or if their mother’s voice lacked its usual cadence.
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In the 1970s Andrew Meltzoff—shown here—and Keith Moore discovered that newborns imitate facial expressions
. (Image and Figure Credits
5.1
)

There’s other evidence that humans are born ready to respond to their own parents’—and especially their mother’s—smell, voice, and touch. Within twenty-four hours of birth, for example, the language circuitry in a newborn’s brain comes alive at the sound of its mother’s voice, according to a 2011 experiment led by University of Montreal neuroscientist Maryse Lassonde. Compared to what happened when a female stranger’s voice was played, a brief snatch of the mother’s voice provoked a dramatic neural response in the tiny subjects. “This proves for the first time that the mother’s voice is special to babies,” said Lassonde, whose newborn granddaughter was among the test subjects. “When the mother spoke, the scans very clearly show reactions in the left-hemisphere of the brain, and particularly the language processing and motor skills circuit. Conversely, when the stranger spoke, the right-hemisphere [associated with voice recognition] reacted.”
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Even hours after birth, babies need their parents to engage with them as conversation partners.
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Though we don’t yet know whether a father’s voice exerts the same effect as a mother’s, we know that neither a stranger’s voice nor an image on a screen wields the same power.
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Clearly babies come into the world with their brains prepared to interact. Not only do they respond to their parents, babies are exquisitely wired to pick up little signs that their parents are attuned to them. When adults sit face-to-face with babies and imitate exactly what they’re doing (much the way a good spouse or therapist mirrors your tone of voice and posture to show that she’s paying attention), the baby looks at the parent longer and smiles more. “The baby brain lights up at this!” Andrew Meltzoff explained, describing his recent EEG studies of infants. Taking this finding one step further, Meltzoff and his colleagues Joni Saby and Peter
Marshall have found mirror-neuron-like structures in the baby’s brain that become activated when he or she watches an adult execute a specific action.

“You know Penfield’s famous homunculus body maps that show the ‘body in the brain’ with exaggerated hands, lips, and feet? We discovered the beginning of a baby-sized homunculus in the brain of the infant,” Meltzoff wrote in an email. “Penfield would have loved it. Remarkably, when the baby sees the adult use her hand, the baby’s own hand area lights up; when the baby sees the adult use her foot to bring something about, the baby’s own foot area lights up. There is a very primitive body scheme in a baby’s brain that acts like an invisible bungee cord connecting them to their moms. This mapping from the baby’s body to the mom’s supports early nonverbal feelings of attachment, connectedness, and belonging. Babies look at moms and see themselves.”
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TOO MUCH MOTHER LOVE

The idea that babies need a steady diet of parental contact and affection is fairly novel as child-rearing approaches go. For more than a century, from the Victorian era until the late 1950s, bringing up baby in the Western world was a rather chilly affair. Chastened by the spread of infectious childhood diseases and browbeaten by early child-rearing pioneers (including a number of influential pediatricians, as well as the behaviorist John B. Watson), parents were instructed not to comfort, cuddle, or play with their babies, but to maintain a certain reserve, lest they spoil them with too much love.

I remember my grandmother visiting a few weeks after my first child was born. Small at birth, Eva cried incessantly during her first few weeks, and I responded by nursing her on demand, cuddling, rocking, and walking her in an attempt to calm her. This shocked my usually affectionate grandmother. Allowing babies to exhaust themselves by crying “exercises their lungs,” she informed me, and rocking or nursing unhappy babies spoils them (I later
learned that she had acquired this parenting advice from the women’s magazines of her day). Doling out boiled cow’s milk in precise amounts from sterilized glass bottles, on a fixed schedule, fit this approach better than breastfeeding did, to be sure. And physical contact? That was a no-no. As Deborah Blum writes in her marvelous book
Love at Goon Park
, “John Watson’s instructions were clear: Don’t pick them up when they cry; don’t hold them for pleasure. Pat them on the head when they do well. Shake their hands; okay, kiss them on the foreheads, but only on big occasions. After a while, ‘you’ll be utterly ashamed of the mawkish, sentimental way you’ve been handling your child,’ Watson wrote.”
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Given this sanctioning of parental
froideur
, it should come as no surprise that Watson’s own mother was a Bible-thumping prohibitionist. For both mother and son, it seems, pleasure was something to be avoided. They were hardly alone. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the desire for a disciplined approach to children became a national obsession, so much so that the American government got into the act, recruiting Columbia pediatrician Dr. Luther Holt to write a federally endorsed child-rearing manual,
The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses
. His book was in such demand that fifteen editions were printed between 1894 and 1935. But this so-called scientific approach to raising children was actually anti-science. At a time when evidence of stepwise stages of cognitive development was emerging, the manual viewed children as flawed mini-adults, little homunculi who needed a rigorous training program from the moment they were born. To foster immediate independence, Holt was firmly opposed to the “vicious practice of rocking a child in a cradle, picking him up when he cried, or handling him too often.” He also frowned on hugging older children.
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For two-thirds of the twentieth century the parental zeitgeist was to deny babies and children any physical or emotional comfort. To make them grow up. Fast.

