Moms as Wonder Drugs

My toddler crawls pretty fast, hoists himself to standing, and is very curious. He topples over sometimes. When he lands on his bottom he sometimes cries. I can stop him from crying by picking him up and telling him it’s okay. That’s because he wasn’t really in pain, he just startled himself.

Sometimes, though, he cries because he is in real pain. This happens when he falls and bumps his head (in spite of our best efforts to prevent it). Or, when his teeth are coming through. With those more serious things, he doesn’t stop crying when I pick him up, hug him, and tell him it’s okay. But, if my wife picks him up, he often immediately stops crying. And when I say immediately, I mean one second flat.

Source: Max Pixel/Max Pixel .net

Why can my wife make him stop crying so fast? You might say that he is not actually in pain, and she is simply stopping him from fake crying. That’s not true. Any parent knows the difference between real tears and ‘crocodile’ tears. And scientists believe that children can feel pain, maybe more acutely than adults. Or, you might say that I’m not good with babies. After all, some Dads are better than Moms at calming babies. Yet, I grew up with a large family, and caring for babies comes naturally to me. Unless our baby is really disturbed I calm him down easily. It’s just the times that our baby is in more severe pain that I struggle.

The reason my wife is better is that there is something special about her touch. The power of touch to communicate and heal is not new, and is known to be able to communicate emotions ranging from anger and fear to love and gratitude. However the science behind mother-baby touch is getting more attention recently. Skin to skin contact creates a cascade of happy hormones in the baby and mother, makes a child’s heart stronger, reduces pain, regulates temperature, reduces stress, and (years later) improves IQ and makes children better behaved, It also makes breastfeeding easier. Breastfeeding, in turn, improves child and mothers’ health. If you could bottle up skin to skin contact, you’d have several blockbuster drugs.

Adults can use touch to read minds. Infants can do something similar and feel mothers’ relaxation and stress (activating their sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous systems, respectively). There is lots of evidence that relaxation heals. (A study of hugging showed that relaxation is contagious via touch in adults too.) After reading these studies about relaxation I relaxed consciously and was able to calm our baby down more successfully.

Source: Pixabay

Amazing as it is, the science of touch doesn’t tell the whole story. In spite of getting better after relaxing, my wife is still better at taking away our baby’s pain with her touch. And I suspect that no matter how good I get at relaxing, my wife will still have an advantage. Imprinting’ (a special connection developed by some mammals with their primary caregiver) tells part of the story. Imprinting certainly explains why connections between adopted children and their parents are as strong in important ways as those between biological parents and their children.

In our case, I think it is because my son, in utero, heard the first sounds of his life, my wife's heartbeat, all day every day, once a second. He felt the growls of her stomach. He felt her warmth all the time, every day, at exactly 98.6F (37C). He was squeezed when she moved; he trembled when she sneezed. For his whole life, until birth. Then the first thing he learned after the incredible tumult of birth, was what she tasted like, how much more comfortable it was to be held close to her than anything else time in his short life to date. All that must have affected him. Being close to her must mean something to him, at a deep level that’s hard to replicate no matter how much I relax. I don’t believe that the science of that meaningful connection is fully understood. I just know that it’s awesome.

Professor Dan Moerman helped write this post.