Family Briefs
Raising Babies—It All Starts in the Brain
By Christine de Vollmer

Insights from the World Congress of Families III

Full-time mothering gets a boost from science.

The last 100 years have seen amazing advances in knowledge about the human body, which made possible a veritable revolution in health care.  The one hundred years ahead promise an equally stunning change in what is known about the human brain.  In the last 15 years, since 1990, non-invasive studies of brain development have been possible and the discoveries about the brain have put previous ideas to rout.

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To begin with, it has been proven that the cerebral cortex does not grow automatically, but according to the stimulation received while it is in its main growth phase:  during the first 6 years.  This explains why gifts and aptitudes so often “run in families”: musician’s children are better at music, trapeze artists’ children have a gift for the trapeze, children who are taught to ride or ski at a very early age, do it better than others.  Small children exposed to many languages, learn them all and do not confuse them.  The reason is that the cortex adapts to the demands of the stimulation and neurons are produced to respond to it.  This is the first discovery and it is important.

But there is more.  Much more important than our skills…in fact vital…is the development of the limbic system, which is that part of the cerebral cortex which governs the sense of self, emotions, self control and a host of elements of the balanced and happy individual.  It now appears that the cortico-limbic lobes develop also, in response to stimulation.  And that stimulation is the love and caresses of his or her mother from the moment of birth.  The main development of the limbic system takes place in the first 4 years and is a fascinating subject.

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A remarkable interdisciplinary work has been done by Dr. Allan Schore, who has collected the most outstanding new data from many fields involving the human brain and human emotions in an important work entitled Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self.

Just to give you a couple of glimpses into this extraordinary new field, I will mention the importance of those hours of mothers’ gazing at their babies.  It seems that a detectable energy flows from the mother’s brain through her eyes, into the baby’s eyes and stimulates the baby’s brain.  The stimulation inherent in this “transaction” as they call it, causes neuro-chemical reactions, involving secretions similar to endorphins, which as well as causing growth, are very pleasurable!  The baby loves the feeling and responds, on each other’s brain.  A result of this process is that the mother learns to know exactly how much stimulation to give and the studies indicate that there is an uncanny understanding on the part of the mothers to know just how much to stimulate and when to calm.  The tactile stimulation of her kisses, cooing and caresses stimulate cortico-limbic growth, also.  As the baby grows, the mother continues to require—with a sure sense—an increasing level of responses, which the baby loves to grow into.  The bonding, and the mutual understanding of how much, how long and so on, seem to be somehow connected to all that mutual gazing from birth.

Science now tells us without a shadow of a doubt, that mothers, in constant contact with their babies, are actually forming the baby’s brain…particularly in the right hemispheric orbitofrontal cortex…those cortico-limbic lobes and intricate connections which will determine his or her emotional well-being and sense of self for the remainder of earthly existence.  She does this with her eyes, her voice, her reactions.  It is transfer, if you will, of creative energy—of love—from her brain to the baby’s brain through their senses mainly their eyes.

When we see the extensive studies since 1990 so brilliantly collected by Dr. Schore, it becomes obvious that the age-old fascination with motherhood has not been misplaced.  It is not new.  What is new is to know that it is brain growth, not just fun.  The second discovery, and rather alarming, is that it cannot be achieved by part-time caretakers.  These caretakers can attend most excellently to the bodily needs of the child, but not this early brain growth.

Science has also learned that if this stimulation is not given, and the cortico-limbic lobes are not produced, the individual will grow up seriously deficient in all those areas of self that make him or her able to interact with others in an appropriate way.  It was recently disclosed that the author of the Colombine massacre had spent many years in day care.

This young man suffers from a cortical disability as identifiable as one who suffers from lack of development of the vision center or whose mobility is impaired by damage to the midbrain.  We all remember those tragic PET scans of the orphans of Bucarest, whose brains were in large part inactive, where no stimulation had been given.  So, part of our new paradigm of development must certainly be to listen to the latest in neurology and to allow and facilitate mothers to be with their children during those first 6 years.  We must grow children with healthy emotional systems.