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How mental state talk helps kids learn about beliefs, feelings, and the perspectives of other people

© 2009 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved
Mind-minded parenting means treating children as autonomous, thinking beings
Young children aren't as sneaky or as sophisticated as older kids are. For example, it seems unlikely that kids under the age of three grasp the cognitive and moral implications of telling lies (Talwar and Lee 2008).

But there is ample scientific evidence that young children have active, developing, socially-oriented minds-right from birth.

And it seems that kids are better off when we treat them as creatures with more than mere physical needs.

That's what psychologists Elizabeth Meins and Charles Fernyhough have proposed. Parents who are "mind-minded" treat their children as individuals with minds. When in doubt, they act as if their children's acts are meaningful-motivated by feelings, thoughts, or intentions.

For instance, the mind-minded parent is more likely to act as if a baby's vocalizations represent an attempt to communicate.

Mind-minded parents may also be more likely to

Pay attention to their baby's gaze and interest in objects

Imitate their infant's actions

Engage in sensitive, appropriate mind-minded talk--i.e., comment on what a child seems to be feeling or thinking. For example, a parent who sees her baby looking at a toy camel might ask the baby "Do you remember seeing a camel at the zoo?" (Meins et al 2001).

Assume that their children can understand and benefit from conversations about emotions and mental states

What does this approach do for us?

Mind-minded parenting might strengthen our attachment relationships.

In one study, Meins and her colleagues watched 6-month-old babies play with their mothers and recorded the incidence of mind-related talk (Meins et al 2001). The researchers were particularly interested in appropriate comments, i.e., talk that revealed an accurate understanding of what the baby was feeling.

The researchers found that appropriate mind-minded comments predicted secure attachments. Moms who made more frequent, appropriate comments at 6 months were more likely have securely-attached babies at 12 months.

Mind-mindedness may also help kids reason about the emotions and beliefs of others.

One hallmark of our species is that we possess a theory of mind--an understanding that other creatures have goals, desires, beliefs, and emotions.

Theory of mind develops gradually over the first few years of life, and it can be measured in several ways. One important test is the false belief task, which asks a child to distinguish between what's really true and what seems to be true to another, mistaken, person.
Do kids raised by mind-minded parents have an easier time developing a theory of mind?

In a study that tracked children for over three years, Meins and Fernyhough assessed mind-mindedness in mothers of 20-month-old toddlers (Meins and Fernyhough 1999).

The researchers scored moms as highly mind-minded if they were more willing to attribute meaning to their children's nonstandard vocalizations. Moms were also deemed more mind-minded if they spontaneously used mental terms when describing their children (i.e., "Charlie wants to be like his big brother.")

When the kids reached 5 years of age, the researchers presented them with a puppet show that tested a child's understanding of false belief.

In the show, kids watched Charlie the Crocodile empty a milk cartoon and refill it with soda pop. Next, Penny the Penguin-who didn't witness the act-came along.
The kids who correctly predicted Penny's feelings (i.e., that she'd be happy at first, and then disappointed) were the ones whose moms who had showed more mind-mindedness when they were toddlers.
The researchers told kids that Penny likes milk, not soda pop. Then they asked kids to predict how Penny would feel when she first saw the cartoon. Would she be happy or sad? And how would she feel after she looked inside the cartoon and found that there was soda pop, not milk, inside?

These findings are consistent with other research on theory of mind and family talk about mental and emotional states.

More studies

In an observational study, Dunn and colleagues watched kids (aged 33 months) as they interacted at home with their parents and siblings (Dunn et al 1991b). Later, when the kids were 40 months old, they were given a false belief task (similar to the one described above) and a task that tested their understanding of emotions.

The researchers found that kids performed better on these tests if they came from families that frequently discussed feelings and the ways that feelings motivate behavior.

A similar study asked 6-year-olds to describe the emotions portrayed by adult actors in several videotaped vignettes (Dunn et al 1991a). The kids with the best understanding of emotions were the ones who had experienced the most family talk about emotional causation when they were 3 years old.

Another study observed mothers reading stories to their young children (ages 3 to 5 years) and noted which mothers used "cognitive state verbs" (like "think") to describe events in these stories (Adrián et al 2007). Researchers had the kids complete false belief tasks and then, one year later, administered a second set of follow-up tests.

