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THE BABY BOND

WHEN A BABY is born, it comes into the world knowing that the first priority is to find you. The new babe’s eyes open and immediately begin to scan the environment in search of you—her best bet for survival. She cannot see well yet, but her brain is wired to find your eyes. And as soon as she lands on your gaze, she will stop scanning. That’s when the magic happens. Well, it isn’t really magic, but years of evolution that have perfected this synergistic connection. When that newborn finds your eyes, she will invariably hold the gaze for as long as she can. And as she does you will find it all but impossible to look away. Biologically, fireworks are going off because your brain is bathed in oxytocin. Long known as the bonding hormone, oxytocin connects parent (male or female) to child, chemically and emotionally, setting the stage for a relationship that will be the ultimate determinant in a child’s health, well-being, and success in life.¹

Here is some great news: parents are wired to be good at this, and so are babies. A newborn knows enough to recognize the difference between breast pads soaked with her mother’s milk and those soaked with another mother’s milk when they are placed on either side of her head; she will naturally orient to the breast pad soaked with her mother’s milk. No special training needed. No psychological support required. What a brilliant way to start!

From the first hours of life a newborn is wired to mimic a parent’s facial expressions. If you stick your tongue out at your baby or you open your mouth wide repeatedly you might find that she starts to do the same. To put into perspective how incredible this is, keep in mind that your newborn won’t have command of her muscles and movements in a determined way until many weeks down the road. It is a reflex, like blinking in bright light. This mimicry also underscores some basic rules of social psychology: that “birds of a feather flock together” and “imitation is the highest form of flattery.” We tend to like people who like us, and we determine that they like us when they appear to endorse the similarities between us.

From the first moments of life your baby is on a mission to make sure that you like her and think she’s the smartest baby in the land—and she doesn’t even know what she’s doing! Even though she has no cognitive control over this copycat impulse, your baby will instinctively try to make herself more like you to assure your acceptance. Again, no special training or psychological support required.

Parents are biologically wired too. If you are breastfeeding, you will experience a milk let-down in response to your baby’s cry. At night, when she cries out, you may find that you are up and awake with her in your arms before you even know what’s happened. You may find that the advice to let your baby cry herself to sleep, or to let her sort herself out before moving quickly to tend to her, doesn’t feel right. You may even find it difficult to be away from her at all, especially in the early days. This is nature’s way of nurturing the all-important connection between parent and child. In some cultures, it is “mandatory” that the parent, usually the mother, stay at home with the newborn for a full thirty days after birth. During this time, the mother is well taken care of by her family and friends and is released singularly to the task of caring for her new babe.

Now, consider this: nature wastes nothing. A newborn baby is biologically wired to pursue and cement connection with a parent, and most parents are wired to take care of this connection instinctually. So don’t be afraid to dive headfirst into this burgeoning new relationship and ignore the misinformation trickling in from other influences that may tempt you to overlook your parenting instincts. Everything about child development, and the human condition in general, hinges on the actualization of the attachment relationship, and it becomes the primary focus from the earliest moments of life. Whether they realize it or not, parents will spend most of their energy encouraging and fostering this bond with their children.

This primary relationship—the parent-child connection—forms the entire foundation of what it takes to parent right from the start. A human is not simply a biological entity but a “being” wired to see and to be; to be intelligent and empathic; and to attract, recognize, and participate in the dance of social connection. As a social species, we cannot survive in the absence of connection. And a sweet, new babe already knows this with her breath, with her heart, and with her wise, intuitive soul.

A wonderful dance is taking place in each moment with your newborn, one that weaves the two of you together in your developing relationship. It is so present and so natural in its emergence that you might not even realize it is happening. You are doing this. And whether or not you know it, you are really, really good at it. Remember that you don’t need to be taught how to do this; you simply need to allow yourself to fall into your child’s very natural invitation to be a facilitator of this relationship.

