mother Love
Scientific studies end something mothers everywhere have all the time intuitively known - that the unique love they have for their offspring is vitally leading to their development. A mother's love and nurturing even directly impacts the biological amelioration of the child's brain and central nervous system. In effect, mom and child are "hard-wired" for mutual love. The brain is like a template designed to await molding by its early environment. One researcher even wrote that hugs and kisses while the early needful periods sustain in making neurons grow and associate properly with other neurons.
mother Love
Throughout childhood, warm human love and touch generate an internal release of addicting and pleasurable opiates. Even teenagers (who may act as if they don't need the parents at all) must receive ongoing neural synchrony - love - from the parents. The brain and heart appear in fact designed for love, with happiness and even condition depending on it.
The pituitary hormone, oxytocin, is gift while all loving acts but most especially at birth where it serves to stimulate uterine contractions, and while nursing for the milk ejection reflex. It, along with the nursing hormone, prolactin, help generate that intense feeling of love shared by mom and child. Endorphins are physiological chemicals that are also released in both the mom and child while loving contact. They generate a feel-good high for both and thus play a needful role in encouraging affection and dependency.
When bonding fails, it is theorized that the absence of these pleasure chemicals can leave a void, making such children especially susceptible to drugs that can also release such pleasure chemicals. The stress hormone cortisol is also released when touch and love are lacking. Sensory deprivation in mother-absent children - a form of stress that stimulates the release of cortisol - can increase susceptibility to abnormalities such as depression, violence, substance abuse, and even impaired immune response.
The most natural way mothers deal with newborns in the majority of the world is with an in-arms approach. In more primitive cultures where mothers are barely allowed a break from work to give birth, babies are swaddled to the body creating constant perceive and reassurance. This bathes tissues in love hormones and encourages amelioration of salutary neural connections, particularly as the synaptic connections in the cortex construct for the first two years of life.
There is also heart-to-heart, quite literally, in the middle of mom and child. Heart muscle cells not only contract, but also delineate with one another. Isolating one cell from the heart in a petri dish causes it to lose its rhythm and begin to fibrillate until it dies. Putting two cells in presence to one someone else causes them to synchronize and beat in unison. There is an unseen and as yet unmeasured transportation in the middle of living cells. The beating of the mother's heart and her breathing pattern coordinate in a needful way with the infant's internal rhythms. This is part of what is known as a synchronizing hormonal flow that occurs in the middle of mom and child (directly from breast milk and also from loving perceive and even from presence and thought) that help to regulate vital rhythms in the child. Mothers instinctively place their babies to their left breast, retention their two hearts close. The mother's advanced heart in fact stimulates the newborn heart activating a dialogue in the middle of the two hearts and minds. mom and child are more appropriately considered as one, rather than two cut off entities as they bond while the child is being held and nursed.
These appealing links that science is revealing in the middle of mom and child are someone else proof that all life is holistic and intimately interconnected. The ideal holistic model is that which nature presents and it is clear that mom and child are meant to be intimate. Children cannot simply be cast off to be fed, clothed and housed as if that were enough. society needs to take note of this leading biology as more and more pressure is put on contemporary families and mothers to treat newborns as just someone else duty to program into the appointment book or to have serviced by a third party. By giving love the respect it deserves and making it the beginning point of life, the odds are much greater that love will then bloom in children and be carried through to their children...and, who knows, perhaps continue on to the world at large. We could use a lot of that.
Janov, Biology of Love, 2000, Prometheus Books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Asin/1573928291/qid=1060190175/sr=11-1/ref=sr_11_1/002-3171269-3580012#product-details
Odent, The Scientification of Love, 1999, Free Assn Books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Asin/1853434760/qid%253D1060190558/sr%253D11-1/ref%253Dsr%255F11%255F1/002-3171269-3580012
Pearce, Evolution's End,1993, Harper
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Asin/006250732X/qid=1060190780/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-3171269-3580012
Amini et al, A general ideas of Love, 2001, Vintage Books.
, 2003; 117
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/Asin/0375709223/qid=1060191020/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/002-3171269-3580012
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