The kids who showed a stronger understanding of mental states at follow-up were more likely to have had moms who used cognitive verbs during story-telling.

And a longitudinal study tracking kids from 15 to 33 months of age reported that maternal mind-minded talk during the early years was the most consistent predictor of a child's use of mental state language (Taumoepeau and Ruffman 2008).

These studies report correlations only. They don't permit us to conclude that mind-minded parenting causes kids to form more secure attachments or develop better theory of mind skills. Maybe mind-minded parents possess genetically-based traits that make them better mind-readers (Sabbagh and Seamans 2008). If so, the links between mind-minded parenting, attachment security, and theory of mind might be explained solely by the inheritance of these "mind-minded" traits.

But there is at least one experiment that addresses this possibility.
Learning to talk about the difference between appearances and reality
Mental talk and theory of mind: An experiment on preschoolers

If you are trying to work out another person's perspective, it helps to have a good vocabulary for discussing mental and emotional states. Heidemarie Lohman and Michael Tomasello tested this idea by introducing 3-year-olds to "deceptive" objects, like a pen that takes the shape of a plastic flower.

First, researchers measured each kid's understanding of false beliefs. Could these kids grasp that other people sometimes believe things that aren't true? Then kids were divided into two groups. One group received training in the language of mental states. An adult talked to them about the deceptive nature of the objects, using terms like "think" and "know." For example, the adult might ask "What do you think this is?...You thought it was a flower...."

Kids in the other group experienced similar sessions, but the adult didn't use mental state terms ("What's this?...It's a flower...")
This experiment didn't involve the children's parents at all, so it suggests that exposure to language about mental states is intrinsically helpful.
After these training sessions, the researchers re-tested kids' grasp of false beliefs. The results supported the idea that mental state language helps kids learn. Kids trained with mental state language performed better on a false belief task. They also showed a better understanding of the distinction between appearance and reality.

If so, we'd expect that parents who use more mental state language are helping their kids learn about the mind. This, in turn, might help kids become more sensitive to other people. And when parents and kids show more sensitivity to each other, we might expect kids to develop more secure attachment relationships.

References: Mind-minded parenting

Adrián JE, Clemente RA, and Villanueva L. 2004. Mothers' use of cognitive state verbs in picture-book reading and the development of children's understanding of mind: a longitudinal study. J Genet Psychol. 165(3):293-309.

Dunn J, Brown J, and Beardsall L. 1991a. Family talk about feeling states and children's later understanding of others' emotions. Developmental Psychology 27: 448-455.

Dunn J, Brown J, Slomkowski C, Tesla, C and Youngblade L. 1991b. Young children's understanding of the other people's feelings and beliefs: Individual differences and their antecedents. Child Development 62: 1352-1366.

Lohmann H and Tomasello M. 2003. The role of language in the development in false belief understanding: A training study. Child Development 74: 1130-1144.

Meins E, Fernyhough C, de Rosnay M, Arnott B, Leekam SR, and Turner M. 2012. Mind-Mindedness as a Multidimensional Construct: Appropriate and Nonattuned Mind-Related Comments Independently Predict Infant-Mother Attachment in a Socially Diverse Sample. Infancy 17(4): 393-415.

Meins E, Fernyhough C, Fradley E, and Tuckey M. 2001. Rethinking maternal sensitivity: Mothers' comments on infants' mental processes predict security of attachment at 12 months. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Allied Discipline 42: 637-648.

Meins E, and Fernyhough, C. 1999. Linguistic acquisitional style and mentalising development: The role of maternal mind-mindedness. Cognitive Development 14: 363-380.

Sabbagh MA and Seamans EL.2008. Intergenerational transmission of theory-of-mind. Dev Sci. 11(3):354-60.

Talwar V and Lee K. 2008. Social and cognitive correlates of children's lying behavior. Child Development 79(4):866-81.

Taumoepeau M and Ruffman T. 2008. Stepping stones to others' minds: maternal talk relates to child mental state language and emotion understanding at 15, 24, and 33 months. Child Dev. 79(2):284-302.

