Pearcej's blog

Let’s say we have this wonderful mom and she’s nurtured and feels safe during pregnancy.  She had a rather ideal experience inutero but then the nurturing environment collapsed after birth.

This has a tremendous impact on the fourth neural structure in the human being, which is the pre-frontal cortices right behind our forehead.  That’s the largest part of the whole brain.  Larger than any other structure.  But this grows, not inutereo where the fore-brain, what we think of as the ordinary fore-brain and hind-brain grew, which is determined by the mother’s emotional state, but the growth of the pre-frontal cortices, which is what makes us unique humans over all the other mammal species, the pre-frontal cortices grow primarily after birth because otherwise the head would be so huge you’d have real troubles with birth.

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. 

What we call 'Bonding'is the primary biological survival system in the human being.  The bonding we speak of between the infant and the mother is critically necessary for the establishment of all sorts of physical processes in the infant.  Do we think of DNA being a program that just unfolds into all these marvelous growth periods in our life and so on.  But DNA is environmental sensitive.  It’s experience sensitive.  The DNA unfolds according to the nature of the environment in which we found ourselves.  That’s what gives us our great adaptability.