Parents have a rough go of it. They white-water raft their way through the days and nights of balancing child raising, work, and household management. Often, without much assistance.
But new parents have it the worst. Parents go into shock from the sudden change in daily and nightly life. The baby is no longer encased and quiet inside mother but requires nearly constant monitoring and purposeful care.
If you think new parenting life is hard, think of the newborn. Life is much more challenging for a neonate. In the womb where there was an ongoing provision of oxygen and nutrients. Baby floated in darkness with constant supportive ‘touch’ of mother and warm temperature. In the first weeks of life, the newborn has to learn to breathe, to adjust to variations in light, temperature and touch, and to learn to ingest nutrition.
Babies expect the kind of treatment outside the womb that was received inside the womb—the soothing flow of immediate response to needs without delay. Anthropologist Ashley Montagu called this exterogestation, or “womb with a view.” The infant takes a long while to learn to live outside the womb and needs constant assistance for healthy development.
Some researchers call the postnatal period a fourth trimester. But it’s not just one trimester of exterogestation that infants need. They need at least six more trimesters after birth—until around two years when physiological changes bring them into a resemblance of newborns of other animals. Newborns of most other animals are able to move and feed at will after a few hours. It takes two years for a human baby to reach the levels of development most other animals display at birth. We might even contend that babies are not children yet. They still have much maturation to undergo after age two such as taking the cognitive perspectives of others which comes about, with supportive care, in subsequent years.
During the first two years of a human baby’s life, the brain is rapidly developing as a result of the dynamic interaction between maturational schedule of various systems and previous and ongoing experience. In fact, the infant is self-organizing a whole-body health system—a coordination of interacting hormones, immunity, and the central nervous system. A supportive exterogestation fosters a healthy system and trajectory for life whereas a distressing exterogestation does the opposite, seeding chronic inflammation.
Does this mean two years of misery for parents? Did evolution set this up to torture parents? Actually, humanity evolved to raise children in communities, not in isolated nuclear families. Among nomadic forager communities today, they type of society in which humanity spent 99% of its existence, babies are held half the time in the arms of allomothers, nurturers other than mother, such as father or grandmother.
What kind of support is provided by the community of carers? My lab calls it the evolved developmental niche or evolved nest. After soothing gestation and birth, the child is welcomed with skin-to-skin contact with mother and others who provided nearly constant touch and responsiveness to needs to maintain optimal arousal. Babies rarely cry because needs are met quickly. Infant-directed breastfeeding is offered by mother or others. Playful, joyful interaction with community members is an ongoing experience. The mobile child plays freely in the natural world with multi-aged playmates. Community healing and bonding ceremonies occur routinely.
Every child expect evolved nested care, protesting without it, which grows the brain in a healthy direction. Brain plates are soft and unconnected until around age two when they solidify after anticipated tripling of neonate brain growth is completed.
The child’s physiological health trajectory established in early life affects much more than their own body. It is a biopsychosocial trajectory, a biology that grounds a sense of self and the nature of their relationships. I always say: What a baby practices is what they become. A child undercared for in early life will undercare for others in relationships. A baby experiencing extensive fear and insecurity carries that forward in the psyche. Physiological systems setpoints and thresholds are set up to be easily dysregulated, which affects worldview and behavior. Feeling less secure in the world and in relationships, they become less cooperative with others. This may have something to do with why adults have become so uncooperative with the needs of babies—we are suffering from generations of baby undercare.
When parents have little experience with babies, as is the case with most new parents today in highly industrialized-capitalist nations like the USA, they turn to the hoard of parent advisers for guidance. Unfortunately, little of that advice is rooted in our species’ evolved nest, most of whose characteristics were tested over tens of millions of years across animal species. In fact, we can learn a lot from watching wild social mammals raise their children in natural conditions where nurturing is normal (see my latest book, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities, with Gay Bradshaw).
Living in a society that values work and money over nurturing and wellbeing, parents are often drawn to advice that urges them to ‘get their life back’ or ‘show the baby who is in charge.’ They are encouraged to apply a conquistador (dominator) mindset into their baby raising. Instead of understanding the special needs of an infant for the first few years, these advisers focus on parent wellbeing and minimize effects on the baby. Such advice ignores the evidence showing long term effects of early life stress, evidence that grows by the day. The adviser picks out a few studies that are not grounded in an understanding of species-normal, or optimal, baby raising. Experiments involving baby care are limited by scope, method, assumptions and interpretations—typically biased toward nuclear families and a minimizing of infant needs. Ignoring our species’ baseline for optimal care, the evolved nest, researchers too often act as if modern humans can know nothing until an experiment is done—scientism.
Of course, parental wellbeing is important. But instead of taking for granted parent isolation and a need to ‘get their lives back,’ advisers should be emphasizing the needs of the baby and how parents can adjust their own lives around those needs. Instead of telling parents to detach from responsivity to their babies’ needs, to condition their babies to expect less of them, instead of aiming for baby survival instead of thriving, parents should be educated about how they are shaping a living being—for better or worse.
Instead of minimizing the irreducible needs of babies, advisers should be promoting, advocating even, ways for parents to get the support they need to be responsive to their baby’s needs. There is much to be advocated for in the USA. Babies to work programs are helpful (well-cared for babies—assuming soothing gestation and birth—are pleasant to be around). Multi-generational and multi-family housing can restore the community of care, along with neighborhood designs that encourage social interaction (sidewalks) and play in Nature (parks). But most important is paid parental leave for at least one year if not three.
Parent and infant stress and their disconnection from one another are symptoms of a greater problem—the movement of the dominant culture away from its biological roots, from what brings about our humanity, the evolved nest. The dominant culture has made humans think domination is normal, but that is primate politics, not rooted in our species-normal nature which develops mostly after birth. We evolved to be partnering, cooperative members of Earth’s community. Lack of evolved nested care means the individual is likely to rely on innate survival systems instead of the sociality that comes about through postnatal nestedness.
Let’s help parents move away from domination to nested partnership, encouraging them to humble themselves to the needs of their infants. We all need to step in and support parents and children wherever we are because we all play a role in raising cooperative members of Earth.
References
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