When this comes up at LLL meetings, I use an illustration from that
venerable Ashley Montagu book, _Touching_ (1971).  The point of the
illustration is that *bonding* has little if anything to do with
*feeding*.  The supporting argument is the famous monkey study where
the young were separated from their mothers at 2-3 days of age, and
placed in cubicles with both hard wire mother-substitutes and soft
cloth mother-substitutes.  In half the cases, the hard wire mother
"lactated" (had a bottle of milk attached), and in the other half,
the cloth mother had that distinction.  All the young monkeys spent
most of their time with the cuddly cloth mother-substitutes
regardless of whether there was food involved.  The preference for
the cloth mother was strong in both groups (12-18 hrs per day vs. 1-2
hrs per day for the wire mother), and it persisted through the length
of the study (almost 6 months).

Montagu quotes from the original researchers (Harlow and Zimmerman,
1958): "These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable
of overwhelming importance in the development of affectational
responses, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance.
With age and opportunity to learn, subjects with the lactating wire
mother showed decreasing responsiveness to her and increasing
responsiveness to the nonlactating cloth mother . . . "  And Harlow
further writes, "We were not surprised to discover that contact
comfort was an important basic affectational or love variable, but we
did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of
nursing; indeed, the disparity is so great as to suggest that the
primary function of nursing as an affectational variable is that of
insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the
mother."

Now I'm sure others on the list will know if this line of reasoning
has been overturned since 1958 :-) but I suspect it hasn't.

A very similar point has been made by someone on LactNet, much more
succinctly: it is dad's job to show the baby that *love* is not
necessarily associated with *food*.  (I'm sorry that I can't give
this bit of brilliance proper attribution -- will the author raise a
hand?)

Margaret
LLLL
Longmont, CO

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