I’ve attached links below to three songs welcoming infants into the world: “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder, “I Get to Be the One” by J.J. Heller, and “You Will Always Be My Son” by Anthem Lights.
As we all know, our parents and other major caregivers have a huge impact on us as infants and children. Each infant, toddler, child, and youth, of course, needs plenty of support through these first four stages of life. The support that each of us receives can affect our self-concept, our self-esteem, and our relationships for the rest of our life.
The period from conception until at least one year after birth is our perinatal stage of development. Our womb, birth, and infancy experiences make up the stage of our perinatal self.
Our womb-and-birth experience has a long-term impact on the development of our self. The events from conception to birth matter. Our womb, birth, and newborn experience — our perinatal experience — has lifelong power.
Each of our natural lives begins with our conception. During conception, the natural bodies of each pair of human parents combine to conceive and give form and matter to a new natural body as a human embryo.
Based on everything we know about consciousness in humans and animals, it seems evident that our consciousness is derived along with our physical body, with which it is united. The whole person – at least the whole natural person – is initiated by two parents in one and the same generative act.
Step by step, material substances (in forms) are added, in their various patterns and levels, for the reception of more life. Each fetal being takes on more capacities, more consciousness, and more significance with each passing week.
Some six weeks after conception, our natural fetal body takes on more of a true natural life with a beating heart. By about 12 weeks after conception, brain cells – neurons – begin to appear. By 28 weeks after conception, virtually all our brain cells are present.
It’s a weak brain at 28 weeks in utero, but brain activity regulating of innate behavioral patterns is strong. Awareness and even a fetal consciousness does not have to be heavily brain-based, of course. The memory system may be cellular, organism-wide, or otherwise not limited to the brain.
Our consciousness even in our months as a preborn seems to include telepathic awareness and sensing with our mother and even other human beings. Even transcendent awareness from beyond our prenate body seems to occur somehow.
If we feel wanted or somehow know that we are wanted, we feel more secure and our prenate nervous system develops along a better path. If we feel unwanted or somehow know that we are unwanted, we feel more anxious and our nervous system develops along a more troubled path. And some strengthened boundaries to the self, some extra individuation, seems to occur in our fetal state in response to discomfort, pain, or other negative experiences in the womb.
In a normal (or good) womb experience, all our needs are satisfied. As a prenate, we sense the unconditional love of our future caregivers and we live in a state of oceanic unity with our mother. We feel nourished, safe, secure, protected, blissful, tranquil, serene, and peaceful. And our nervous system reacts to, codes, and stores this positive experience.
For those of us who believe that we have a soul that will endure to the remainder of eternity, the question arises: When does our soul emerge? This raises many complex questions involving the interaction of our soul and our brain, and the way both our consciousness and our soul are rooted in our brain and our body. How and when do we become ensouled in our body? Very few of us have given this weighty matter the attention it deserves. Almost all of us who believe we have a soul to eternity believe that it arrives by the time of our natural birth. We believe that at natural birth and possibly sooner, each human soul begins a life that will endure for the remainder of eternity.
Let’s turn to the transition from prenate to infant – the human experience of birth.
At the end of our time in the womb, each of us undergoes a three-stage birth experience: “no exit,” the struggle out, and arrival.
First is our no-exit experience. Chemicals and then uterine and muscular contractions signal us to leave the womb, but there is no way out. We become anxious in the face of this imminent yet unidentifiable danger to our well-being. We feel claustrophobic, engulfed, trapped, inadequate, afraid, and paranoid.
We are constricted, with no way out and no way back to the serenity of the previous nine months, and our previous reference points are shattered.
Second is our struggle-out experience. The cervix opens and we experience the biological fury of our mother’s organism. With the destructive onslaught of her uterine contractions, we are propelled forward gradually through crushing pressure. With our aggressive effort to avoid total defeat and to survive this catastrophic ordeal, the extreme pressure (and often suffocation) causes us both extreme agony and extreme ecstasy.
Third is our arrival experience. We are propelled through the birth canal and become an organism free of the womb. In a healthy birth, we experience physical and emotional relief, resolution, triumph, contentment, and joy.
Our birth can set the balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic functioning of our nervous system. With a healthy birth, we are more likely to live our lives nicely balanced – exercising parasympathetic restraint as needed and sympathetic drive as needed.
