The fact that a woman becomes a mother is enough to foment permanent changes in her brain. For her baby, on the other hand, changes in their newly developing brains occur largely because of actions the mother chooses to take or avoid. This begins in the very first hours of life. Skin-to-skin contact (also known as kangaroo cuddling) has numerous benefits as soon as the baby is born. Primarily, it’s a means of physical interaction and helps to regulate the baby’s temperature.
It also provides sensory stimuli, promoting an early breastfeeding response with access to colostrum, which improves both short and long-term breastfeeding, and furthermore facilitates emotional bonding. As Katherine Harmon wrote in Scientific American, skin-to-skin contact helps calm babies. When held, they cry less and it helps them sleep better. There have even been some studies showing that such contact helps to facilitate their brain development — probably because they are calmer and sleep better, allowing the opportunity for more connections to grow in the brain. The infant isn’t the only one who benefits either. Kangaroo cuddling can also release oxytocin in the mother’s brain.
A factor even more critical to an infant’s developing brain than skin-to-skin contact is the question of how long they were breastfed following their birth. One study conducted at Brown University, published in NeuroImage, discovered that by age two, babies who had been breastfed exclusively for at least the first three months of their lives had enhanced development in key parts of the brain compared to children who were fed only using formula, or who had been weaned on a combination of formula and breast milk.
Those who had been breastfed for more than a year had even more brain growth than the first control group. The researchers confirmed their findings by performing cognitive tests on older children. They found increased language performance, visual reception, and motor control performance in the groups of children who had been breastfed. Thus, to give your child a cognitive boost from the outset, choosing breast milk over formula can engender lasting benefits.
Everyone knows that babies are really good at one thing in particular: crying. This is something that can frustrate sleep-deprived mothers and parents of newborns everywhere, to no end. Simply carrying a baby around when they wake up in the middle of the night screaming seems to be one of the most effective methods of calming them down. It’s a phenomenon that can now be explained by understanding the response of the infant’s brain. The infant’s calming response to carrying is derived from a coordinated set of regulations within the central, motor, and peripheral nervous system.
In fact, the response has been with our ancestors since well before the Stone Age. It’s an evolutionarily preserved aspect of interactions between a mother and her infant. This quieting response is determined by crosstalk between both your parasympathetic nervous system and a region of the brain called the cerebellum. It’s only through understanding the instinct and bodily changes underlying the infant carrying response that we are more able to remain calm in the face of a wailing baby, thereby allowing us to respond effectively to the infant’s needs.
By nurturing your infant and expressing empathy at every turn, you impact his or her life, long into their childhood. A study conducted at Washington University in St. Louis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that school-age children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, which is a key structure crucial to learning and memory as well as response to stress. In their efforts, researchers followed 92 students from preschool, and found that those children without depression who had been nurtured had a hippocampus almost 10% larger than children whose mothers had not been as nurturing. So the next time little Jimmy scrapes his knee, kiss his boo-boo and make it better. It might just give him a cognitive advantage.
Not every woman has a child, but every child has a mother — it’s a fundamental fact of the human race. Indeed, humanity would cease to exist without mothers. It’s no wonder that this intense and instinctual relationship alters the brains of both mother and child. From the increase in gray matter and distinct brain activity that provides mom with the skills to successfully rear her newborn, to the larger, healthier, happier brains of infants as a result of mom’s choice to breastfeed, to hold, to kangaroo cuddle, and to nurture — the rewards of motherhood pay cognitive and emotional dividends to both the future generation and the present one.
This article is updated from its initial publication in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