Content last modified 1/12

image copyright istock/Sheryl Griffin

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Mind-minded parenting: How mental state talk helps kids learn about other minds

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Mind-minded parenting means treating children as autonomous, thinking beings Young children aren't as sneaky or as sophisticated as older kids are. For example, it seems unlikely that kids under the age of three grasp the cognitive and moral implications of telling lies (Talwar and Lee 2008).

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'Motherhood changes you forever' - the cliché your own mother forewarned you. And she was right. Motherhood, and specifically breastfeeding - the most central physiological act of mothering during infancy, changes you because it literally alters your brain - structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly. I am about to explain how the act of nursing sets apart mothers who breastfeed from those who don't - on a neurological scale.

Breastfeeding mothers and their babies are attuned to each other on a deep biological level. In fact, a breastfeeding mother and her baby are sometimes referred to as a 'dyad' - two individuals so closely linked they are considered one unit. Her body nourishes him; his feeding determines her milk production. Scientists call this 'limbic regulation'. It's a remarkable natural phenomenon whereby the mother is neurologically and chemically in sync with her baby, and her baby to her. Michael Merzenich, the San Francisco University brain plasticity expert, has described breastfeeding as a kind of temporary breakdown of identity for both mother and child that powerfully affects both their brains. "At that point, the baby and the mother are unified" (Merzenich 1994). Glassy eyed, who, me?

New Pathways

When you breastfeed, you are relating to this little person in a way you have never related to anyone else in your life. The process of a baby suckling at the breast actually forges new neurochemical pathways in the mother's brain that create and reinforce maternal behaviour. This process is aided by chemical imprinting and huge increases in oxytocin. These changes result in a motivated, highly attentive, and aggressively protective brain that compels the breastfeeding mother to alter her responses and priorities in life (Hahn-Holbrook 2011). This hormonal cascade makes mom want to respond to her baby and helps her to interpret his needs effectively (Rapley and Murkett 2012).

When a mother nurses, not only do her blood oxytocin levels increase, but her body makes more receptors, permanently increasing her feelings of love - and her ability to feel loved. Mom's sensitivity to oxytocin's power is one of the most fundamental ways she changes as a new mother. In humans, we have oxytocin receptors snuggled within our breast tissue. As Sweden's Karolinska Institute, Kerstin Uvnas-Mobery, the global authority on oxytocin, found in a series of experiments, breastfeeding women tend to be less reactive to stress hormones, less physically tense, less suspicious, and less bored. They are also calmer and more sociable when tested for these traits than mothers of comparable ages who are not breastfeeding (Uvnäs-Moberg & Petersson 2005).

But the accolades don't stop there! In another study, this time conducted by Margaret Altemus, a psychology professor at Cornell University, 10 lactating and 10 non-lactating women were stressed by being forced to engage in one of my favourite past times - pounding a treadmill for no particular reason. The research team found the lactating women released only HALF the amount of stress hormones, compared to those not nursing (Altemus 2010). Other studies back this up. It appears that oxytocin not only lowers blood pressure but also inhibits the release of the stress hormone glucocorticoid. Glucocorticoids are one reason why prolonged stress can damage the hippocampus. Meanwhile, prolactin, dubbed 'the parenting hormone', dampens fear and anxiety by inhibiting the amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for fear responses) (Kirsch 2005). Zen! The two hormones are elevated each time baby suckles at the breast reaching blood levels of eight times the norm (Ellison 2006). In other words: breastfeeding moms' antistress systems are frequently activated and they are buffered. Oxytocin is Mother Nature's weapon against stress, an innate mechanism that mammal mothers enjoy so that stress doesn't interfere - and least not too much - with mental function. As Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, an international expert in stress (would you want his job?) has remarked: "Somehow mammals have worked this out, because cognition is a good thing to have when you have small dependents" (Sapolsky 2014).

Breastfeeding mothers respond to stress less with the banal 'fight-or-flight' model (commonly seen in men) and more with an alternative one that has been named 'tend-and-befriend' - with friendliness rather than anger. This 'female model of the stress response' is again, thanks to lactation's triggering of oxytocin (Taylor 2000; McCarthy 1995). Throughout most of human history, women have had to watch out not just for themselves but for the sprogs they most likely had in tow. Their bodies knew they had little people to care for purely because of the signals produced through sustained lactation. A consequence of this biology is that each gender has evolved differently in the matter of psychological responses to stress. Formula feeding mothers respond to stress like men, in a more 'fight or flight' manner, due to their low exposure to oxytocin relative to lactating mothers. This in part explains why breastfeeding mothers are significantly less likely to abuse their babies (Strathearn 2009; On this touchy topic, see also: 'Why the Way You Feed Your Baby is MY Business').

