Finding Christopher, Finding Myself

I'm cheating again tonight!  I spent the first part of the day with my hubby, which doesn't happen near enough.  I spent the rest of the day with my 4 year old granddaughter, spoiling her while her mom and dad are out of town.  I thought I would get her to sleep and be able to write, but she is nowhere near ready to go to sleep!  So here are some quotes I found about the importance of the mother/child bond while researching for another post. 

I'm off to go watch a movie and hopefully put an overly tired four year old to sleep!

To interfere with or destroy this intimacy is to risk interrupting a vital psychological process that may reduce the woman's confidence in herself as a mother and interfere with the flow of communication between her and her baby. - Marshall Klaus

While what the newborn craves is touch, physical skin stimulus and the familiar sound of mother's heartbeat, she is placed in a lifeless basket, with a baby blanket, perhaps a teddybear or soft doll. She is learning that encounters with people cause severe stress. For the newborn, separation from mother equals abandonment:

It is impossible to overstate the monstrousness of this final violation of a new life... this isolation neatly cancels every possible chance for bonding, for relaxation of the birth stress, for the activation of the sensory system for its extra-uterine function, and for the completion of the reticular formation for full mental-physical coordinates and learning... the organism never fully recovers. All future learning is affected. The infant body goes into shock. - Joseph Chilton Pearce

Marshal Klaus, MD, and John Kennell, MD, wrote the book Maternal-Infant Bonding, in 1976, describing the connection between a mother and her child, which originate at birth (or even before) and which is characterized as an intense physical, emotional, spiritual, bond that exists between the two. They describe this bond as a sensitive dance that occurs between them, where each relies on the cues of the other and interacts in an intense intertwined fashion.

The mother-infant bond is extremely important to the present and future emotional health of a child. There are clear indications that an infant is ready to respond to his mother from the moment of birth. Evidence shows that an infant hears and recognizes his mother's voice prenatally.  This innate preference in addition to several reflexive behaviors are important to the concept of bonding.  (Brazelton & Cramer, 1990).