One of the earliest and most interesting examples of a behavioral-biological connection, where it was the behavior of the infant initiating a biological response in the mother, was the demonstration that infant\u2019s cries stimulated the milk let-down reflex. This is a wonderful one because of course nutrition is absolutely critical to the survival of the infant. Crying is something the infant does from birth, from the very first birth cry on, and it turns out that these cries are very effective stimulators to the milk let-down reflex which helps establish successful lactation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that\u2019s just one illustration and that\u2019s mediated by the oxytocin pathway for lacto-oxytocin pathway, and there are others. Oxytocin, as it turns out, is a critical hormone for regulating a whole variety of maternal caregiving behaviors. This has been most well worked out in animal species, as you can imagine, but indeed the oxytocin has become of significant interest in understanding why parents provide the right kind of caregiving for their infants and how important that is to the right feelings of affiliation and attachment that mothers have for their infants. So it\u2019s almost certainly the case that very similar pathways occur in the caregiver and that\u2019s what you\u2019d expect, indeed, if it is a dyadic, or dual if you like, kind of system that is central for this early good start, you\u2019d expect it to be effective for the parents as well as for the infants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because one of the anecdotes I like to describe is just imagine how remarkable the organism is that has been designed by human nature, in that metaphorical sense, that we can raise infants in which they receive milk from their natural mothers on an average of every 15 minutes in the first two or three years of life from breast feeding, or they can be raised on the milk of another species as we\u2019ve been doing for the last few decades and feeding them every four hours. That\u2019s a remarkably resilient organism. So what is the lesson of that for understanding how we should take care of our infants. And I think one of the lessons is that the range of normality and potential strategies that are available to us to raise infants is much broader than we might think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And what\u2019s fantastic about the mother-infant pair is that you can have successful infants being raised by mothers in a whole variety of contexts with a whole variety of strategies depending on what the challenges.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the earliest and most interesting examples of a behavioral-biological connection, where it was the behavior of the infant initiating a biological response in the mother, was the demonstration that infant\u2019s cries stimulated the milk let-down reflex. This is a wonderful one because of course nutrition is absolutely critical to the survival of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1603","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1604,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1603\/revisions\/1604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}