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!
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