Fascinating Slideshow on Infant Statistics and Attachment

 Original Post Dec 2, 2009 at 4:44 AM on Cafemom

A psychologist friend sent this slideshow to me because 1. she knew I'd enjoy it and 2. she knows I've been unhappy with the damage to the bond and relationship with my middle child due to the epidural hormone inhibition and ensuing postpartum depression and there's a bit in there that cites research regarding brain development in the infants of depressed mothers that shows that breastfeeding protects babies from damaging asymmetry causing negative emotion-related psychopathology. Which means it prevents attachment and developmental problems caused by maternal depression (however, there is clearly damage done by the depression, it simply doesn't fall into the negative, it just prevents baby from rising as high into the positive as non-depressed mother's infants).

Slideshow

It's pretty long, so you'll need 1. Adobe Acrobat or similar program and 2. time to go through it. I'm sure something is lost without the speaker presenting it, but it's still very informative and not too hard to follow for the most part. It does get technical in several parts.

Some quotes:

Separated infants cry much more
..........................KMC babies               ...Cot babies
Number of cries        ...4                              ...41
Seconds cried          ...70                           ...2839

I especially liked slides 225-230 in regards to Kangaroo Care:
Two hospitals in a town in Ecuador, the poorer using [skin to skin contact], compared to the richer using incubators, in a controlled clinical trial... “Enrolment was terminated early because a highly significant difference in severe morbidity at six months emerged, in favour of SSC” [sic]

Slide 234 shows that breastfeeding is improved with skin to skin contact as well as overall health (and that duration of breastfeeding improves healthy outcomes as well).

In all mammals, brain grows in utero until it reaches 80% of full adult size… then BIRTH… then the brain grows the last 20% to final full adult size. Homo sapiens also has a brain that grows along this pattern… the brain reaches 80% of final size at the age of 21 months

Actual birth takes place at 9 months… which makes the human birth one year too soon: Exceedingly Immature

Humans essentially complete gestation outside the womb

In the UTERINE HABITAT, the umbilical cord delivers all the basic biological needs to the fetus. In the NEWBORNS HABITAT, the mother’s breast delivers all the basic biological needs to the fetus.

“Crying, the highest behavioural state, is DETRIMENTAL. It impairs lung functioning, jeopardizes the closure of the foramen ovale, increases intra-cranial pressure, and initiates a cascade of stress reactions”.

“Crying depletes energy reserves and oxygenation, increases intracranial pressure, white blood count and base excess, reestablishes fetal circulation, and interferes with the infant’s ability to interact appropriately with caregivers.”

Mother and offspring live in a biological state that has much in common with addiction. When they are parted the infant does not just miss its mother; it experiences a physical and psychological withdrawal from a host of her sensory stimuli, not unlike the plight of a heroin addict who goes cold turkey.

“Society reaps what it sows in the way that infants and children are treated. Efforts to reduce exposure to stress and abuse [specifically MATERNAL INFANT SEPARATION --Bergman] in early life may have far-reaching impacts on medical and psychiatric health and may reduce aggression, suspicion and untoward stress in future generations.” Martin H Teicher

Musing on Fictional Realism

If time is Schrodinger's cat (my preference lying in the quantum multiverse), then it would be linear only due to our perception of it. When not observed, it exists in a jumble--everything happening at once and not yet having happened. Thursday coming before Wednesday, but after Tuesday (the Doctor Who wibbly wobbly timey wimey... stuff bit. "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.").

If writers do not create, if they merely see into a separate universe, maybe this is why so many do not write linearly. They hop in, they see a piece here, a piece there and then they must make sense of it. I hold myself in a universe, traveling at the speed of time, sometimes slipping through the path for peeks at what is to come, at what was and is not now, but for the most part, I stay on course. I must. I cannot make sense of time in its indefinite state, so I must travel it in the way I can comprehend.

Then I wonder at the two states of writing. Which came first--the universe or the writer?
 

State one: We are not the gods of our worlds, but merely the observer. The recorder. We view what is and share it. This absolves us of the responsibility of fate.

State two: We are the gods. Our observation of the universe creates it. We bring it into being as we imagine it. It becomes real, a separate multiverse; a separate dimension. The suffering we write, the death we have wrought--we are the instruments of it all. We are guilty, though still not responsible, because rather than ignorant, we are innocent.

In conclusion to my middle of the night musings: a writer is a powerful thing. Piss one off and your counterpart in another universe might suffer greatly, exponentially branched into its own multiverse of decisions that have been made and have not been made. So, as the writers, we then mete out our vengeance upon innocents... who, of course, are much less innocent in the other reality as they are or we have created them to be, the villain to remove the guilt of our construction of fate.

Now I have to go bed, but I thought I would share with you musings from other parts of my life. The parts that don't call me Mommy.