Dr Kerstin Uvnas-Moberg, a world authority on oxytocin, has studied the changes between these two defence mechanisms, where she refers to the 'tend and befriend' approach as 'calm and connection'. In her book 'The Oxytocin Factor' she compiled two striking lists:

For breastfeeding moms, it's an upward spiral. The longer and more often their baby suckles, the more it triggers the prolactin-oxytocin response in the mother's brain, forging more connections. Pretty soon, the mother forges enough receptors that she can feel her breasts tingling and leaking at the sight, sound, or merely passing thought of nursing her baby. As one Warwick University study discovered:

"Breastfeeding causes a massive increase in communication between the neurons, co-ordinating a 'swarm' of oxytocin factories producing intense bursts of the hormone". To illustrate, take a gander at the virtuous circle depicted in the diagram below:

When a baby grasps its mother's breast with tiny hands and sucks on her areola, it triggers explosive bursts of oxytocin and prolactin, prompting bursts of dopamine, in the mother's brain. Prolactin is detected by a sensitive area on each milk-making cell and has the effect of priming them, or switching them on. Breast milk then begins to flow. These 'receptors' are much, MUCH stronger in lactating mammals than non-lactating mammals (Tzanou et al 2007). When these receptors are stimulated they make the mother want to protect her baby and hold him close.

These hormonal interactions create the notorious 'breastfeeding bond', switching off negative emotions and switching on pleasure circuits that produce feelings of exhilaration and attachment (Domes et al 2007; Hurlemann et al 2010). The hormonal exchange works as follows: The nursing response of the oxytoxin circuits is reinforced by the feeling of pleasure created by bursts of dopamine - the pleasure and reward chemical. Dopamine is jacked up in the mother's brain by estrogen and oxytocin. The mother's blood pressure drops, she feels peaceful and relaxed, and she basks in waves of oxytocin-inspired loving feelings for her baby. This neurological mechanism explains one of the ways that breastfeeding reduces the risk of a mom developing postpartum depression (Figueiredo et al 2013; Figueiredo et al b 2013; Hahn-Holbrook et al 2013). Think of it like walking through a forest the same way again and again, each time making a clearer trail - this is what's happening in mom's brain. Circuits that activate as she breastfeeds, become stronger and respond more readily.

More Powerful Than Cocaine

Let's explore this feel-good mechanism in even more detail. In one study, mother rats were given the opportunity to press a bar and get a squirt of cocaine or press a bar and get a rat pup to suck their nipples. Which do you think they preferred? Those oxytocin squirts in the brain outscored a snort of cocaine every time.

To give you another example of oxytocin's potency, male prairie voles given a shot of the stuff are converted from roving-eyed bachelors into nurturing husbands and fathers (Ellison 2006).

Enhanced Empathy

In one Yale University study, a team of researchers examined new mothers - half who were breastfeeding, and half who were formula feeding. Two to four weeks after giving birth, the mothers had their brains scanned using a swanky 'functional magnetic resonance' (fMRI) machine while they listened to recordings of their babies' cries. Why their cries? I can think of better stuff to put on my ipod. Why not their cute baby gurgles? Or their babbles? Well, the focus on crying was strategic: as I have discussed elsewhere, responding promptly and lovingly to a baby's cry is an important part of helping that baby develop trust, a feeling of safety, of worthiness, and of mental well-being. The results of this Yale experiment revealed that the brains of the breastfeeding mothers showed a significantly stronger response to the sound of their babies' cries than did the brains of the formula feeding mothers. Greater activity was revealed in several brain regions, including the superior frontal gyrus, striatum and amygdala. The researchers hypothesised that high activity in these regions contributes to breastfeeding mothers' ability to understand how their babies are feeling and respond in an appropriate way (Kim et al 2011). In other words: breastfeeding mothers are more attentive than their formula feeding peers. Mammaries: 1. Man-Made Powder: 0.

