Attraction-Affecting Behavior

A joint stay in the ward of the maternity hospital( ruming-in) is especially useful for mothers experiencing difficulty with transition directly to maternal duties. One day, doing a detour, I went to see Jen, who had recently given birth, and found her in sorrow."What happened?" I asked.

She did not hide: "All these fountain-beating feelings that I'm supposed to feel for my child - so, there are none! I'm nervous, tense and do not know what to do. "

I began to cheer Jen: "Love at first sight does not happen to every couple, like between a woman and a man, so between mother and child. For some mothers and their children this is a slow and gradual process. Do not worry, your baby will help you. But you must provide the conditions that will allow the system to take care of the child. "And I began to explain.

All children are born with a set of special qualities called attachment behavior - traits and behaviors aimed at giving the child caregiver the knowledge of the presence of the child and pulling the person, like a magnet, to the child. These features include the roundness of the eyes of the child, cheeks and the whole body;soft skin;comparatively large eyes of the child;a piercing long look;the delicious smell of a newborn;and, perhaps most importantly, the child's first language is screaming and sounds that precede screaming.

This is how the original system of communication between mother and child works. The sounds issued by the child, notifying about approach of scream, activate the mother's emotions. Not only at the psychological, but also at the physiological level. As already discussed in Article 1, after hearing the crying of her child, the mother feels an increased flow of blood to her chest, which is accompanied by a biological irresistible desire to take the baby in her arms and feed. This is one of the most vivid examples of how the child's biological signals trigger the mother's biological response. There is no other signal in the world that would cause such a violent reaction from the mother, like the crying of a child. At no other time in the life of the child

the language will not be able to so strongly urge the mother to act.

Imagine what happens when a mother and child live together. The child begins to cry. The mother, as she is near and physiologically adjusted to the child, immediately takes the child to her and feeds him. The child stops crying. When the child wakes up again, writhes, makes grimaces and then begins to cry, the mother reacts in exactly the same way. The next time the mother notices the child's signals before the scream. When the child wakes up, writhes and grimaces, the mother takes it in her arms and feeds before he has to cry. She learned to understand the signs given by the child and respond accordingly. After repeated repetition of this dialogue during the stay in the maternity home, the mother and child are already acting as one team. The child learns to express his needs better;the mother learns to understand the child better and react properly. Since the cry of the child causes a hormonal response in the mother's body, the reflex of the lactation( consisting in the removal of milk from the mammary sinuses in which it is stored inside the mammary gland, along the ducts to the nipples) does not malfunction, and the mother and child are in biological harmony.

Now compare this idyll called ruming-in with the case when baby care is carried out in the children's ward. Imagine this newborn baby lying in a plastic box. He wakes up hungry and cries along with twenty other hungry babies in plastic boxes, which by that time had already all interrupted each other. A kind and caring nurse hears cries and answers them as quickly as time permits. But she does not have biological attachment to this child, there is no internal program specifically targeted at this newborn, and her hormonal background does not change when this baby cries. A crying hungry child gets to her mother at a strictly certain time. The problem is that child crying has two phases: the first sounds of crying have an affectionate property, while the further sounds of unheeded crying are more unpleasant by ear and can even cause a mother to reject the reaction.

Note: I imagine myself in the place of my newly born child and understand that the hunger is a new sensation for him. He has never experienced it before and does not know that I will quickly solve this problem. A hungry child becomes restless, and then, very quickly, a violent cry begins. I want to be around before this happens.

From a mother who missed the first scene of this biological drama because she was out,

when her baby started screaming, still expects a caring reaction to her child a few minutes later. By the time the child is presented to the mother from the nursery, he has either surrendered and stopped crying, falling asleep again( leaving pain), or welcoming his mother with even more loud, heartbreaking cries. A mother who has biological attachment to her child, however, hears only cries that can cause anxiety rather than tenderness. Although she can offer a child such a powerful sedative as the breast, she can be so tense that the milk will not be removed and fed to the nipple, which will make the child cry even harder. Over time, she comes to the point that she begins to seriously doubt her ability to calm the child, and the child has to spend more and more time in the nursery, where, according to the mother, the "experts" can give him better care. This separation leads to an even greater number of missed signals and leaves gaps in the relationship between the mother and the child, and they return home from the hospital without knowing each other.

It's quite another matter if a child lives with his mother. He wakes up in his mother's room, his early crying sounds quickly get attention, and he is put to the chest or before he has to cry, or at least before the initial affectionate crying passes into a uncomfortable phase. Thus, both the mother and the child benefit from a joint stay. Children cry less, mothers show more mature skills when the child cries, and infant distress syndrome( anxiety, colic, endless crying) happens less often than in children in the children's ward. At us in children's branch even there is such saying: "Children in a children's cry are louder, children with mum shout better".

Instead of a ruming-in( cohabitation), it would be better to use the term fitting-in( co-mashing).Spending more time together and repeating the signal-response dialogue, the child and mother are well adjusted to each other - and each one shows the best.