Fri, Feb 21, 2020
This episode of Netflix documentary series 'Babies' starts with a slow walking shot down the hall of a hospital while voices of nurses, doctor, mother and father are heard during childbirth. The film cuts to the mother holding the baby as the father cries. Then come voices from researchers: what determines the baby's development. How do they become who they are? Babies are born completely helpless but are going to become masters of the universe - how does that happen? Now we have so many ways to answer those questions.Doctor Ruth Feldman, Director of the Centre for Developmental Social Neuroscience at the IDC Herzliya in Israel says the relationship with our parents has a major influence on how a baby develops and she wanted to know how the baby's brain develops: what is the biology of bonding? The hormone Oxytocin is related to bonding, but how does it develop? In 2001, she devised an experiment to test the role of Oxytocin in Parent/Child bonding. 80 mothers and babies were used to test the bonding relationship. What they found is that Oxytocin levels rises during pregnancy and stay high through childbirth. Also discovered was that Oxytocin levels also rise as a result of touching. Unexpectedly the same holds true for fathers or committed caregivers. Adding to that conclusion was the result of a study of 80 couples: mothers and fathers' levels of Oxytocin were identical. A different result happened, the Amygdala (area of the brain involved with experiencing emotion) increased when the Oxytocin increased. A study of 48 homosexual couples who became parents via surrogacy also experienced increase in Oxytocin and growth of the Amygdala.The still face experiment was designed by Doctor Ed Tronick, professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts. His experiment was designed to find whether a baby is born ready to engage in social relationships. During play, the mothers were asked to stop reacting to their baby by assuming the 'still face'. The babies immediately tried to get a reaction from the mother. This showed that the baby recognized the withdrawal of social reaction and that if the relationship gets disrupted, it has a very powerful emotional effect on the baby. Professor Tronick determined that the baby is born with the capacity to engage in social relations. A follow-up experiment showed that the stress hormone Cortisol increased during the still face experiment.Third was the experiment to find whether parenting affects the baby's brain. Anne Rifkin-Graboi, head of Infant and Early Childhood Research at the National Institute of Education at the in Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore wanted to find out. She compared brain scans shortly after birth with scans taken 6 months later. The 2009 study observed interactions of 20 parent in the lab between the scans. The baby's hippocampus (area of the brain) differed according to parenting style. Growth of the hippocampus indicated that the baby received less parenting and the baby must prioritize comfort rather than experimentation.
