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Bonding and Attachment Your baby has a powerful drive to attach with you. The need to attach is strongest with mum. As a baby, your child must attach to you if she is to receive the love, attention, warmth and food that she needs to grow. You have an inbuilt urge to bond with your baby This is part of being a human parent. While most parents feel a strong bond with their baby either in pregnancy or early after birth, many do not experience the ‘bond’ for days or weeks, and a minority do not experience it at all. How you felt in your early relationships with your parents does have an impact on the way you bond with your baby today. The human brain drives every person to connect with other people. In the limbic brain, specialised cells incline us to make eye contact, allow us to read other people's emotional states by their body language, and drive us to mirror one another. Your baby is compelled to attach to you, and you are driven to bond with her. You can find out more about your baby's drive to bond on the emotions page. Quality of bonding Every parent has the neural mechanisms and the body systems that incline him or her to bond to their baby. While it's usually a pleasure, bonding is not always instant, deep or miraculous, however. Inside your brain, the specialised cells and the networks the drove you to bond with your mother as a baby responded to your experience then. Adults who bonded closely with their mothers, in particular, and with other adult carers, tend to find it easy to bond with their own babies. On the other hand, adults who's bond with their mums was ambivalent, entailed avoidance, fear or confusion, often find that with their own baby, despite all their 'rational' expectations, the bond may be similarly strained or confused. This is because neural networks formed in infancy persist, and those related to mother-baby bonding are called into play again when you become a parent. If your bond with your mum (or dad) was awkward, painful or difficult, it may be encouraging that it is never too late to 'make repair' and alter, in a beneficial way, the deep process of your own brain so that you can enjoy a close and loving bond now with your baby - and your baby will feel the benefits of this. You'll find more on making repair on the emotions page. Boosting the bond The way you bond with your baby depends on so many things. Your baby's personality, and her health and strength as a newborn will affect the way you communicate. so will your own experience as a baby. But there are many things you can do that are known to support bonding - to actively stimulate the parts of the brain that need stimulation to create a feeling of safety and trust, and to increase the flow of hormones and neuropeptides that encourage bonding; and also to stimulate genes that encourage the firing and networking of cells in the brain responsible for bonding behaviour. Breastfeeding, if successful, is a On a babiesknow course you'll get lots of tips on promoting bonding, in pregnancy and from birth, and later on (many parents feel the bond finally feels right when their child is a toddler). We recommend breastfeeding, sleeping with your baby, touch and massage, playing and more. All these activities are beneficial, but the most crucial element for your baby is that she feels that you are in tune, and with her. Inside her brain, her limbic brain senses your feelings, and knows if you are distracted, or really present. Listening to and accepting your own feelings, whatever these may be, is a skill that will help you stay present for your baby, and give her the loving attention she needs. All contents copyright © Babiesknow, 2008. All rights reserved. |
"After the babiesknow course - in fact it was half way through - we suddenly started tuning into our toddler, whose first two years had been such a struggle for us all - and our relationship changed overnight. Thank goodness, it's never too late to bond." |
