Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby's brain

by Sue Gerhardt

relationships are a source of pleasure and comfort, and therefore worth preserving.

Important pathways continue to be established through childhood, especially up to the age of 7.

Then in early adolescence there is another intense moment of brain reorganisation, until the brain is fully fledged at 15 years old.

mindfulness meditation can help improve self-regulation

However, in my view, prevention is better than cure.

babies need not too much, not too little, but just the right amount of responsiveness

not the kind that jumps anxiously to meet their every need, nor the kind that ignores them for too long, but the kind of relaxed responsiveness that confident parents tend to have.

the best responsiveness for babies is the ‘contingent’ kind. This means that the parent needs to respond to the actual needs of their particular baby, not to their own idea of what a baby might need.

If the baby is distressed, he needs holding and rocking. If he’s bored, he needs a distraction. If he’s hungry, he needs food. If he has caught his foot in a blanket, it needs releasing.

understanding the specific way that you are feeling, helping you to express it, and thinking about solutions with you.

This is the essence of emotional regulation:

Good regulation depends on feelings flowing freely through the body, while having the mental capacity to notice and reflect on them, and to choose whether or not to act on them.

They are learnt in an unconscious way and become assumptions about the world

However, in less drastic circumstances, there is increasing evidence that the effects of early stress can be repaired if good care is available quickly enough. For example, the effect of prenatal stress on a baby’s hippocampus can be put right as long as he receives attentive post-natal care

Serotonin synthesis in the brain starts in the womb and increases through the first two years of life, peaking at the age of 5

During this period, stress can alter the way the serotonin system develops and can create lifelong tendencies to serotonin dysfunction and vulnerability to anxiety, depression and aggression

Exercise has also been found to increase the volume of the hippocampus

there may be more flexibility for those with relatively minor problems. One study with ordinary but stressed adults found that only 8 weeks of mindfulness meditation was needed to reduce their grey matter volume in the right amygdala

Fascinating work by Britta Holzel has also found that mindfulness increases the important regulatory connections between the amygdala and the higher brain, especially the anterior cingulate

It is well known that regular, mild exercise can stimulate endorphins; some evidence suggests it might also stimulate the release of serotonin

Exercise is increasingly seen as an effective antidepressant (NICE 2009). Likewise, body massage has a good effect on depression by reducing stress hormones and increasing serotonin

Regular practice of mindfulness meditation can also reduce cortisol levels, and can calm anxieties by dec...

Found in oily fish such as mackerel, they have a powerful anti-inflammatory effect and can decrease the production of cytokines

Sulforaphane, found in broccoli and cauliflower, is another substance which defends the body against inflammatory conditions. When diets lack these constituents, the individual is less protected against inflammation, which as we have seen, is linked with depression as well as a whole range of diseases ranging from arthritis through to heart disease.

we find that her fatty acids pass through the placenta and breast milk and may affect various systems in her offspring’s brain during critical periods of development. In particular, early deficiencies of omega-3 can affect the operation of serotonin and dopamine in the frontal cortex

But emotional habits take time to form and time to change. First, they have to be aroused. You can only change emotional processing by doing it differently.

When a particular feeling is aroused, neurotransmitters are released from the subcortex and old neural networks automatically become activated to manage this state of arousal in the old way. But with the help of a therapist, new forms of regulation can be practised.

There is a common misconception that psychotherapy is about hating your mother.

At the earliest stage of life, safety and acceptance are conveyed by touch. But as we mature, we increasingly use words to ‘hold’ each other. Depressed babies, abused babies, or neglected babies miss out on these experiences of physical and verbal holding. Their feelings and states are not well recognised, accepted and regulated. They don’t learn that all states can be ‘held’ and that failures in acceptance or regulation can be repaired.

You are simply the ‘mum with the baby’. This role subsumes all other selves you have been or want to be.

But probably for most women who have a sense of identity based on their working lives, it is a very difficult adjustment.

This approach has been sanctioned by politicians.

These concessions are not based on the needs of the baby, but act as a gesture to give parents time to recover from the impact of a new baby.

They still hurry parents ba...

This sends women the message that mothering is not a valued activity in its own right, and that public roles are the only ones that really matter.

During the ‘primal period’, as Michel Odent has called the time of dependent infancy (1986), babies do have very demanding needs. They are demanding because they are continuous, sometimes hard to fathom without the aid of language, and they make no concessions to adult needs. You cannot ask a baby to wait while you make a phone call or finish eating your lunch. Once the wail goes up, there is an urgency to quieten it, which takes precedence over everything. The baby cannot wait because the baby has no concept of time and therefore no capacity to anticipate needs being met in 10 minutes’ time.

When parents respond to the baby’s signals, they are participating in many important biological processes. They are helping the baby’s nervous system to mature in such a way that it does not get overstressed. They are helping the bioamine pathways to be set at a moderate level. They are contributing to a robust immune system and a robust stress response. They are helping to build up the prefrontal cortex and the child’s capacity to hold information in mind, to reflect on feelings and to restrain impulses, all of which will be a vital part of his or her future capacity to behave socially.

Whether or not this is the case, she fails to note that women’s lives have certainly changed in this period. Women’s greater participation in the economy, increasingly while their children are very young, has made it much harder for them to juggle the demands of a career with the demands of motherhood. During this period, when depression has apparently surged dramatically, more and more babies have been cared for by strangers during daylight hours, and by their parents at the end of a busy working day.

The qualities of good parenting (and of close relationships in general) are essentially regulatory qualities: the capacity to listen, to notice, to shape behaviour and to be able to restore good feelings through some kind of physical, emotional or mental contact, through a touch, a smile, a way of putting feelings and thoughts into words.