On Observing Infants in Prams and Buggies

                    

Let Your Observations Support  The Theme Of This Blog.

I would like to see readers of this blog observe the behavior of infants in both forward and mother facing prams and buggies and get some sort of measure from such observation as to their relative contentment. This should convince those taking the effort that forward facing strollers or prams indeed are cold comfort to the psyche of those so 'ensconced'.
What age of infant does the substance of this blog relate.  It relates to the infant having eye contact, touch, auditory stimulus and smell at close hand right from birth which means positioning them so these can happen. Increasing strength and physical activity enable the developing infant to move to away from such reassuring stimuli as they chose fit –as their assurance and confidence grows –but these attributes aren’t inherent and need to be nurtured.  

One wonders how much the grip or startle reflex, which are inherent and not nurtured and  which tend to go normally around 2 – 4 months  in humans,  is not just primate survival i.e. actually staying safely with ‘mum’ as we see them cling on,  but a virtual  feed-back mechanism reinforcing in its brain that it is safe or else its time to find someone else to cling onto.  Let interest, curiosity, even boredom  in the infant govern the direction of and be the prime mover for its head turning away from the parent – a choice truly impossible in a forward facing pram or buggy.

Triangular thinking as seen by Greenspan and  Shanker  in ‘The First Idea’ embraces triadic interaction ‘among feeling states’,  wherein a Judgement value is placed on the interaction. They suggest this starts after 2 ½  years.

Something present much earlier,  I think could very reasonably be called ‘triangulation’ is easily discernable very soon after birth and relates to how the infant, when confronted with something unusual or someone new rapidly searches for its mother’s eye for approval from a smile, a word, a reassuring touch signalling this is ok, safe and I’m here to back you up. The infant then completes the triangle happily engaging this ‘other’.

 This can’t happen when it does not face the mother but think about what does happen to its brain frame – scariness, strangeness, maybe even danger and who can I turn to tell? With this happening chronically the infant cannot be at peace with itself and dare I say starts to generate an  ambivalence towards its mother from the start, an ambivalence that persists with annoyance, suspicion and even aggression into young adulthood.                                                                          

                                                    

Baby's discontent with smoking out of view.

                                      

   



Failure of Infant Bonding Leads to Violent Teen Behaviour

It seems from the internet that there is a considerable ambivalence from ‘nursery advisors’ of large companies such as John Lewis over the matter of choice over forward facing or parent facing buggies and the suchlike.  I would contend that it defies common sense, common intuitive sense and that such advisors should be castigated for their temerity in offering such advice.

I have spent some several years noticing the attitudes of infants in both situations and the overwhelming  constancy of infants in stress in the forward facing situation rather backs up the notion of a lost opportunity to bond.  Things I see are the infant asleep, or put to quiet with some irksome convenience rubbish or a dummy in its mouth staring blandly into space or twisting its head back to catch mothers attention.  Infants facing forward cry much more.

I have the distinct belief that that an infant deprived  parental endorsement of stimuli received by the child results in ‘a neural non-connection’, an ‘in brain’ failure to acknowledge the stimulus as a safe and happy one as apposed to a stimulus whose safety remains  unknown or ill- defined.

I have a hunch juvenile dysfunction as seems to be expressed in loutish and offensive behaviour is a legacy of a failure or fragmented bonding.  Certainly Freudian psychology would encompass the child’s capacity to seek later revenge for these ‘rides’ in isolation.  Even the excessive covering  of the infant’s face in the rain and sun is to be deplored and the spectacle of the infant under a bubble of plastic  smacks of it being sent on a space trip.

Also the first thing the infant  wants to see when it wakes is it mother’s face, to know she is there; this the default scenario, the ever needed baseline for the rest of intelligence gathering and curiosity.

Bonding vital in primates for evolutional survival

Almost certainly hundreds of kilometres of books have been written about the development of human interaction and it would similarly require a miserable lifetime to read them all.

However as far as infant bonding is concerned, some important mores, however simplified, must emerge in that will take less space and be easier to read.

 Allowing there is no contention that, differences withstanding, we are just from a line of apes, and that the stanzas between the recognised primate groups may concern some, what blindingly connects them all, and more or less seamlessly is how they bond with their young. And since the substance of this blog is to promote bonding it is not unreasonable to look at, and learn from that earlier primate behaviour.

Adulthood biologically starts when the animal can successfully reproduce and care for their offspring. In primates this period, as a fraction of lifespan, increases with intelligence across the various groups.

This blog contends, not to interdict, but be a reminder of what is already intuitively done and  known by some, and for some what is not known or done.

It all is common sense, especially if you put yourself in the  place of the infant, where ‘you’ have just come from, and what the world is confronting ‘you’ with.         

What Babies Want But Can't Tell You

What infants need is touch, eye contact, visual and auditary stimulation and the smell of its parent. Many well meaning parents think that by having their charge facing away they will be part of the greater world but in reality what they see is so novel that it has to be alarming and what they want when this happens is to have the reassurance of its mum' s or dad's smiling eyes - it then knows 'this is ok'.