Homeless Babies—At Home!

Importance of the second attachment system

• A two-month old baby propped up with pillows while mom holds the bottle. But even this was unpleasant for mom, so the parents set up a contraption to hold the bottle.

• A crying baby is placed on a remotely controlled Tonka truck racing around the room.

• A distressed baby is duct taped to the wall.

…A grandmother’s heartbreaking story and two You Tube videos.

Babies untouched. Attachment connections broken.

What has gone wrong in these examples?

Clearly the ‘caregiver attachment system’ was not activated in the parents. This is the system complementary to the child’s attachment system, both identified by John Bowlby (1979). Both systems are critical for healthy parent-child relations and for the child’s wellbeing over the long-term.

Fetuses are deeply attached to mother, ensconced in their mother’s body for around 10 months, their needs being met automatically without any effort on their part. They expect the same when they emerge into the arms of mother and community.

NOTE: And it is important to provide such an ‘external womb’ (‘a womb with a view;’ Montagu, 1986) for about two years because humans are like fetuses of other animals until about that time (Trevathan, 2017).

Under natural conditions, the reward systems of mother and newborn ready them for deep physiological and psychological bonding immediately after baby is out (Buckley, 2015). The natural way this occurs is for the baby to crawl up the mother’s belly to squeeze mother’s breast nipple which releases oxytocin, for the milk let down. The skin-to-skin contact with its mutual smelling is critical for both to calm themselves down from all the mobilizing hormones that guided the birth process. They need to be left alone as they allow bonding hormones to reach their pinnacle. Thus, if not already up and running during pregnancy, mother’s caregiving attachment system is activated. A signal that the caregiver attachment system is activated is that the mother does not want to let go of the baby.

D.W. Winnicott (1987) described what happens when the caregiver attachment system has been activated, one can observe the nurturing orientation he called ‘good enough’ mothering.

The good enough mother knows what the baby is feeling, anticipating and meeting baby’s needs before baby expresses them.

That is, the mother has an extended perspective of being that includes baby. Baby is her. Fathers can develop a similar orientation with extensive skin-to-skin carrying. “Good holding and handling facilitate the maturational processes and bad holding means repeatedly interrupting those processes because of the baby’s reactions to failures of adaptation” (Winnicott, 1987, p. 62).

Good enough mothering doesn’t come from reading a book or being told about it by others. Trying to consciously be attentive doesn’t much work. “She has to know about it from a deeper level and not necessarily from that part of the mind which has words for everything. The main things that a mother does with the baby cannot be done through words” (Winnicott, 1987, p. 61). “While a mother may have no words to describe her feelings for her baby, when she lifts him, she gathers him together” (ibid, p. 43).

Winnicott noted that mothers lay “the foundations of the individual’s strength of character and richness of personality” (1987, p. 25). “The basis of personality is being laid down well if the baby is held well enough. Babies do not remember being held well—what they remember is the traumatic experience of not being held well enough” (ibid, p. 62).

He described a baby at six weeks who had been fed routinely on his back alone. Then he was adopted and could not suckle except in that same impersonal position. This impersonality and distance from others became woven into his personality.

Think of all the babies today, sent to overwhelmed day care centers who are necessarily treated impersonally.

In contrast, Winnicott wrote about a good enough feeding experience: “the tremendous richness that belongs to the feeding experience; the baby is awake and alive and whole of emerging personality is engaged. A great deal of the baby’s waking life at first has to do with feeding” (Winnicott, 1987, p. 29).

Deeply embodied caregiver attachment is missing in the cases mentioned above. The parents are relationally out of tune, treating the baby like a plant or toy rather than a human-under-co-construction. They do not realize that they are responsible to co-regulate baby, that baby’s regulatory systems need them for a healthy self-organization on every level of being, and that these effects last a lifetime. They don’t feel attuned to baby and baby’s needs, which an activated caregiver attachment system allows them to do.

A remedy to activate the system can be skin-to-skin carrying (Bergman, 2014) or belly-to-belly communication (Welch, 2016).

Being treated like an object herself can undermine the activation of the caregiver attachment system in mother. But the biggest culprit is medicalized birth, which can undermine it in multiple ways. First, with its drug interference to speed up labor (out of ignorance and for a profit motive) which then require painkillers to make it bearable. These procedures suppress the mother’s own hormonal pathway to a successful, largely painless birth. They impair mother and child’s oxytocin systems, critical for bonding and breastfeeding success.

Second, medicalized birth practices typically separate baby and mother after birth undermining the magic bonding time (Bergman, 2024). Baby-Friendly hospitals keep mother and baby together to foster bonding and breastfeeding success. Only about 28% of all births in the USA are in baby-friendly settings.

The caregiver attachment system can also be impaired if the mother’s attachment system (to her mother or carer) was impaired in childhood and she has not healed. Her instincts may be self-protectively set against connection and bonding. Ideally, the mother has prepared herself psychologically, perhaps with assistance, for the birthing experience which goes better if she is able to release control over her body during labor and ‘become animal’ as she and fetus, little by little, inch by inch back and forth through labor, prepare both for a new form of relationship (Mieli, 2019).

A society rots from the inside when babies are treated like objects. Instead of being recognized as a unique body-mind-spirit and brought into a circle of loving companionship care, they feel homeless. They live in the world as a lost soul, looking for grounding, which, unhealed, in a modern society like the USA will be found in consumption, self-numbing, or a power ideology.

The nested pathway is one of respecting the needs of babies and mothers with community provision of the evolved nest. Meeting basic needs with compassion from the beginning is foundational to a good life.

Watch our 6-minute film, Breaking the Cycle.

REFERENCES

Bergman, N.J. (2024). New policies on skin-to-skin contact warrant an oxytocin-based perspective on perinatal health care. Front. Psychol. 15:1385320. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1385320

Bergman, N.J. (2014). The neuroscience of birth – and the case for Zero Separation. Curationis 37(2), Art. #1440. http://dx.doi. org/10.4102/curationis. v37i2.1440

Bowlby, J. (1979). The making and breaking of affectional bonds. Tavistock.

Buckley, S.J. (2015). Hormonal physiology of childbearing: Evidence and implications for women, babies, and maternity care. Washington, D.C.: Childbirth Connection Programs, National Partnership for Women & Families.

Mieli, G. (2019). Do mothers dream of electric babies? The importance of emotional bonds for growing, nurturing, and educating. Routledge.

Montagu, A. (1986). Touching: The human significance of the skin. New York: Harper & Row.

Trevathan, W. R. (2017). Human birth: An evolutionary perspective. Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9780203789599

Welch, M.G. (2016). Calming cycle theory: the role of visceral/autonomic learning in early mother and infant/child behaviour and development. Acta Pædiatrica, 105, 1266–1274.

Winnicott, D.W. (1987). Babies and their mothers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.