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Love starts young.
Only weeks after birth a baby can recognize a face smiling down, and can smile back.
As those early months go by, love evolves. And those early months all build into an emotional launching pad that will enable us some day to have friends, to fall in love as adults, and even to think, to use language, to understand our world.
All that, starting from the moment when a baby looks up at an adult face and breaks into a smile.
The first sign comes at six weeks to two months of age, and it’s love in the very simple sense of shared positive feelings, says J. Bruce Morton of Western University’s Brain and Mind Institute, who studies child development. The parent smiles. The baby smiles back, a sunny, happy moment that any mother or father knows.
The baby is sleeping for 20 hours a day at this age and feeding most of the rest of the time. “But there will be these moments when the child is satiated (and) alert, and they become engaged with the principal caregiver,” Morton says.
This “is enormously rewarding for the weary parent, and it is a moment when the child is becoming related to something in the outside world in a way that is quite different from feeding and sleeping.
“It is just a beautiful, beautiful moment in development when that first happens.”
Puppy love.
Is this love? Maybe, though at this stage the baby really doesn’t have a sense of itself, or of relating to another individual. Over the next few months this baby may give these happy smiles to anyone, not just a parent or other close family member.
“But certainly there are core facets of what we think about as love,” he said.
By about seven months of age there’s a new stage. “Now all of this shared positivity is becoming focused on one or two individuals in that baby’s life, and that’s the primary caregiver.”
“Importantly, this is someone who gives them a feeling of security in a world that is becoming increasingly complicated and filled with fearful and surprising things.
“The emotional landscape of the infant changes quite markedly between two and seven months… All of a sudden fear raises its ugly head and the world becomes a scary place,” filled with neighbours, grandparents from out of town, and other strangers.
Love now is a bond with a parent who offers protection and comfort amid uncertainty.
This feeling in a baby only a few months old has profound effects for a lifetime, and the pattern holds across many mammal species. We know this because the modern world has witnessed what happens when this connection is broken.
After the collapse of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania in 1989, outsiders discovered tens of thousands of Romanian children who had been held in orphanages and never given a chance to bond with caregivers.
Neurologist Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School found that these children’s brains had actually not developed fully. They lacked the nerve circuitry that lets the brain process emotions, learn, and develop “executive function” — the ability to plan, pay attention, organize thoughts, and manage time.
Neglected babies and young children grow up less able to develop language skills, less intelligent, and less able — even unable — to form healthy social relationships as adults, either in the form of love or as simple friendship.
“Neglect is awful for the brain,” he said in a 2014 interview.
Love is the antidote for this, beginning early.
“The early relationship with the principal caregiver forms something of a blueprint, or a template, that then is called upon, or provides a framework, for intimate loving relationships later in life,” Morton said.
“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the formation of that first loving relationship.”
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
Only weeks after birth a baby can recognize a face smiling down, and can smile back.
As those early months go by, love evolves. And those early months all build into an emotional launching pad that will enable us some day to have friends, to fall in love as adults, and even to think, to use language, to understand our world.
All that, starting from the moment when a baby looks up at an adult face and breaks into a smile.
The first sign comes at six weeks to two months of age, and it’s love in the very simple sense of shared positive feelings, says J. Bruce Morton of Western University’s Brain and Mind Institute, who studies child development. The parent smiles. The baby smiles back, a sunny, happy moment that any mother or father knows.
The baby is sleeping for 20 hours a day at this age and feeding most of the rest of the time. “But there will be these moments when the child is satiated (and) alert, and they become engaged with the principal caregiver,” Morton says.
This “is enormously rewarding for the weary parent, and it is a moment when the child is becoming related to something in the outside world in a way that is quite different from feeding and sleeping.
“It is just a beautiful, beautiful moment in development when that first happens.”
Puppy love.
Is this love? Maybe, though at this stage the baby really doesn’t have a sense of itself, or of relating to another individual. Over the next few months this baby may give these happy smiles to anyone, not just a parent or other close family member.
“But certainly there are core facets of what we think about as love,” he said.
By about seven months of age there’s a new stage. “Now all of this shared positivity is becoming focused on one or two individuals in that baby’s life, and that’s the primary caregiver.”
“Importantly, this is someone who gives them a feeling of security in a world that is becoming increasingly complicated and filled with fearful and surprising things.
“The emotional landscape of the infant changes quite markedly between two and seven months… All of a sudden fear raises its ugly head and the world becomes a scary place,” filled with neighbours, grandparents from out of town, and other strangers.
Love now is a bond with a parent who offers protection and comfort amid uncertainty.
This feeling in a baby only a few months old has profound effects for a lifetime, and the pattern holds across many mammal species. We know this because the modern world has witnessed what happens when this connection is broken.
After the collapse of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania in 1989, outsiders discovered tens of thousands of Romanian children who had been held in orphanages and never given a chance to bond with caregivers.
Neurologist Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School found that these children’s brains had actually not developed fully. They lacked the nerve circuitry that lets the brain process emotions, learn, and develop “executive function” — the ability to plan, pay attention, organize thoughts, and manage time.
Neglected babies and young children grow up less able to develop language skills, less intelligent, and less able — even unable — to form healthy social relationships as adults, either in the form of love or as simple friendship.
“Neglect is awful for the brain,” he said in a 2014 interview.
Love is the antidote for this, beginning early.
“The early relationship with the principal caregiver forms something of a blueprint, or a template, that then is called upon, or provides a framework, for intimate loving relationships later in life,” Morton said.
“I can’t emphasize enough the importance of the formation of that first loving relationship.”
tspears@postmedia.com
twitter.com/TomSpears1
查看原文...
