It’s All About the Brain, Baby!

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.