Think of the moments over the course of each day—and night—that are filling up your baby’s relationship cup. When you are feeding your baby and you return her gorgeous gaze, that is a drop in the cup. When she smiles at you and you smile back, another drop is added. When she starts to coo and you respond with a coo of your own—in goes another. When she shows signs of fatigue, like turning her head away or becoming fussy, and you respond with rocking and soothing, you are adding more. When you are changing her diaper and murmuring sweet-nothings, her cup grows fuller still. And when you have skin-on-skin tummy time and your little love hears your heart and feels your warmth, another droplet—or more. Your baby’s connection cup will be overflowing within minutes or hours, never mind the abundance in connection that can be created over the course of a whole day.

The key to allowing this relationship to take root is to avoid the urge to look for giant signs of connectedness or to wait for the next telltale wave of warm fuzzies. Rather, it is about being present, moment to moment, for the minutia of the relationship dance. You won’t always see neon-sign evidence of it unfolding, but rest assured that it is happening. As certainly as you breathe, the relationship blooms. This is where a little faith comes into play. When you can trust that nature knows its way, that without even understanding what is happening or how, the relationship will flourish, you are able to release yourself to the magic of the dance—that perfected-by-evolution, synergistic magic of the parent-baby bond.

Even with all of your best intentions, it can be seductively easy in our outcome-focused world to measure your progress in creating a healthy relationship with your baby by exhaustively assessing if they are developmentally on track in other ways. Is your baby getting enough tummy time? Should she be lifting her head by now? Is she developing a flat spot on her skull from spending too much time on her back? Is she growing enough, sleeping enough, eating enough? So much tracking and measuring and thinking! Although you of course need to be aware of these sorts of things, I encourage you to focus on feeling and fuelling the connection in ways that feel natural. Allow this wonderful time getting to know your new little person to unfold without being hijacked by thoughts of whether she’s met all the milestones. Connection is the foundation to healthy growth and development. With that connection underway, those measurable outcomes all but take care of themselves.

The Science of Connection

Before I explain exactly how this deeply connected relationship works in a baby’s development, let’s consider the history of attachment theory, and the significance of attachment to healthy child development as understood in the scientific literature. As we explore these topics, you’ll get a sense of how deeply attachment theory departs from that of the behaviourists discussed in chapter 1.

In a nutshell, behaviourists landed on the logic that if you deprive a child of connection at any age, desired behaviour will result: a baby left alone appears to figure out how to fall asleep; the child who is timed-out appears to behave better. Who among us isn’t going to be tempted by parenting “strategies” that result in a better-behaved child who sleeps through the night and performs as expected? The goal of these practices is to ensure desired behaviour on the part of the child—behaviour desired by the adult. But why do children respond to them? Be forewarned: the answer to this question may bring you to your knees. A child instinctually knows that without connection they are doomed, so most children will fall into line to secure the connection they desperately need to grow as nature intended.

The understanding of the importance of connection between children and their primary caregivers comes to us primarily via British psychoanalyst John Bowlby’s work. When Bowlby was doing research in a hospital during the 1940s, he noticed that young children dropped off at the hospital to receive care appeared to become more ill rather than improving in health. He also noticed that when their parents came for visiting hours the children would appear much improved. Experimenting with these discoveries, Bowlby established that parental presence led to faster improvements in health and far less distress for the child. Not only did this revolutionize hospital practices in terms of parental rooming-in and increased visitation, but it was also seminal in terms of how we understand the inner workings of the parent-child relationship. Bowlby’s observations resulted in a lifelong course of research for him and his then student, Mary Ainsworth.

In the late 1960s, Ainsworth designed the paradigm called the “strange situation,” used to study attachment theory in the parent-child relationship. Ainsworth placed young children in a series of variously stressful and structured physical separations and reunions with their parents to observe the children’s reactions. Through Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work it became clear that the nature of the parent-child relationship is significant for positive developmental outcomes. In the 1970s, it was developmental psychologist Dr. Edward Tronick who studied the parent-child relationship using emotional separations and reunions. To do this, Tronick devised the still-face paradigm. Tronick asked parents in a controlled situation to interact with their babies face to face as they normally would at home. The parent was then instructed to turn away, wipe her face of all emotion, and then turn back to her baby with a completely “still” face. The still face is devoid of all emotion and connection and appears robotic.

