Bonding and the Brain continued

The term bonding assumes that two things are being connected. The mother-child is a shared, reciprocal unit. The question is maintaining the connection that is there throughout the entire nine months of gestation.  That bond is simply that the other is the actually and only environment for the growing fetus and infant.  To refer to that as a bond might strike you as strange but that’s what it is.  It’s a bond between the new life and the environment which gives rise to it, and that’s the mother.  Now the idea that at birth we suddenly terminate that and throw in a radically different environment and the system will respond, but it responds but in a completely different way than nature intends.  Nature intends that the nurturing environment of the womb be extended for at least the first 9 to 12 months outside the womb simply because the system isn’t complete until then. Not even the very first parts of it are complete.  If that nurturing environment is suddenly truncated, just cut right off, you’re going to have a completely different response by the DNA and a completely different brain structure and a different heart brain interaction and the whole organism will be surprisingly different, if that second stage of bonding, after birth, is removed.

This doesn’t have anything to do with the willful activity of the mother or the infant or anything else.  It’s not even a conscious process.  If nature’s directive is followed, if the mother gives birth to the infant in a way that she has unbroken contact, what Marshall Klaus, MD, calls skin-to-skin contact, the bond is automatically there.  You might say the bond is unbroken between utero and extrauterine. The bonds are the same and growth then is according to, you might say natures’ agenda.  But that means adapting to the environment.  What kind of environment does the infant adapt to?  Either a nurturing environment where they feel loved, protected, wanted, cared for or a hostile environment where they’re not loved and protected or they feel abandoned.  See you have a completely different biological response and a biological growth and you have a different biological organism if the nurturing environment is not provided in the first year after birth.