Health

Baby Care: Baselines for Mental Health

Babies' experiences can lead to mental illness.

Posted June 18, 2017

Each year Infant Mental Health Awareness Week reminds us that babies need particular care to promote good mental health. In fact, babies need 24/7 care of a certain kind. Most babies in the U.S. today do not receive the type of care that supports their long term mental (and physical) health.

In our ancestral environments, 24/7 baby care was not so demanding because people lived together in cooperative bands, with many helping hands and social support. But in the industrialized world, especially in the USA today, mothers (and fathers) are often left “on their own” to care for a needy baby. At the same time, because of parent inability to provide for the baby in the way baby needs, experts move in to tell these isolated parents how to cope, how to get through the few years of baby’s extreme developmental needs without going crazy. These “experts” often urge the use of practices that might relieve stress for parents but ultimately undermine baby’s mental and physical wellbeing.

Researchers are awakening to the fact that babies can become "depressed."

What are common practices that undermine young babies’ optimal health?

Physical isolation in carriers, cribs, swings
Scheduled feedings
Cry-it-out sleep training
Daily life with strangers
Being left to cry
Being subjected to pain

(Note that several apply to hospital birth practices also, starting things off on the wrong path.)

I call these practices undercare (if not trauma or neglect). Note that consistency in undercare is better than inconsistency. Animals that are shocked unpredictably break down and often give up and even die. Animals that are shocked in predictable ways learn to cope. Undercare on a schedule is providing the baby with predictability, which helps them cope, though not to grow in ways normal for a human being.

Of course, to make judgments about what is good for a human baby, one must have a baseline(s). Baselines don’t come from experiments because experiments naturally have to be limited in scope (they only look at a few variables in limited conditions) and such experiments typically don’t start with a sense of human baselines.

What is the human baseline for baby raising?

We call it the evolved nest (or evolved developmental niche; Narvaez et al 2013a 2013b; 2013c). Every animal has a nest for its young—humans too! But human babies are especially needy because they should be in the womb another 18 months—yes, at 18 months of age, human children have the capacities of newborns of other animals. Because of this immaturity at birth, vital neurobiological and psychological growth is scheduled to occur during the first months and years of life. Think of housebuilding as an analogy. Without a good foundation, the quality of the house will be suboptimal, though it may take a few years to notice. Similarly, without good neurobiological and psychological foundations in the first years of life, a person’s lifelong wellbeing will be suboptimal. Without the evolved nest, a person’s lifelong wellbeing will be suboptimal.

Virtually all of the characteristics of the human nest are over 30 million years old (having emerged initially with social mammals, the family of animals that humans are part of; Konner, 2005). The nest was provided in 99% of human genus history, prior to civilization (agricultural mono-cultures which started to pull adults away from being with babies 24/7). With civilization, nest practices degraded more and more (as people forgot what babies need and began instead to punish them for their needs; see de Mause, 1995).

What is the typical nest for our species, the baseline of baby care?

soothing perinatal experience
extensive breastfeeding on request
extensive affectionate touch
quick and warm responsiveness to needs
mutual relationships with caregivers
multiple responsive adult caregivers
positive social support and climate for mother and baby
self-directed free play

These components provide the support for optimizing normal development in early childhood, matching up with and constantly interacting with the maturational development of the child with ongoing epigenetic and plasticity effects. Without them, the trajectory of development shifts to a suboptimal pathway.

PART 1: Baselines for Babies

PART 2: Baby Care: Baselines for Mental Health

PART 3: Baby Care: 3 R’s for Raising Baby

Related blogs:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

^{de Mause, L. (1995). The history of childhood. New York, NY: Psychohistory Press.}

Health Essential Reads

3 Ways to Navigate an Ultra-Processed World

The Return of Syphilis

^{Hewlett, B.S., & Lamb, M.E. (2005). Hunter-gatherer childhoods: evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine.}

^{Konner, M. (2005). Hunter-gatherer infancy and childhood: The !Kung and others. In B. Hewlett & M. Lamb (Eds.), Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives (pp. 19-64). New Brunswich, NJ: Transaction.}

^{Konner, M. (2010). The Evolution of childhood. Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press.}

^{Meaney, M. J. (2001). Maternal care, gene expression, and the transmission of individual differences in stress reactivity across generations. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 24, 1161–1192.}

^{Meaney, M. J. (2010). Epigenetics and the biological definition of gene X environment interactions. Child Development, 81(1), 41–79.}

^{Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.}

^{Narvaez, D. (2016). Embodied morality: Protectionism, engagement and imagination. New York, NY: Palgrave-Macmillan.}

^{Narvaez, D., Braungart-Rieker, J., Miller, L., Gettler, L., & Hastings, P. (2016). (Eds.), Contexts for young child flourishing: Evolution, family and society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.}

^{Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., & Gleason, T. (Eds.) (2013). Evolution, early experience and human development: From research to practice and policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.}

^{Peterson, C.; Maier, S. F.; Seligman, M. E. P. (1995). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. New York: Oxford University Press.}

^{Schore, A.N. (2000). Attachment and the regulation of the right brain. Attachment & Human Development, 2, 23-47.}

^{Schore, A.N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 201-269.}

^{Schore, A.N. (2003a). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. New York: Norton.}

^{Schore, A.N. (2003b). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York: Norton.}

^{Schore, A.N. (2013). Bowlby's "Environment of evolutionary adaptedness": Recent studies on the interpersonal neurobiology of attachment and emotional development. In D. Narvaez, J. Panksepp, A. Schore & T. Gleason (Eds.), Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy (pp. 31-67). New York: Oxford University Press.}

^{Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.}