Love & Nurturing Stimulates Larger Brains In Our Children

This isn’t a surprise, really?  I mean….is it?  I only ask the question because it seems to make logical sense to me that when we nurture and love our children, the WAY they were meant to be loved and nurtured…..then, of course, they’d be more intelligent and grasp new ideas about the world around us in a healthier way! I believe that LOVE is truly the only healer and worker of magic when it comes to  total health and happiness.  How can it not stimulate our children’s brains to grow larger so as to hold more information and build a greater curiosity of the world around them?

I wonder if the brain growth and size takes place because growth, of any kind, can be stymied by fear.  If a child enters the world feeling a sense of dread and fear of the world around them….I wonder….do their brains then restrict growth to be able to protect the infant of exploring too far the world around them?  If they can’t comprehend more, then maybe the system believes they can protect themselves from treading too far into a scary, unsafe world?  I have no factual evidence to correlate with my opinion & honestly, I’m too lazy to spend the time looking….but what if????

Birth itself can be extremely traumatic on a newborn. Their nervous systems are about 150 times more sensitive than ours as adults.  That only means that their ability to view their own birth experience as traumatic is much greater.  Looking into the world of how we birth our children…..not just their treatment and care after delivery, might feed into the insights and studies that are being done on children’s brains.

I have no doubt that growth restrictions can even take place in utero.  This can happen based upon the Mother’s fears and negative belief patterns about herself or the world at large.  She then passes those fears and negative belief patterns onto her unborn child in an attempt to help the baby acclimate to the new world it’s entering.  It’s a protection, you see.  The only downfall with that protection is then the baby inability to feel safe in our world and choose to explore it.  Exploration and experience truly are the greatest teachers for our children.

Below is the first article which shows an image of 2 brains.  One where the child was nurtured and love and the other where the child was extremely neglected.  Notice that the neglected infant’s brain is almost half the size of the loved child.  This is a HUGE difference!  Not just a mild one……Click the link below to read the full article.

“Experts say that the sizeable difference in the two brains is primarily caused by the difference in the way each child was treated by their mothers.”

The article states that not only will the child’s brain size be smaller but that there are also LONG term effects of the restricted growth.  

The first hour or so following birth can be some of the MOST CRITICAL bonding and connecting time for you and your baby.  Think back about the birth of your own children.  Did they whisk your baby away immediately after birth or did they let you hold and cuddle your baby for as long as you wanted?  Did they poke and prod your baby with needles and hands or did they keep your baby close to you as they gently talked and soothed your baby as they did any needed testing?  These are just 2 examples of a stressful situation for you and your baby that might negatively effect your baby’s ability to feel love and their brain growth patterns.  

This second article is explains more in details the REASONS for the restricted brain growth and why and how it happens.  Here’s a great quote from it…..

“Myths inevitably survive long after they’ve been scientifically disproven. Such is the case with the fantasy that mental illnesses can be written off solely to genes and chemicals. Over the last decade a string of scientific discoveries has shown that the biology driving mental illness has at least as much to do with the environment as with chemicals or genetic inheritance. And it increasingly appears that the single most powerful environmental factor is the love – or its lack – that children receive from their parents. So in a very real way we parents are back on the hook for the lifelong emotional well-being of our kids.”

Click link below to read the whole article….