Rachel:

Next time you are in New York, I'll take you to my Martial Arts classes.  There are many different holds that you can choose from that seem nonthreatening at first, but can put the other person in a helpless position without going as far as a stranglehold.  You can also kick and punch bags and other people (who are wearing protective gear) to get out all those feelings as well.  Very therapeutic.  I have to laugh at the fact that the Martial Arts instructor mentioned that one of the hardest kickers was a nurse working in a hospital.  So, you might want to make sure your skills are better than hers!! 

What amazes me is that it still has not completely filtered through that love and contact really are so important these many years after Harlow did his research.  Or that contact just shuts off at some particular predetermined time when you shut the door on your baby or child in their "isolation" unit and remove all contact so as to "condition" them like Skinner who put his child in a box.  

One of the facts that I gleaned was that the baby monkeys spent 18 hours a day with the cloth mother (whether or not they were fed from the cloth or the wire mother) and those that were fed from the wire mother only spent 1 hour feeding from the wire mother, eating really fast.  The book didn't really say how long the baby monkeys fed from the cloth mother.  To me the huge discrepancy in time spent hugging even an unresponsive cloth mother versus eating adds poignancy to the problem of overcoming what seems to be an increase in Manhattan of distancing yourself from your babies.  

Anyway, I have been telling moms to give a minimum of 80 (10*8) minutes of skin to skin time to their newborn babies if they can't put them because I was too timid to suggest more.  Really it should be more like a minimum of 160 (20*8) minutes if you look at the so called range of normal feeding, but maybe I should give them more of the average 350 (35*10) minutes.  Has anyone encountered any studies on minutes of skin to skin time among bottle feeding mothers and the impact on bonding? Somehow,  I have a feeling this will freak out some mothers and elicit the same denial it did in the researchers who had trouble believing that their own research was so flawed and may have caused deprivation and even death in so many infants.  

I still wonder if the eating fast with lack of contact is one of the many contributors to our rising obesity epidemics.  We now have several generations whereby eating has been turned into a rigidly scheduled task to be finished quickly so as not to disturb maternal "lifestyles" and this is being translated into how we breastfeed as well.  The slow food movement needs to start at the beginning.  

Best regards,  Susan Burger

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