Читать книгу The Fussy Baby Book: Parenting your high-need child from birth to five - Martha Sears - Страница 57

Even as newborns, most babies who are separated from their mothers click into survival mode: their breathing increases, they clench their fists, they arch their backs and tense their muscles. Their whole body language shouts, “I have to be held to survive.” The sooner parents pick up on these cues, the sooner baby will thrive. Some babies are particularly separation-sensitive, even during sleep. We decided to study the physiological effects of nighttime separation on our eighth baby, Lauren, when she was two months old. A local company loaned us £50,000 worth of equipment and their technical assistance. Using the latest in noninvasive technology, we wired Lauren to a computer that recorded her electrocardiogram, breathing movements, air flow from her nose, and her blood oxygen saturation. The instrumentation was painless and didn’t appear to disturb her sleep. The computer recorded Lauren’s physiological changes during one full night of sleeping side-by-side with Martha and the next full night of sleeping alone in the same bed. Our study revealed that Lauren’s overall physiology – her heart rate, breathing, and blood oxygen saturation – was more stable when sleeping next to Martha than when sleeping alone.

New studies are beginning to prove what savvy mothers have long suspected: growing infants develop better the more time they spend in touch and interaction with their parents.

How did these parenting “experts” come up with these numbers? One begins to wonder. Wishful thinking? There were no actual studies to back them up. By the time the study of infant behaviour developed into a science in the sixties and seventies and researchers began disproving the spoiling theory, the low-touch, high-control style of parenting was so entrenched that even today compelling research has not been able to unseat it.

The cry-it-out advice is based on the principle of reinforcement, which is simply this: if a behaviour is not reinforced (not responded to), it is extinguished, it goes away. If the behaviour is reinforced (responded to), it will be repeated. This does make a certain amount of sense, but there are several fallacies in the way this principle has been applied to infant crying. First of all, the reinforcement principle assumes that the cry is a bad behaviour to be eliminated rather than a signal to be listened to. Second, research does not support the idea that ignored cries are simply extinguished. Rather than learning to be quiet, some infants learn more disturbing means of communication. In other babies, those with whom the cry-it-out advice “works”, it is the drive to communicate that is extinguished. And along with learning that his cries have no signal value, the baby also learns that he has less value. This lays the foundation for a sense of distrust rather than trust. This is no way to begin life.

“But it works”, defenders of cry-stopping advice claim. This depends upon your point of view. Consider how you would feel if you had a desperate message to convey, and your previously trusted significant other stopped listening. You’re delivering what you feel is a very important message, at least to you. You need some help, yet the one to whom you are talking ignores you. How would you feel? You might conclude that what you are saying has little or no value to the listener. You might further conclude that your listener doesn’t care about your message, or about you. How would you react? You could yell more loudly and make yourself so obnoxious that your listener would be forced to come to your rescue. By this time you’d be a very angry person and would carry that anger with you, perhaps turning it inward. You could just quit delivering your message, sniffle to yourself a few times, and decide that you can’t depend on anyone but yourself or that maybe you don’t deserve to be heard. A baby who makes this shift might even be rewarded with the tag of “good baby”, one who doesn’t bother anyone. A third alternative is to go on delivering your message, sincerely hoping your listeners will stretch themselves to really hear what you have to say, and will respond appropriately.