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 April 2nd, 2010  
You take your baby to the pediatrician for her regular check-ups, vaccines, and at the first sign of a fever. You keep her away from runny-nose friends and steer clear of the sun. You babyproof your home and gently bandage her boo-boos. All to make sure your child grows up healthy and strong. But compelling new research is showing that the strength of your emotional bond with your baby may well trump all of those other measures you take to help her thrive.
A close attachment can prevent diseases, boost immunity, and enhance IQ in your baby, says Deepak Chopra, M.D., the endocrinologist turned mind-body — medicine guru, Parenting contributing editor, and coauthor of Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives: A Holistic Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth. Those hugs and kisses are a force of nature more powerful than ever thought, says Dr. Chopra. Mother-child bonding has evolved to become a complex physiological process that enlists not just our hearts, but our brains, hormones, nerves, and almost every part of our bodies.
There are decades of evidence to back up Dr. Chopra’s claims. In one study from Ohio State University, rabbits that were cuddled by researchers were protected against the artery-clogging effects of a high-cholesterol diet. The love and attention affected the rabbits’ hormone levels, the study authors concluded, helping them withstand heart disease. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal found that some female rats took more time and care to lick their infant pups than others; the pups that were licked frequently grew up to be less stressed and more adventurous in temperament, while pups that weren’t groomed as much exhibited nervous, stressed-out behavior. And yet another study, published in Pediatrics, found that premature babies who were stroked gained nearly 50 percent more weight than those who were not. Such skin-to-skin contact (known as kangaroo care) has been shown to have other health benefits for preemies, too.
It’s well known that the nipple stimulation that occurs when a baby nurses causes a hormone called oxytocin to be released in the mom, which in turn triggers milk let-down. But oxytocin is also called the “love hormone” because it’s produced during orgasm and other affectionate moments. In fact, oxytocin behaves in the brain much the same way that morphine does; it turns on our “reward” center, easing pain, making us feel good, and causing us to crave that emotional high again and again. Women who don’t breastfeed, or choose to eventually switch to or supplement with formula, happily do not miss out on the “love drug.” Simply gazing into your baby’s eyes while bottle-feeding or just snuggling or massaging also unleashes the feel-good hormones in both of you.
There’s more evidence that we’re hardwired to connect with our kids: Pheromones — the chemicals we secrete to attract a partner — are also secreted by our babies, ensuring that we’re similarly smitten with them. In one study, 90 percent of moms were able to identify their newborns by scent alone after having spent as little as ten minutes with them. When the moms spent an hour with their babies, 100 percent of them correctly distinguished their own baby’s smell from the smell of other infants.
A baby recognizes his mother’s scent, too. Last year, researchers in Japan found that infants who smelled their own mother’s milk while undergoing a routine heel-stick procedure exhibited fewer signs of distress than babies who were exposed to the odor of another mother’s milk, formula, or nothing at all. The mere scent of their mother’s breast milk was enough to calm the newborns and ease pain. Here’s an interesting aside: The act of kissing may have evolved as an affectionate gesture because it puts our nose in direct contact with the base of our partner’s nostrils, where pheromones are generated.
Just as scent motivates you to care for your child and motivates your child to stay close to you, so too does a smile. In a recent study conducted at the Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, brain MRIs were taken of women while they looked at photos of their own children and of other kids making sad, happy, and neutral faces. The scans found that when a woman saw a photo of her own child, the parts of her brain associated with rewards processing (meaning they make you feel good!) were activated, and even more so when she saw photos of her child smiling. It’s all very primitive: Mom make Baby smile, Mom get reward, Mom want to make Baby smile again.
So ignore your e-mails and forget about the laundry. Don’t stress about vacuuming or entertaining guests. Let bonding with your baby become your priority. Lie around with her, doing nothing. Cuddle. Play. Dr. Chopra believes in “nourishing all of your baby’s senses” by holding her, massaging her, singing to her, using soothing scents (lavender, rose, vanilla), and showing her colorful, interesting shapes and objects. Remind yourself that you’re building a connection that will comfort both of you for years and years. And when you need a break, take one.
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February 2nd, 2010 
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
February 2nd, 2010
Eve, the first woman to become pregnant, suffered from excruciating pain during the delivery because she cheated on her diet. God told her to not eat an apple, but she was tempted by the serpent’s claim that the forbidden fruit would endow her and Adam with worldly knowledge. In God’s fury, he transformed the serpent into a belly-crawling creature. Then he turned to Eve and said, “I greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.”
The thought pattern was set. Women deserved pain. In 1591, Eufame Maclayne was burned at the stake for asking for pain relief during the birth of her twins. Attitudes did not change much when safer anesthetics were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most people thought they were fine for surgery but not childbirth. Devout men and women believed that the pain in childbirth was a heavenly duty. If you couldn’t endure the agony of childbirth, how would you handle the ups and downs of motherhood? (Why no equivalent hazing process for fathers? Vasectomies without pain meds?) Pain relief became somewhat acceptable when Queen Victoria asked Dr. John Snow for a whiff of chloroform to ease her delivery during the birth of Prince Leopold on April 7, 1853. But only somewhat.
Birth from antiquity through the Middle Ages was an all-girls affair orchestrated by men who had never seen a baby born. It was considered obscene for a man to enter the delivery room, yet they wrote the guidebooks, doling out advice based on hunches handed down over generations. (In 1522, Dr. Wert, a German doctor, was sentenced to death when he was caught dressing like a woman and sneaking into a delivery room.) Their words of wisdom (or of ignorance) were a man-made concoction of myth, herbs, astrology, and superstition. Nearly everything was about good sex and good thoughts and eating and drinking the right things. It was not simple. As far back as 1500 BC, probably even earlier, women had access to all sorts of explicit information about sex, pregnancy tests, abortions, and contraceptives.
If you were lucky to be in a city, you may have been helped by a licensed midwife (European cities started educating and registering midwives around the fifteenth century); if you were in the rural outback, you may have had an uneducated but experienced midwife or a female family friend. In any event, you were surrounded by a gaggle of women. Oddly enough, expectant women were not supposed to be catered to, but to cater. You were expected to act as hostess and serve the aptly coined “groaning beer” and “groaning cakes.” Friends of the laboring woman were called “gossips,” as in God sibs, as in siblings of God. You can assume they did what all women would do under the circumstances — sit around and talk about other people. So what was once an epithet for “close-to- God” morphed into a term for “behind-the-back chatter.”
Women were told how to speed labor (a concoction of herbs), what to eat (nothing too spicy), what to drink (not too much wine), and what to think (no angry thoughts). Women were told how long to breast-feed and when to hand the baby to a wet nurse. They were told to have enough sex because a splash of sperm moistens the womb. They were also told not to have too much sex because it wears out the baby-making machinery. That’s why “whores have so seldome children,” one guide said, because “satiety gluts that womb.” In France, pregnant women rarely left the house after dark because they were told that if they looked at the moon, the baby would become a lunatic or sleepwalker.
Reprinted from Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein. Copyright 2010 by Randi Hutter Epstein.
Source
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