They weren’t constantly licking and grooming their pups. They did their LG-ing mostly in one very specific situation: when their pups were stressed out. It was almost as if the dams were trying to teach their pups, through repetition, a valuable skill: how to manage their inflamed stress systems and restore them to a resting state. The equivalent skill for human infants, I think, is being able to calm down after a tantrum or a bad scare, and that’s what I concentrated on trying to help Ellington learn how to do. To be clear: I didn’t lick my son. I didn’t even really groom him much, to be
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