This dynamic was played out with children of different ages, and Tronick observed that, regardless of age, the children noticed immediately the presence of the still face and would become unsettled by it, even very young babies. After keeping the still face for two minutes, the parent was instructed to re-engage with the child in a way that was typical to their relationship. A child used to a responsive caregiver (that is, one who experienced secure attachment) was more likely to settle relatively quickly. The child who was used to a non-responsive caregiver might continue to be unsettled for a long period of time or might not even notice the parent’s re-engagement.

You can see how this paradigm works in one disturbing video of a still-faced parent interacting with a three-month-old baby. As the parent continues with the still face, the child becomes increasingly dysregulated and upset. After only two minutes of emotional separation from his parent, the baby turns his head to the side and vomits from distress. What would it be like, then, for a child who experiences this type of emotional separation in an enduring way, as part of the relationship in which they are raised? What parents can learn from these studies is that while simple physical proximity is essential to the provision of care for young children, emotional closeness is also vital if the child is to grow and develop as nature intended.

Secure attachment is the natural state of the parent-child relationship, and what we are wired up to engage in without instruction. But our modern lives feature numerous distractions, some of which can have us unintentionally exposing our babies to a robotic still face. Think of all the moments of opportunity for connection that existed before the invasion of screens and phones. Dr. Kristy Goodwin addresses this in her book Raising Your Child in a Digital World, in which she notes that feeding time is incredibly important for the cognitive and visual opportunities it grants babies around facial mapping—an important part of social development. “Brexting,” or feeding while texting, interrupts that process. Without a phone and social media and text messages to pull you away, you fall naturally into eye-gazing and gentle murmurs while feeding your baby. Public health campaigns have recently been developed to let parents know that being emotionally attentive to your feeding baby is key to their healthy development.² There is no app for your lap!

This provision of physical and emotional contact and closeness for our children is particularly important in the formative early years of their lives. Psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld has woven together a large amount of research in the field of child development to map out exactly how the attachment relationship plays out in these early years.³ He tells us that a baby’s first year is characterized by attachment through the senses; that is, a baby makes sense of the connection that is forming primarily through being with the parent. The child needs to see, taste, touch, smell, and hear you to know that you are his best bet, that you’ve got him, and that you can be counted on.

Clearly, the attachment relationship is a foundational piece of growing up our children in the best possible way. This marks a huge shift from the days of behaviourism, the parenting strategies which are, at heart, all about using the deprivation of connection to control a child’s behaviour. Attachment theory approaches the growing up of children as developmentally rooted in the creation and nourishment of connection. It also allows parents and other adults to see that each baby and child is exactly perfect in their imperfection. Challenging behaviour and the chaos of childhood are indications that everything is unfolding in exactly the right way. Don’t fret about the mess or the noise your baby is making—your biggest focus must be on you and your ability to protect that parent-child connection.

Children must be able to trust the “dance” of reciprocity in the relationship with their parents. Psychologists refer to this dance of trust as “serve and return.” A child puts out a bid (usually a cry or some form of behaviour), and the parent responds over and over again. If a baby is left to cry, they will eventually fall asleep because they are exhausted from the stress. Though the baby may reflect the behaviours the parents desire, the internal experience is one of continual angst that ultimately thwarts development. Alternatively, if a parent responds consistently, the baby learns to trust in the certainty of that parent’s response. And, if handled as needed, also learns to trust in the goodness of the parent’s response.

First, the child truly gets the message that they matter. When the dance of trust and reciprocity between parent and child is consistent, the child develops the belief that they are worthy of love and that they can simply lean into a parent’s enduring embrace—physically and emotionally—to receive that love. Over the years, this consistent provision of love from the parent morphs into a consistent provision of self-love from within the child. And the greatest gift a parent can give a child is to help them grow into an adult full of self-love.