Fast-forward a hundred years, and scientific opinion has made a complete about-face. Infants are no longer seen as miniature adults with incredibly bad table manners. Nurses no longer take them from their mothers right after birth and place them in “isolettes” in antiseptic neonatal nurseries designed to protect newborns from germs and the corrupting effect of human contact (This was still the practice at university-affiliated hospitals when my first child was born, in the mid 1980s.) Upon discharge from the hospital, new mothers aren’t handed their swaddled newborn along with cases of free infant formula in beautifully pebbled four-ounce bottles. Instead, they’re urged by lactation consultants to breastfeed, come what may. Fathers are no longer confined to the waiting room but are now expected to be present at the birth and to interact meaningfully with their children ever after.

Until recently, pediatricians were considered experts who diagnosed, immunized, and prescribed from the remote and comfortable remove of their offices. Now, directives from the American Academy of Pediatrics (issued in 2012) state that if pediatricians sense that something is amiss, they must also intervene in the child’s social world. New evidence from the fields of neuroscience and epigenetics shows that without the protective effect of healthy relationships, other stresses—such as addicted or warring parents, and even “inappropriate electronic media, or fragmented social networks”—can have lasting effects on the developing brain. According to the report, an indifferent or abusive parent, or even a screen habitually substituted for social contact, can alter the young child’s brain circuitry and lead to school failure or heart disease. The
New York Times
op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof paraphrased the academy’s findings this way: “Affection seems to defuse toxic stress—keep those hugs and lullabies coming! Stress emerges when a child senses persistent threats but no protector.”
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If there is little active, affectionate parental engagement, it’s now up to the pediatrician to help the child find that protector.
This is a far cry from the expert advice of pioneering pediatrician Dr. Holt, who a hundred years earlier had advised parents that “infants should be kissed, if at all, upon the cheek or forehead, but the less even of this, the better.”
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KANGAROO CARE

Being advised to hold your naked newborn against your bare chest would have shocked the pants off the Victorians. Touching infants is now permissible, thank goodness, not only because it is one of life’s pleasures but because skin-to-skin contact has been found to be a homegrown analgesic for babies, as well as a stimulant for growth. In what is called “kangaroo care,” a baby wearing nothing but a diaper is held right up against the parent’s skin, preferably nestled between the mother’s breasts. The pair are then wrapped in a blanket. After just one minute of this total embrace, researchers have discovered that babies who have been subjected to a painful medical procedure—such as having their heel lanced for blood samples—feel half as much pain as babies who undergo the same procedure and are then placed in incubators.
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Not just any bare chest has that effect, mind you. Premature babies who were tested this way felt less pain when held by their mothers than by their fathers, according to Celeste Johnston, the lead researcher and a nursing professor at McGill University.
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But if the mother is unavailable, the father is a good stand-in. One Swedish study found that full-term infants who’d been delivered by C-section and who were held by their fathers in a skin-to-skin embrace cried less and slept more than those in bassinets.
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The evidence for holding newborns is so strong that some hospitals are starting to use professional “baby cuddlers”—trained snugglers who step into the breach when a parent can’t be there. Hugging and rocking have been shown to be particularly soothing to fragile babies. When a baby-cuddling program was introduced in a Pennsylvania hospital in 2009, for example, babies going through
drug withdrawal were strong enough to leave the hospital an average of four days earlier.
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Being cuddled, especially skin-to-skin, helps the baby gain weight faster, breathe more regularly, and regulate its own body temperature.
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It’s no wonder that the American anthropologists Sarah Hrdy and Kristen Hawkes have suggested that the human species could never have evolved its big, social brain and long lifespan without the assistance of grandmothers and other “alloparents,” who would have helped feed, protect, and hold babies close. Without her “village,” a mother alone wouldn’t have been enough.
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