Turben Developmental Services - How Babies Learn to Love

Friend of the Family Radio Free Parenting Video During the past decades a number of child-development specialists have started a new trend in the scientific study of babies. They began to sneak off one by one from their consulting rooms and their laboratories and camped out in homes where new babies had just arrived. I was one of them. We took along pencils and paper, cameras and tape recorders and said to baffled mothers, "Don't mind us. Just do everything you ordinarily do in the course of the day. We want the baby to teach us a few things."

The mothers quite frankly thought we had lost our minds. But if the doctors wanted to learn how to diaper an infant or how to get a spoonful of mashed peas into a baby with a mind of his own, the mothers felt, well, just go ahead. Actually there are no benefits to the parents; but sometimes if a mother needs an hour of emergency baby sitting, it was a comfort to know that a Harvard professor was available who could entertain the baby with the kidubon bird whistle he kept in his kit.

Among the many things we scientists wanted to learn in this camp-out was one very exclusive question: How does the baby learn to love? Since no infant has ever been known to say to his mother, "I love you," the scientific work had to attack the problem by inference. What are the signs of love and attachment during the first eighteen months of life?

Over a period of years many of he scientists found agreement about certain signs. If we follow the growth of the infant's human attachments from the first day of his life to the end of his first year, we find the he responds to his mother and his father in ways that show increasing preference. And finally we see that he values his parents above all other persons in his small world. And because the mother is the primary figure during the first year of life, the selective responses to the mother became a sound guide for all the scientists engaged in this work.

What are the signs?

During the first six months the baby has the rudiments of a love language; there is the language of the smile, the language of vocal sound-making, and the language of the embrace. It's the essential vocabulary of love before we can yet speak of love. (In 18 years, when the baby is grown and "falls in love" for the first time, he will woo his partner through the language of the smile, through the utterance of endearments and the joy of the embrace.)

How does the smile become part of the vocabulary of love? The smile is innate, the universal greeting sign of our species. Already in the early weeks of life it appears in deep sleep; then gradually it is elicited more and more frequently by external stimuli. At three months of age the one stimulus that will automatically produce a smile is the human face. At this age any human face will elicit a smile, which seems a poor reward for maternal devotion, but between three months and six months the smile becomes a smile of preference - for the mother.

The baby smiles more frequently for his mother than for others and his smiles for her are bigger and more joyful. During the same period he "talks" more, jabbers more fluently, with his mother than with a stranger. And if he is frightened or has taken a bad bump, he cannot be comforted by "just anyone" any longer; he seeks the comfort of his mother's arms. His mother's arms and her lap, the closeness of her body, have a magical quality in soothing him and creating the feeling that all is well.

At this stage, then, the baby has discriminated his mother from others, shows preference for her and associates her with the satisfaction of his hunger and body needs. But, we ask ourselves doubtfully, is this "love"? or yet, perhaps. But these are signs of selection, of intimate exchange and partnership, that will lead him to love

Between six and twelve months something new begins to emerge. The baby now begins to show us another way in which he places special value upon his mother. While he has always been sociable and smiled for the uncle who wiggles his ears or for the lady in the red dress, he now begins to become downright unsociable. In place of a smile they may get a look of cold scrutiny, or a frown, or regrettably a howl of indignation.

The infant's parents are quick to offer apologies. "I don't know-what's got into him! He used to be so friendly." What's-got-into-him is something the baby specialists called strange reaction, perfectly normal behavior between six and fifteen months. It means, very simply, that his mother for the time being is the center of his world and the "stranger" is somehow an intruder, someone who unsettles the intimacy and safety of the private world. Typically, after the baby produces a negative reaction to the stranger his eyes will begin to search the room for his mother, and when he finds her face he bestows a big smile upon her and then may make overtures to be picked up.

Odd as it may sound, this behavior toward strangers is one the signs of the baby's increasing affection for his mother. All love, even in later life, begins with a feeling of exclusiveness. "You are the one who matters - only you." It's the magic circle of love that in infancy includes the father and a few other choice people but not yet the stranger. In a few months, by the way, the baby will receive strangers quite hospitably again, but that's because he is secure enough to feel that the magic circle is no longer threatened by outsiders.

At around the same time, about eight months of age, the baby shows his growing love for his mother in still another way. He complains when he is separated from her. He may not object if she leaves him to go to the kitchen, but his face is very likely now to pucker up when he sees her in her hat and coat. And his baby sitters may report that he complains loudly for a time after she leaves.

"Do you think he's spoiled?" some mothers and fathers will ask. But he's not spoiled. At this time his mother is till the most important person in his world. And he behaves the way all of us behave when a loved person is absent for a while: "I can't bear to be without you. I am lost..I am not myself when you're gone...You are my world, and without you the world is empty."

If all this seems to extravagant to put ito the minds of babies, we need only watch an infant of this age whose mother has been called away on an emergency for several days or a baby who has been isolated from his mother in a hospital. The face of grief is no different at eight months from that as 30 years of age. Loss of appetite, sleeplessness, refusal of comfort from someone else - for both ages the symptoms are the same.

From this short sketch we can see that by the end of the first year the baby has gone through a sequence of phases in his human attachments-from simple recognition of the mother to recognition of her as a special person to the discovery that she is the source of joy, the satisfier of body hungers, the comforter, the protector, the indispensable person of his world. In short, he has learned to love.

This is what we learned from scientific camping out in the homes of babies.

Another group of scientists chose to study babies who had been reared from birth in institutions as well as babies reared in their own families. And they emerged with a different story.

In the institutions - even the best ones - no baby has a mother or a mother substitute. There may be 12 or 30 babies in a ward with two or four nurses or aides for each of three shifts. No one person, no matter how much she loves babies, can serve as mother substitute under these circumstances. The infant is fed, bathed and changed by a rotating staff. In many institutions it saves staff time to feed the baby by means of a propped-up bottle. A good part of his time is spent in a crib during the first year of life.

At three months of age, when our home-grown babies smiled in response to the human face, the babies in institutions smiled too. The smiles were not frequent, some of the scientists noted, but they were there. The babbling sounds that babies make at three months were made by the institutional babies also - but their vocalizations were less frequent than those of family-reared babies and seemed to have more limited range of sounds.

Then between three months and 12 months of age something that should happen to the smile and something that should happen to vocalizations did not appear in the institutional babies. At a time when the home-reared baby showed preference with huge smiles from mother and father, the institutional baby smiled differently at everyone he saw. And around six to 12 months, the time when the family baby reserved his smile for the members of the magic circle and showed negative reactions toward strangers, the institutional baby behaved no differently toward the daily nurses and attendants and casual visitors to the nursery whom he had never seen before.

Everyone had equal value in his eyes because no one had special value. Anyone created a diversion in the monotony of the nursery day could get a smile.

During a period when the family-reared infant began to carry on "conversations" in gibberish with his mother and later when he began to imitate sound (around eight months of age), the institutional baby had a restricted range of sounds. He was not imitating sounds; and the melodies of speech, which emerge at this time like a absurd parody of English, were not present at all.

How odd! We think. These institutional babies were exposed to all the ordinary conversational exchanges of nurses and aides; they were not being reared in isolation. But findings such as these are very common among institutional babies. From this we learn that while the brain is "programmed so that a full range of articulations are available to every normal infant, the organization of these sounds into patterns and the use of these sounds from communication is entirely dependent upon the existence of human partners.

We can confirm this very simply as adults. It is possible to live in a foreign country for months, exposed to the native language day after day, and not acquire ever the rudiments of discourse in that language if there is not relationship with a native who speaks the language, some who provides the condition for dialogue.

The institutional babies had heard the sounds of English all around them, but because there are no partners to provide the intimate exchange that is vital to that acquisition of language, they were slow to acquire the sounds and the cadences of that language. And if they remained in the institution for the early years of life, speech became on the areas of severe retardation in their development.

