Newborns Are Human, Too!
It all begins with an idea.
Many new parents are intimidated by the idea of caring for their newborn. Most of their angst can be summed up in one thought…”How will I…?” How will I know when to feed them, when to stop feeding them, when to put them down to sleep, if they are sick, what they need?
The good news is for all new parents is that newborns are not very different from adults, because, as humans, we all act like humans. We are our own reference point for our babies. Understand the fundamental human basics, understand what baby’s have and don’t have when they are born, and you have an orientation to how you will figure out the rest.
Not that this will make everything easy—it won’t. It will probably require that you turn in to your own humanness and human experience in order to understand your child’s. Most parents don’t like this idea. Many adults think they’ve got it all figured out by the time they have a baby, and they don’t like the idea that maybe there is still a lot to learn about themselves.
Part of the human experience is learning about yourself and accepting your evolution is part of the excitement of life.
Getting to know and care for our baby is a catalyst to becoming out best selves. Get comfortable with that and everything will be a lot easier, and a lot more interesting!
It’s All About the Brain, Baby!
It all begins with an idea.
Wrapping your head around the job of parenting requires that you wrap your head around what’s in your head—and gut, and heart, and nervous system. The most basic question about raising newborns to adult is is “what’s it all about?” For humans, it’s all about “the brain”.
Across time and culture, the job of those who care for the littlest humans (and for most of human history it wasn’t exclusively the biological mother and/or father in a modern, nuclear family situation), was to keep them safe and protect them until they were old enough to take care of themselves. That’s kind of the job in all animal species, and humans aren’t different.
What is different is the complexity and capacity of our nervous system in its entirety. Our minds are so powerful that it takes our babies much, much longer to grow into that power than other animal species. They are also born with less of that structure developed than in other species, so the influences of their early environment are really important in how that development takes place.
Understanding these interactions has been known across time and culture, but we’ve gotten away from much of that understanding in our “modern” era. As new parents you must unlearn then relearn what is most important about being a human. This won’t just help your baby, it will help you in this new, human role.
First Understand Ourselves: Labor and Birth
It all begins with an idea.
Learning more about our nervous system may be one of the most important things we can do during pregnancy to protect our health and our baby’s health, both during the pregnancy and afterward. Chronic stress increases the risk for many pregnancy complications and can negatively impact your baby’s development in utero. Stress is a nervous system response.
It’s not just about the pregnant parent, either. The stress of partners and other family and community members during pregnancy can spill over to impact mom and baby’s health. Across time and culture, there has been an understanding of this and community rules to protect the mother from stress during the pregnancy.
This is because humans are relational, and we evolved to survive and thrive in community. The health of the community impacts the health of the individuals in the community. The health of human relationships impacts the health of individual human bodies.
Relational health, or safety, is the cornerstone of human thriving and ease. It is also the key to a smoother, less complicated labor and birth.
Strengthen Your Nervous System Like You Strengthen Your Body
It all begins with an idea.
We’ve come a long way over the last 150 years since Sigmund Freud popularized the idea of psychoanalysis to answer the question “why do we do what we do?” But, like many other human endeavors, we are not a place of new “discovery”; we are better described as having a modern understanding of what many human cultures, ancient and modern, have know about the human experience and how to best survive and thrive in a chaotic, unpredictable world.
Thanks to more fields of study, a greater diversity of researchers (and their associated experiences, curiosities, and questions), and better tools and methods, we can now explain how varied human practices, like focused breathing, word choice, touch, and reflection change and influence our nervous systems and the nervous systems of those around us. These are exciting times!
Understanding this is like understanding how different exercise practices influence your organ systems to change your muscles, your lung capacity, your heart health, even your mood. Hundreds of years ago, exercise just happened in the living of day-to-day lives; in the 2020s most people have to be deliberate to get enough exercise because our culture has evolved away from what kept us in top shape throughout the millennia of human history.
Our nervous systems deserve the same understanding and attention as we’ve given to our muscle groups over the last several decades.