As long as we are discussing that horrible, die-hard myth about how children may be harmed by being given loving attention when they show signs of needing it, can we discuss the word most often used in English to describe what may happen?  I refer to the word 'spoil'.  It's not as if children are mayonnaise or luncheon meat or some other kind of food that easily goes bad under the wrong storage conditions, so why do we use the same word?  It's demeaning to children (to all people, really) and it's judgmental.

We have a corresponding word in Norwegian though it differs slightly from the word for describing spoiled food.  When I am asked about the risk of a young baby becoming spoiled if it is comforted when in distress, I say 'We used to believe that, but we know better now.  Children at this age want exactly what they need and they need exactly what they want.  So far we don't know of anyone who was ruined by being cared for - but we do know of plenty of people who have been harmed by not getting the care they needed.'  I wish it were not such a common question, along with the question about whether babies need to cry to exercise their lungs - often posed by the same parents, in rapid succession.  Arrggghh.

Reading the Strathearn articles at the U of Queensland site was sobering, since it seems that many of us have difficulty responding warmly to our childrens' distress, and it is not simply a matter of needing encouragement to follow our feelings or 'instincts'.  Those feelings may in some cases actually hinder a mother from nurturing her child, if she herself was not given the kind of nurturing that fosters secure attachment.  From the article on how the mother-child bond affects more than one generation, I quote:  "For mothers with ‘secure' attachment, we found that both happy and sad infant faces produced a reward signal in their brain, or a ‘natural high',” Dr Strathearn said.

“However, mothers with an ‘insecure' attachment pattern didn't show this same brain response.  In fact, their own infant's crying face activated the insula, a brain region associated with feelings of unfairness, pain or disgust.  Thus, a mother's own experience in childhood may shape how she responds to her baby's needs, through these changes in the brain.  This may help us to better understand factors leading to child neglect.” 

The full article is at http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=19393 

Personally I am getting less and less tolerant of environments, such as hospital maternity wards, mine in particular, in which children's cries and even their screams are considered part of the normal background noise, rather than an emergency siren to which we should respond immediately.  I'm not sure what part of my brain gets activated, all I know is I feel all tied in knots when I hear a newborn cry for more than a minute without being comforted, and if it continues I can not keep working, I have to go investigate and comfort the baby if there is no parent available to do so.  I try to collect myself so when the mother does appear (from the toilet, or shower, or wherever she was when the baby started to cry) I can tell her 'somebody missed you desperately' rather than snapping 'What on earth kept you so long?! Some people don't deserve to have children!' because even I can appreciate that mothers need to eat, and pee, and wash, and we don't provide an extended family to help her while she is our guest.

Even an exhausted mother is able to take it as a compliment that her one-day old child already prefers her arms to a plastic box on wheels, if someone is on hand to point it out.  If you work in a hospital, you know that there is never enough time allotted for the most important thing we do, which is nurture the mother so she can nurture her baby, and you are probably as frustrated as I am about it too.

The book 'What Mothers Do - especially when it looks like nothing' is well worth a read, for those who haven't taken the time to do so before.  Naomi Stadlen is the author.

Rachel Myr
trying to stand up for the basic human rights of newborn people in Kristiansand, Norway

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