Emotional needs: essential for survival…

[Updated February 17]. Wanted to write a little more and am doing this while I am listening to the Melody-Festival on TV!!

Quotes from “Rediscovering the True Self” by the Dutch therapist Ingeborg Bosch, about attachment, bonding and emotional needs. See the earlier posting on "Attachment and bonding..."

In the chapter “Emotional needs: Essential for survival” she writes at page 41-43:

“It is important to understand that non-material things such as love, respect, physical touch as cuddling and being held, emotional warmth, a perception of safety is necessary for the child’s very survival. In our Western society there is a strong tendency to think that although love, respect, physically affectionate touch, emotional warmth and safety, etc., are important, a lack of such things could not be life-threatening.

Phyllis Davis’ illustrates the essential nature of emotional needs. She reports some terrible facts on early child death: ‘In the beginning of the nineteenths century more than half of all children died in their first year. The illness was called ‘marasmus’, a Greek word, which means ‘wasting away’… (only fifty years ago) the most widely proclaimed method of childcare was based on the advice published in 'Care and Feeling of Children' by Dr. Holt in 1894. Stop any rocking don’t pick the baby up when it cries, feed only at set times according to a schedule, and prevent ‘spoiling’ by picking the baby up unnecessarily outside the necessary feedings and diaper changings, was some of Dr. Holt’s advice /…/

These dogmatic ideas have survived and even today some parents and doctors adhere to this ‘scientific’ way of raising children… It wasn’t until after the WWII that the cause of marasmus or inexplicable infant mortality was researched and a link could be made with a lack of touch. The infant mortality decreased notably in those places that increased the amount of touching of the infants.

Bowlby’s ground-breaking research in the early fifties also shows how vital it is to satisfy the emotional needs of infants:…from empirical observation we suggested that the young child’s hunger for his mothers’ love and presence is as great as his hunger for food.

In the early fifties people’s eyes started opening up to the fact that infants’ emotional needs are as strong as their need for food, implying that a lack of having these needs met would have severe consequences and eventually lead to death; death by ‘marasmus’. Just as lack of food would eventually lead to death by hunger if this lack were great enough.

Well-known experiments by Harry Harlow on maternal deprivation provide us with yeat another illustration of the importance of emotional needs. As described by Melvin Marx

‘…The results generally indicate that permanent psychological effects can ensue unless adequate substitutes for the mother are provided /…/

Because both heat and food were provided by the surrogate mothers, these satisfactions do not appear to be sufficient to produce normally behaving offsprings.

Harlow’s baby monkeys definitely preferred the surrogate mother with a body of terry cloth over sponge to the simpler wire-frame model, although each presented the same heat and food. Apparently the monkey affectional system is dependent upon contact stimulation provided by the terry cloth, which encourages cuddling; here is more to even monkey motherhood than warmth and hunger satisfaction.’

‘Neglect or abuse, lack of attention from an uninterested or self entered parent, and physical punishment all leave damaging traces on the development of the emotional brain, that result in the shaping of life-long emotional characteristics. In childhood, responses to treatment by caregivers take on a fixed pattern in the fundamental synaptic wiring of the neural architecture, and are difficult to change later in life.’

Lastly, I would like to refer to Robert Prentsky’s research, which also clearly illustrates the enormous impact that follows when emotional needs of the child go unfulfilled. His research shows how the first years of the lives of criminals, guilty of extremely cruel and violent crimes, differed in one way from other criminals who had committed less cruel and violent crimes. The very violent criminals had been sent from foster home to foster home, or they grew up in foundling homes. Their personal history indicated severe emotional neglect and subsequently a very slight chance for adjusting to or bonding with other people in their environment, due to a lack of continuity in relationships.

Just as in the case with Harlow’s little monkeys, there is abundant evidence showing that children have strong emotional needs. Children need more than food and physical warmth. Safety, cuddling, love, respect, and nurturing physical contact, etc. during their first years are essential in order to secure survival and healthy emotional development.”

Addition February 17: Found the following text at this site.

“It is generally known (back to medieval or ancient times) that deprivation of sensory stimuli like voice and vision in the early phases of human life will cause irreversible mental retardation in the child. Also the prevention of child play will cause intellectual deficits in the adult. But eyes, ears and the nose are not the only human sensory systems.

Additionally there are the two body sensor systems, the 'somatosensors'. One is the vestibular sensor for maintaining orientation and upright walk [see this paper about talking without words, or about non-verbal communication; in Swedish though. Not disturbing or even destroying it, but show the child the outermost respect! We can recover, more or less, but it is an enormous struggle doing this!??]. The other one is the skin, for sensing touch [see Bosch about boundary violations! And also here].

MOTHER BONDING IS ESSENTIAL FOR PEACE

Through the work of James W. Prescott, Ph.D. and various others until the mid 1970s it was established that these previously neglected senses are of overwhelming importance for the development of social abilities for adult life. Their deprivation in childhood is a major cause for adult violence.

James W. Prescott /.../ created and directed the Developmental Behavioral Biology Program at the NICHD where he initiated NICHD supported research programs that documented how the failure of ‘Mother Love’ in infant monkeys adversely affected the biological development of their brains. These astonishing abnormal brain changes underlie the behaviors of depression, impulse dyscontrol and violence that result from mother-infant separations.”

Addition February 23: And also see this, about the kangaroo-method.