Let’s turn to the experience of being a human infant. The first 12 months of life, perhaps the first 18 months of life.
At birth we are almost nothing but need. As a baby each of us is a helpless, clinging creature. We need to be held, touched, cuddled, and soothed by a warm caregiver. Babies react to events — especially trauma and neglect — much more strongly than do adults. Ideally, our needs are met.
As an infant, our need for a caregiver is fairly constant. As an infant, toddler, and child, we most feel our need for our caregiver when we become frightened, tired, or stressed.
Infancy is very much about physical survival and meeting our physiological needs. Infancy is primarily a sensory, nonverbal, and instinctual phase of life. Doing what we must to stay alive. Satisfying our basic, imperative physiological needs: food, water, a warm or cool temperature, sleep.
With our caregivers, we make bids for attention, nurture, protection, security, and other needs. Ideally, our caregivers are responsive and fill our needs -- and model a range of behaviors for us.
Unimpaired infant and toddler development requires both secure attachments to one or more responsive caregivers. We usually become attached to — form a strong and long-lasting emotional tie — with our mother or primary caregiver.
When our caregivers are responsive, the attachment is secure. Children who had a secure attachment with at least one caregiver as an infant are more curious, self-directed, and eager to learn; they initiate more play with their peers; they are sensitive to the needs and feelings of other children; and they are more popular with their peers.
Let’s try to go into the mental world of the infant.
Despite the extraordinary capacities of prenates discovered in recent decades, it still seems safe to say that we are born with no connate ideas, words, logic, narrative capacity, or sense of historical time. In infancy, our synapses — connections between our brain cells (neurons) — steadily arrive. These neural networks help make a whole range of mental capacities possible, including awareness of our self.
As newborns, our mental experience encompasses two major activities: our sensory perceptions and our emotional reactions.
In the womb, we do not yet have a separate individual awareness of self. And we begin life still having no separate sense of self. We sense ourselves to be fused with our environment — undifferentiated from it — and we are unaware of any independent self.
For our first 5 to 9 months, we are both symbiotic and adualistic: we are not aware that our body is different than the material world. To us, it seems that our body and our physical environment blend.
And for our first 15 to 24 months, we are not aware that our emotions are different than those of everyone else. To us, it seems that our emotions and our emotional environment blend. A baby will cry simply because another baby cries.
Beginning when we are between 4 and 9 months old, we become aware that our physical self is independent from other people’s and from our physical environment. And we are heavily focused on our physical needs for survival, safety, security, food, water, milk, and warmth.
Our sense of self becomes rooted in our body. Not surprisingly, then, most babies seem to view other babies as objects.
So we begin our life with our self and world seemingly fused, both physically and emotionally. And we are bonded symbiotically with our primary caregivers – especially, if she is present, our mother.
Let’s look a little closer at the parenting of an infant.
Our mother imposes herself between us and the world. She satisfies our insistent needs and protects us from fear and overwhelming anxiety. With her comfort, support, and care, our mother shows us that we are lovable, and how to love. She sets lifelong patterns for trust and intimacy.
On average, today’s fathers spend about two-thirds as much time with their children as mothers do. Fathers are equally sensitive to the cues of their infant, and equally responsive. However, fathers spend more time playing with their children than in caregiving.
Fathers tend to provide infants and children with physical, stimulating, novel, and exciting play — and foster their children’s autonomy and individuation. Fathers also model masculinity for their sons and confirm femininity in their daughters.
As parents, we focus on a newborn’s physical needs for survival, safety, security, food, water, milk, and warmth. Until they become independent young adults, we continue to meet our children’s physical needs, including their needs for survival, healthy immunity and physical stress responses, food, clothing, shelter, and bodily safety, including protection from physical injury, illness, pain, and other damage.
Even an infant takes pleasure and joy from mastering challenges. We help infants and children gain mastery with their bodies — to control and use their bodies and parts of their bodies— to move, function, and express themselves. We help them gain dexterity with their hands as they reach, grasp, handle, and manipulate toys and other objects.
Are we encountering an infant, with a perinatal self? With a newborn, let’s focus on his or her physical needs for survival, safety, security, food, water, milk, and warmth. With all infants, let’s hold them, warmly touch them, cuddle them, soothe them, and pour out warm feelings to them — and shield them from trauma and neglect. Let’s do what comes naturally to almost all of us. and respond to infants with happiness, wonder, pride, and love.
“Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder