Another powerful way to ‘put yourself in the baby’s shoes’:

Imagine that the other person in YOUR most intimate relationship (as adults,
that’s usually our marriage / sexual relationship) refused to respond to
your distress, insisted that you stay alone no matter how much you needed a
hug, quizzed you every time you made yourself a snack, or told you to keep
eating when you were full or didn’t like the food...

There’s a great piece somewhere that asks mothers to imagine their partner
announcing that another wife was joining the family and wouldn’t it be great
that she could wear the clothes that the current wife was getting too big
for, etc.   I gained a valuable new perspective reading this when I was
expecting my second child, plus it’s pretty funny.  Wish I could remember
the source, but that was a long time ago.

Like some of us here, I too was the ‘beneficiary’ of non-responsive
parenting and could easily have gone down the road of inflicting it on my
own kids.  It made me so damn MAD not to be getting enough sleep, and the
few times I let my daughter cry, I just got madder and more stubborn.  I too
am amazed by moms who manage to be responsive and connected without
breastfeeding – they clearly have a great deal more sense than I did.

Fortunately, I had been given a copy of the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
while I was pregnant so I had enough information to protect the
breastfeeding relationship and I eventually got myself to a LLLC meeting.
There I found moms parenting in a way that was very attractive to me, and
more information about the actual physical arrangements of using
breastfeeding as the awesome mothering tool that it is. 

For more on the subject of stress, a long but very worthwhile read is In An
Unspoken Voice, by Peter Levine, PhD (stress/trauma expert) – it's not about
infancy, but every once in a while he touches on an aspect of early
development.  

From the book:

"Babies learn about their body/mind self through action and interaction with
their parents and with the environment that surrounds them.  Infants live
within a sea of sensations (hunger, pain, anger, tiredness); communicating
those states is a matter of survival.  For the human infant, attachment [to
a caregiver] is the only available survival mechanism.

...the younger, the more developmentally immature or insecurely attached,
the more likely it is that [an individual] will respond to stress, threat
and danger with paralysis ['freeze'] rather than active struggle.  

People who lack solid early attachment bonding to a primary caregiver, and
therefore lack a foundation of safety [like babies], are much more
vulnerable to being ... traumatized.

Sensations actually form the bedrock for a child's gradual maturation toward
AUTHENTIC autonomy and independence.

For growth and development, any live organism [baby] and its supporting
environment [mom] must be in intimate contact."

Ingrid 

Ingrid Tilstra
La Leche League Canada Leader
International Board Certified Lactation Consultant

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