Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain

An excellent source of information for everyone. Would be extremely helpful for mothers-to-be. Helps you understanding your developmental psychology. Gives you more information on you and why you turned out the way you did. Should be required reading for high school students who will be parents of the future. It would give them a better overview on how to interact with their children in a more positive way.

This book really opened my eyes to the fundamentals of brain development in infancy. I had no idea how much the actual physiology of the brain is affected by infant experience, not just the psychological. Sources are well cited, ideas are well backed up in scientific research, and the information is presented in a way which benefits lay readers as well as researchers (with an introduction about brain structure and development). I suggest every parent-to-be get a hold of this book. One reviewer was dissapointed by the lack of specific exercises to play with. However, I don't think they are necessary because this book gives specifics about why certain strategies affect infants. I think understanding why certain types of parenting work better than others makes parents more likely to come up with the kind of adaptive spontaneous strategies which come out of such a way of thinking. You could also check out Brazelton for more specific info about exercises to do with your baby. As a side note, once you read this book and make decisions about parenting based on the exhaustive research cited within, you will not only feel more confident about your parenting, but you will be able to defend against attacks from helpful but persistent grandparents, in-laws, and friends - should you want to engage in such discussions.

Why Love Matters offers an eloquent overview of the latest scientific research on attachment. The author has accomplished the formidable task of linking the concrete language of neurochemistry to the more abstract area of attachment theory. In so doing, she has greatly clarified the nature-nurture argument. Her book beautifully establishes the critical importance of close emotional attachment for optimum brain development in childhood, and one's subsequent capacity for love and trust in adulthood. Why Love Matters is an essential new work in the field of attachment. Jan Hunt, author of The Natural Child: Parenting From the Heart

This book offers an overview of baby brain development that makes me want to learn more and to educate others about the crucial nature of responsive infant care. It is a must read for those who work with families in any capacity as well as those with infants at home.

Everything we do or say or learn is mediated by the wrinkled and gelatinous matter inside our skulls. As children grow up, their brains obviously change; not only do the neurons get charged with all the information the children acquire, but the brains physically change as well. It should be no surprise that children who have physical problems in upbringing, like, say, a bad diet, have brains that don't properly grow. It is also no surprise that children who are brought up in emotionally distressing situations have trouble getting along with others into adulthood. It was a surprise to find out, however, that children who are brought up under stress actually have brains that are physically different, and operate differently, from those who are well cared for. In the ambitiously-titled _Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain_ (Brunner-Routledge), Sue Gerhardt has summarized current findings in neuroscience about the developing brains of infants and how that development is influenced by the infants' early attachment experiences. Her work will be tough in parts for those unfamiliar with the neurological territory, but she presents many appealing examples, illustrations, and case studies, so that anyone might enjoy here learning about the inchoate findings of the links between attachment experiences and brain development. The idea that experiences change brains physically, beyond the mere instillation of learning, is fully accepted. Gerhardt concentrates on the orbitofrontal cortex and on the effects of cortisol, a stress hormone which is required for development of the cortex and other brain regions, but which causes such development to be thwarted if the levels are too high. Babies who are stressed, who do not get proper attention and do not have confidence in being cared for, are likely to have high cortisol levels with resultant malformation of the orbitofrontal cortex. Early experience and patterns of attachment do change brain chemistry and structure in ways that cannot be changed back after a circumscribed period of development. It used to be that studying how babies would respond to their caregivers could only be done by sitting behind a two-way mirror and doing limited, uncruel experiments and watching the behavioral results. It could be observed, for instance, that an inconsistent parent could tend to produce an anxious child. This is the sort of "soft" science that is a target for being woolly-headed liberal supposition, but it can now begin to be supplemented with the hard facts of neuroscience. How we are treated as babies influences how our brains develop and determines how we get along with others. As Gerhardt says, this is one of the strange things about research in this field: "After developing ingenious experiments and rigorous controls, the fruits of its labours tend to be blindingly obvious." It is, however, important that we now are getting a scientific basis to show that what is self-evident actual