How Love and Caring Makes Your Baby Smart

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How Love and Caring Makes Your Baby Smart

loving baby makes her smart

When you show your love to your baby by hugging, kissing, coddling and making her feel secure and being cared for, you are helping to develop her brain. You are also making her grow to be socially well-adjusted.

Yet there was a time when child care “experts” and grandparents would advise that the best way to treat your baby is to let her cry so she can learn to be tough, leave her alone so she can be independent, and not respond to her signals because it would spoil her.

Studies including that by Harlow in the 1950’s and the more recent one by Kim Bard of University of Portsmouth in England have proven these advices to be wrong. Their experiments with chimps have shown that those that are deprived of attachment turn out to be “nutty” and intellectually inferior to those who were given motherly love.

The human baby is the most socially influenced creature on earth. When your baby is born, her brain is the least “hard-wired”, the most flexible, and requires to be shaped by experience. Your baby’s earliest experiences with you, the parent, shape what is to become of her as an adult. It is as a baby that she learns about how to feel and handle her feelings – and this affects her later behavior and thinking capabilities.

For a baby, having a flexible brain is important because it needs to be “shaped” by inputs of other humans in order to survive in her particular culture. Shaping a brain that is needed to survive in the culture of Africa is different to that of China, for example.

Sue Gerhardt in her book Why Love Matters shows why loving and being responsive to your baby is important:

Loving, touching and responding to your baby’s signals help your baby’s nervous system to mature without being overstressed. Your love makes a baby feel secure so she can be unhampered in developing her brain in other ways.

You help give your baby a healthy immune system
You contribute to your baby’s robust stress response.
You are helping to build up your baby’s prefrontal cortex and her ability to hold information in mind, to reflect on feelings, to hold back impulses and be well-adjusted in her social relationships in the future. The orbitofrontal cortex develops almost entirely after the baby is born, and does not mature until toddlerhood.
Lots of positive experiences as a baby, such as being smiled at and coddled produce brains with more neuronal connections, and this produces a smart brain.

A neglected or unloved baby can lead to mental problems as an adult:

The absence of a mother or a caregiver who notices her feelings increases the level of the stress hormone cortisol. This over reactive stress response might lead to emotional insecurity and chronic depression. See other bad effects of stress on the kid's brain.
Neglecting your baby might also result in a low level of norepinephrine which can cause her to be unable to adapt, not learning from mistakes.

When a baby has an unhappy early relationship, it may be hard for her to experience pleasure and reward in later life. This is due to having developed fewer dopamine and opiate receptors in the brain (Martin 1997; Lagercrantz and Herlenius 2001).
When a baby does not get attention, she may learn to be helpless. This will lead to withdrawal and depression as an adult.

Here are the ways to show love to your baby:

Handle her a lot, interact with her, establish eye contact and communicate with your eyes. Make her feel secure and that you are always there when she needs you.
Be sensitive to your baby’s changing mood and states, and respond to these.
Teach your baby to differentiate range of feelings like anger, annoyance and irritation by engaging in baby talk and mirroring her feelings so she can learn about what she is going through.
Be patient with your baby when she is crying. Do not shout at her, let alone hurt her. Be calm and reassure her that everything is okay.
Breastfeed. This is one activity where baby feels at peace and loved. This activity soothes the mother too.
If you have to put your kid in childcare, make sure that the caregiver really pays attention to the child. It is the kind of care that counts more than who gives the caring.

Click here for Smart Babies: Tools to Stimulate Their Minds