WHAT DO BABIES NEED?

I leave this video in which the Argentine psychotherapist Laura Gutman explains, very simply, what babies need to grow emotionally healthy.

When humans are born they do it prematurely. Our standing and the enormous size of our skull has conditioned a shortened pregnancy that causes our young to be born without being prepared to live without the heat and permanent contact with their mother's body. We need at least nine months of extrauterine gestation to stop being fetuses born early.

For nine months, babies are not even able to move on their own to reach the nutritional breast. And naturally, during that time at least, they expect to receive the same security as, even if they were children of an unwanted pregnancy, they had in the womb: heat, food, protection.

Babies need listen to their mother's heart, be fed on demand, move to the rhythm of the movement, feel some arms that welcome them, and, if we leave them, they raise their alarms and feel that the danger of death stalks them, because they do not know that Predators can't climb to their crib.

When babies are left separated from the mother they express a strong complaint, cry, cry, shake, claim the mother and her protection. They feel fear and despair. Many, because we are resistant, will end up getting used to and will not expressly claim their mother and their arms, learning to live with the feeling of helplessness. And, in the end, as I will tell you in another article, they internalize the qualifiers that their complaints attract.

As explained by Laura Gutman Babies need to be in arms, be cradled, be carried close to the body, take food on demand. They do not learn anything positive from being left in a crib or a stroller crying, they only learn to be alone and not come when they call us.