Читать книгу Raising Girls in the 21st Century - Steve Biddulph - Страница 28

It’s early morning and little Lucy, just five weeks old, is lying wide awake in her cot beside her parents’ bed. Her mum and dad are both asleep, in fact her dad is lightly snoring. Lucy watches the dancing shadows made by the sunlight on the wall. From time to time, she waves her arms in sheer delight. She makes happy noises, and her head turns from side to side as she takes in the wonder of the world.

After a while, Lucy starts to feel hungry. She whimpers, and her mother, ears attuned for her baby’s sounds by a million years of mammalian history, wakes up, even though her husband’s snoring has not disturbed her all night. She reaches over and sleepily brings Lucy into the bed, then unbuttons a milk-swollen breast for her to suckle on. Lucy hasn’t needed to get upset, so she settles happily to feed, fully alert, looking into her mum’s eyes as she does so. At this age the focal length of her eyes is fixed at just the right distance to her mother’s face when feeding, about 30 centimetres, anything further away is still blurred. All she needs to see clearly is that her mum is happy and content. Then she can relax too.

Soon the day will begin. Lucy and her mum or dad will move through different activities, going down the street to the shops, perhaps meeting or dropping in on friends. There will be many changes of nappies, many feeds. But most of this time Lucy will be just lying about, or sleeping. Breastfeeding and sleeping, without any special effort, are the main events of early babyhood. And through all of this, Lucy’s brain will be growing; in just this first year of life, it will double or even treble in size. It will never grow so fast or so well as in these early months, though. It is the love, smiles, songs and playful interactions and all the other myriad natural things that parents do with babies, that help it to grow.