How did the institutional infants react to separation from the nurses and aides who were the only representatives of a human world? We know that babies reared in their own homes show distress at a mother's absence, and if absences is prolonged, there is terrible grief. We understand that pain at separation is another measure of the child's love of his mother. But the institutional baby showed no signs that the absence of one or another of the people who cared for him had any meaning to him. If the red-haired nurse took a two-week vacation, there were five other nurses who performed identical duties and were interchangeable parts in the human machine that fed, bathed and changed him.

In many of the institutions, babies were placed in foster homes in the second and third years, and the possibilities of human bonds were opened up to them. But some of the babies spent their early years in the institution without human partners, without intimacy. And these children offered science the most chilling testimony for the power of love.

At the age of three and four they were already different from other children. They continued to show by their behavior that one adult was interchangeable with any other adult, and they were measurably retarded in speech and abstract thinking.

In follow-up studies in later childhood and in adult life the scientists found many of them in social agencies, in clinics and in courts. Their life problems were in all cases different, of course, but they all suffered from the most extreme effects of love-starved infancy. They had one thing in common - they were unable to form stable human bonds, unable to love. They were rootless and unbound, without partners or often, with casual and sifting partners, since no one partner was valued.

Of the children who had spent their early years in institutions, some managed to become relatively well adjusted adults, able to make meaningful, if limited, human associations. But many of the children who had never known physical closeness or the certainty of satisfaction of body hungers between man and women, who seemed to have no pleasure in body intimacy and whose sexual appetites were impoverished or bizarre. Aggression, which is normally modified in the early years often through the agency love, appeared in these loveless men and women in erratic forms, sometimes fused with eccentric sexual practices. The human capacity for empathy, for feeling oneself into another personality, was simply absent. And because there can be no conscience without the capacity to feel for another, there was a vacant space in personality where conscience would have been.

Once again the scientific question led back to the first years of life. What was it, we asked ourselves, that transpired between an ordinary baby and his parents that usually guaranteed the capacity for love in later life? Surely since the dawn of mankind and in every society the human family had produced and nurtured babies who grew into men and women capable of experiencing enduring love and physical joy. In contemporary "primitive" societies, simple and illiterate parents achieve this miracle by simply doing what their ancestors have been doing for thousands of years.

It appears that the "program" for infant-mother attachment was laid down in our biological ancestry. It has much in common with the infant-rearing practices of all mammals and has close resemblance to infant rearing among the high primates.

In the biological program we inherit, an infant leaves intrauterine life and comes into a radically changed environment. He is cushioned against the shock of the journey:

From the water world to the land world, from enclosed space to unclosed space - but he brings little instinctive baggage into the world to ensure his adaptation or his survival. As a specimen of our genus, he unfinished by comparison with the newborn of other species.

At the end of his journey there are provisions in the program that the woman who sheltered and nourished him in intrauterine life should be the woman to shelter and nourish outside the womb. Body intricacy, the shelter of enclosing arms and nourishment are all marvelously contrived in the program to center around the mother's breast.

In breast feeding, the infant is cradled in the mother's arms. Pleasure in sucking, the satisfaction of hunger, intimacy with the mother's body, are united with recognition of her face. The baby learns to associate this face, this mother's face, with an enjoyable and comforting experience. As we watch the nursing baby we see how gradually the skin surface of the body is suffused with pinkness - a sensual glow of pleasure and well-being.

When the baby is held at his mother's breast the entire ventral surface of his body is in contact with her body. And this sensual pleasure heightens his awareness of his own body. Nursing mothers also experience sensual pleasure through the baby's sucking. This should lead to no embarrassment. It is simply one of the rewards, one of the rewards, one of the ways in which mutual sensual pleasure binds the mother to her baby and the baby to her.

Breast feeding virtually guarantees that the baby and his mother are bound to each other for the duration of the nursing period. And while it is possible (as we see in many breast-feeding societies) for another lactating woman to take over a feeding in the mother's absence, the regulation of the milk supply depends upon emptying of the breast, and baby's own mother must have continuity and regularity in her nursing or she will cease to lactate.

