Sue Gerhardt - Why Love Matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain

Why Love Matters explains why loving relationships are essential to brain development in the early years, and how these early interactions can have lasting consequences for future emotional and physical health. This second edition follows on from the success of the first, updating the scientific research, covering recent findings in genetics and the mind/body connection, and including a new chapter highlighting our growing understanding of the part also played by pregnancy in shaping a babys future emotional and physical well-being.

Sue Gerhardt focuses in particular on the wide-ranging effects of early stress on a babys or toddlers developing nervous system. When things go wrong with relationships in early life, the dependent child has to adapt; what we now know is that his or her brain adapts too. The brains emotion and immune systems are particularly affected by early stress and can become less effective. This makes the child more vulnerable to a range of later difficulties such as depression, anti-social behaviour, addictions or anorexia, as well as physical illness.

Why Love Matters is an accessible, lively account of the latest findings in neuroscience, developmental psychology and neurobiology research that matters to us all. It is an invaluable and hugely popular guide for parents and professionals alike.

Dr Sue Gerhardt has been a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice since 1997. She co- founded the Oxford Parent Infant Project (OXPIP), a pioneering charity that today provides psychotherapeutic help to hundreds of parents and babies in Oxfordshire and is now the prototype of many new PIPs around the country. She is also the author of The Selfish Society (2010).

How affection shapes a babys brain

Second edition

Sue Gerhardt

Second edition published 2015
by Routledge
27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Sue Gerhardt

The right of Sue Gerhardt to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

First edition published by Routledge 2004

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gerhardt, Sue, 1953- author.

Why love matters : how affection shapes a babys brain / Sue Gerhardt. Second edition.
p. ; cm.

WIncludes bibliographical references and index.
I. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Braingrowth & development. 2. Parent-Child Relations. 3. Brain Chemistry. 4. Emotionsphysiology. 5. Infant. 6. Love. 7. Mental Disordersprevention & control. 8. Personality Development. WL 300] RJ134
155.422dc23

2014011544

ISBN: 978-0-415-87052-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-87053-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-75831-2 (ebk)

Typeset in New Century Schoolbook
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

For my children, Jessica and Laurence

PART 1
The foundations: babies and their brains

PART 2
Shaky foundations and their consequences

PART 3
Too much information, not enough solutions: where do we go from here?

When our children were little, we once, when they were finally asleep in bed, settled down to relax by watching a movie called Parenthood. In this film, Steve Martins character, a harassed but caring dad, had two fantasies in rapid succession, triggered by moments with his little boy. In the first fantasy, his now grown-up son is giving the graduation address as the star student, and thanking his wonderful father for all his help. He points to his dad in the audi-torium, and the audience applauds! Then, the dad is jerked back to reality, his little boy is misbehaving. And suddenly he finds himself imagining a very different scene chaos on a campus as students ran from a crazed shooter in a high tower.

Its the Martin kid! they are screaming. His father was no good!

We all do this, I think hope for our kids, and fear for them. But in the last few decades the fearing side of this has reached a kind of fever pitch. Its as if parents have never felt quite so lost, while at the same time so plagued by so-called experts. It all seems to get more and more complex, and we doubt ourselves more and more.

Part of the problem, though its almost never admitted, is that the experts themselves have been confused. That happens in science sometimes, when the old models no longer match the data, and a new way of looking is needed. A period of confusion precedes a sudden leap to a new understanding, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Luckily, we have just arrived at one of those times. In the last ten years, helped hugely by the technology that allows us to look inside the working human brain, neuroscience has transformed what we know about how little children grow.

You may be thinking well, if theres a revolution in child development, why havent I heard about it?

And the reason is this: first, its made up of thousands of research papers on tiny fragments of the problem, and second, its really hard to understand. For example, the very best book in the field is Allan Schores Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. You can tell from the catchy title that this is a doorstopper of a book. I am a professor of psychology, but I still only made it half way through, before collapsing like Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom. But Sue Gerhardt is made of sterner stuff. Alongside her work as a psychotherapist and specialist in mother and baby relationships, Sue set herself the task of reading and absorbing pretty much the whole field of developmental neuroscience, speaking to the researchers, synthesising it all with a view to discovering How does this help real mums and dads, as well as teachers and policy makers and so on?. She did this because she recognised that this knowledge would change everything. And she was right.

In short, our problems with kids lives and with our own lives have arisen because we have completely missed the importance of affection. We thought it was just something nice that parents did. But in fact, its the key to all mental health, intelligence and functioning as a human being. If someone is a great human being, it can only mean one thing. They were loved.

Those moments of soothing, playfulness, touching and tickling, hugging and holding that happen between mother and baby, husband and wife, old people walking hand in hand, stimulate the brain and build connections that are the foundations of intelligence, people skills and being a decent and wonderful human being. All the enrichment, education, money and resources, courses and expensive schools wont make up for having parents who were rushed, tense and had trouble settling with their baby or toddler and having a loving and fun time.