Second, as well as learning they can trust their parents to respond repeatedly in a caring way, the child begins to develop the capacity for self-regulation. This is a simple and simultaneously complex manifestation of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the brain’s openness to external influence—that is, the experiences a baby has in the child-raising environment will shape how their brain is growing. A baby’s brain gets fired up out of a need for food, for a diaper change, for comfort, for anything. When a parent responds and settles the baby, they are in turn settling the baby’s brain. As this happens again and again, a baby’s brain learns to hang onto the neural pathways that are repeatedly reinforced and fired up through their parents’ ongoing caregiving. Brain fires up. Brain gets settled. Over and over. Those pathways are precisely the ones that will allow a child to become capable of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-control—eventually. It will take years of the connection dance playing out with consistency for this to unfold. And what predicts how well a child learns to regulate? That depends on how well the parent uses their “own arousal level to counterbalance and/or complement that of the child.”⁴

Children will be and do exactly as they are meant to be and do for their own growth trajectory. Our role as parents is to promote our child’s development rather than create circumstances or conditions that get in the way of it. When children don’t get the connection they need they cannot be released fully to their developmental pathway. The child who must hang on, claw or grasp at, seek frenetically, or pursue connect with panic is the child who struggles. This is the child who redirects all of their developmental energy to securing the connection rather than striding forward with zest and confidence.

Relief comes for the child who is invited to lean on and rest in the care of their big people, and this is completely within our realm of control as parents to manage. Though we can occasionally get in the way of healthy development by imposing our own programming on our child’s growth, we can absolutely right ourselves in the face of challenges that might otherwise thwart our well-intentioned journey.

Nature Does Not Demand Perfection

Knowing how essential connection is for a child’s development, I can understand how new parents might feel overwhelmed or uneasy. This kind of commitment is not to be taken lightly. But guess what? Nature does not demand perfection. Parents do not have to keep up the connection dance constantly and flawlessly. Nature is far savvier. Child development experts coined the term “the good enough parent”⁵ to describe a parent who has engaged in the dance of connection well enough that the child has received what is needed, even if it wasn’t perfectly delivered all the time.

In his work, Dr. Tronick showed that parents are perfectly in sync emotionally with their children only about 30 percent of the time. The rest of the time, parents are either falling out of sync or finding their way back to being in sync. He calls this falling in and out “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” The good is when a parent is on top of the reciprocity of the serve-and-return dance. The bad is when a parent has dropped the ball but is working their way back to being in sync. Tronick believes that this falling out of sync is not the worst thing that can happen because the child does learn that reparation and resolution are possible and real. The ugly is when the parent connection is entirely absent and there is no move toward repair. In this scenario, the child is stuck in a horrible place of disconnectedness.

Bear in mind that when a child has a relationship connection with more than one key caregiver—a mom and a dad, for example—the flavour of each connection is specific to the individual relationship. This means that a child will have a specific connection relationship with mom, a different one with dad, and additional connection relationships with any other caregivers. No one relationship will be quite like the other. However, though the other relationships certainly matter, the one that is most intense and most frequent will be the front-row influencer in terms of the child’s development.

And here’s another thing to keep in mind: it really does only take one! Many parents come to me full of angst about an absent, uninvolved, or perhaps incapable co-parent, concerned about how this might affect their children. Yes, there will be an emotional impact of some kind. But if a child has at least one adult who is full of invitation for that child to exist, who is delighted to see them when they walk into a room, who has a twinkle in their eye and love in their heart for them, who will absolutely have their back through thick and thin, this is a child who will be okay. Resilience will abound and that child will thrive exactly as they were intended to.

Eventually other caregivers will be invited into your child’s inner circle—here is the glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel for all exhausted parents out there! Sometime around the age of two years, your child will start to develop meaningful relationships with others with whom she has ongoing connection experiences. As these other caregivers are invited into your child’s inner circle, parents continue to be the most important influence in terms of the child’s sense of self and her brain’s networks to facilitate self-regulation.