The nursing period it is extremely variable, even in primitive societies, but where so-called modern theories of baby rearing have not influenced practices of infant care, babies are nursed for one to two years, on the average. In scientific terms this means that for the critical period of the formation of human bonds the breast-fed baby has had one mother, and his person is united in his experience with pleasure, with the satisfaction of hunger and needs and the alleviation of discomfort and fears.

Need and the satisfaction of need are the indispensable components of all primary human bonds. Love is a special form of need and need satisfaction, in which the giver of satisfaction and pleasure becomes valued over all other persons. As psychiatrist Rene Spitz reminds us, we cannot speak of love if all partners are exchangeable.

In the biological program of mother and baby there are built-in guarantees for the satisfaction of the baby's needs that ensure the formation of human bonds in the first 18 months of life. The mother is the primary "need satisfier," and that need satisfaction should lead the infant through a series of stages in the first year in which the other is love more than any other person in his small world.

Of course, it is entirely possible that even with a breast-feeding regimen the biological program can be derailed or may not result in a strong attachment between baby and mother. But in the main, when a baby and his mother are united through an extended nursing period it will most often lead to a strong attachment.

The bottle-fed baby, we learn, also can follow a normal route toward the development of strong bonds with his mother. This is particularly so when the mother follows the ancient traditions of nursing and when she approximates breast-feeding conditions.

Most mothers who bottle-feed their babies will cradle the baby in their arms during feedings, and the caresses and nuzzling and crooning that normally go with this intimacy give the baby the body closeness and sensual pleasure that are the first requirement of love. Many mothers who feed by means of the bottle choose to take over all or most of the feedings themselves. There is probably no reason why Father or Grandma cannot take over an occasional feeding. But when Mother is the main person who feeds him, the baby will recognize her earlier and begin to respond to her as a very special person, another requirement of love.

Thus most mothers have maintained the traditions while substituting the bottle for the breast. But today in many thousands of families, as well as in institution for the care of infants, the old traditions have been lost. In many busy households or nurseries where the baby is fed by means of a propped-up bottle and is deprived of one of the vital nutriments for love. Alone with his bottle in his crib, he will not learn to associate feeding with body intimacy and face of his mother. An in cases when a baby is fed during his bottle feeding by someone other that his mother he may not associate feeding with pleasure and intimacy in relation to a central persons - which disturbs the conditions for the love bonds.

The bottle gives a mother far more mobility than the breast, which is one of the reasons for its growing popularity during the past two decades. And a baby today experiences many more separations from his mother than the baby in the traditional breast-feeding societies. How does this affect the stability of the bonds to his mother?

At this point none of us can know for certain how changers in baby rearing have affected the development of children in our society during the past 20 years. I have cited the evidence from extreme cases, the babies in institutions who received no mother. What we have learned from these tragic life stories is sobering, but the lesson also should be raised as a testimony for love. It means that something goes on between an ordinary baby and ordinary mothers and fathers that create and ensures the capacity for love in infancy and in later life. It tells us that love and pleasure in the body begins in infancy and progress through childhood and adolescence to a culminating experience, "Falling in love," the finding of the pert anent partner, the achievement of sexual fulfillment.

In every act of love in mature life there is a prologue that originated in the first year of life. There are two people who arouse in each other sensual joy, feelings of longing and the conviction that they are absolutely indispensable to each other - that life without the other is meaningless. Separation from each other is intolerable. In the wooing phase and in the prelude to the act of love the mouth is rediscovered as an organ of pleasure and the entire skin surface is suffused with sensual joy. Longing sees its oldest posture, the embrace.

In the first fall in love, every pair of lovers has the conviction that "nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I never knew what love could be." And this is true, but only in a certain sense. The discovery of the partner, the one person in the world who is the source of joy and bliss, has its origin in the discovery of the first human partner in infancy. What is new is the new partner and the experience of genital arousal with longing for sexual union. Yet the pathway to full arousal in mature life was laid down in infancy, long before the genitals could play a dominant role in experience. It was the infant's joy in his own body, the fullness of infant sensuality, that opened the pathways to fulfillment in maturity. Freud said all this 65 years ago and there were few who believed him.

Redbook, May 1971