The amazing hormonal cascade induced by lactation doesn't end there. Lactation also facilitates learning and memory specifically for social information. Breastfeeding mothers show improved memory for human faces, in particular happy faces (Rimmele et al 2009; Guastella 2008). They also show improved recognition for positive social cues (Unkelbach 2008; Marsh 2010) and improved recognition of fear in others (Shofty 2010).

To examine how important this process is, let's take a look at rats again. Female rats inhibited from producing oxytocin after giving birth do not exhibit typical maternal behaviour (Van-Leengoed 1987). They show a marked delay, and in some instances avoidance, of pup carrying, pup manipulation, nest building, autogrooming, and time spent on the nest with the pups. At the end of 1 hour, two out of the six mothers had not yet picked up a single infant. Consider that human mothers who formula feed are literally inhibiting their oxytocin production, lack of lactation is literally stunting their maternal brain circuits. Contrast this with mothers who breastfeed, they have been found to exhibit more behaviors that create a close relationship to their baby, such as singing a special song to them, bathing and feeding them in a special way, or thinking about them more (Odent 2011). Quite simply, the more oxytocin you have, the more loving and attentive you are to your baby. The reserve is equally true.

The breastfeeding mother has a brain that is literally marinating in oxytocin and dopamine making her feel loved, deeply bonded, and physically and emotionally satisfied. Just check out the smorgasboard of other psychological and physiological changes that oxytocin brings about in breastfeeding moms:

Enhanced Smarts

In the same way that lactation gives breastfeeding mothers the edge over formula feeding mothers on the attentiveness front, it also makes them smarter than their bottle wielding peers. By 'smart' I'm not talking about Hawkingesc quantum physics - nope - the smarts of a breastfeeding mother mean much more than that. I'm talking about the kinds of smarts that translate into enhanced perception, efficiency, resiliency, motivation and social skills. This is a topic I explore in depth in my book when I speak of breastfeeding mothers as 'positive deviants'. Breastfeeding is nature's academic plan for mothers. Harvard psychiatrist Dr John Ratey explains:

"When a mother gives birth, you want her to be really smart, as smart as she can be. You want her to know about the territory around her and remember things about her kids, and be in a prime state to function" (Ratey 2003).

When Dr Ratey examined the brains of mothers in late pregnancy, he found that their normal rate of cell replacement had slowed down and brain size had shrank - an event which may explain the oh-so-dopey 'mommy brain' fog of the third trimester. However, once mom has given birth and breastfeeding begins, cell replacement resumes and increases. Compared to those not breastfeeding, Dr Ratey found that lactating moms had more glial cells, which support the neurons by importing energy and exporting waste products.

Let me give you an example of these cells in action: breastfeeding mothers are more sensitive to the sounds of their own babies, and more skilled in interpreting what they mean. A breastfeeding mom's pricked-up ears (as discussed in that crying experiment we spoke of earlier) make her more perceptive and aware - in a word, smarter - about her child. This perceptional ability becomes part of her general feeling of extraordinary attachment to this new being. Strong attachment itself can help make her smarter about the rest of the world, in part by keeping her brain elevated.

Then there's the sensory aspect: a mother's skin as she nurses her baby, is her most direct and loving means of communication, just as her suckling baby talks back with lips and hands, egging her on, before he knows a single word. Katherine Ellison, author of The Mommy Brain has extensively researched this area. She has noted that:

"Studies on animals strongly suggest that breastfeeding re-plots the map of the brain. When my baby son lay on my chest, he had direct impact on my sensory hormunculus. With repeated input from suckling and nestling, my chest, which used to be a purely aesthetic part of my personal repertoire, had acquired a leading role in the nurturing of another human being - and also in the way I was imagining myself, interpreting the world, and learning to behave".

A decade ago, two neuroscientists, Judith Stern at Rutgers University and Michael Merzenich at the University of California, provided stunning evidence of this impact when they showed that in the cortex of a mother rat, the area devoted to the trunk, or chest, had actually doubled in size while that rat was breastfeeding. Both Stern and Merzenich have little doubt that the same kind of thing happens in humans:

"It is probable that human lactation results in substantial representational remodeling in most or all of more than 10 different somatosensory representational areas, as well as in a number of motor and

premotor zones" (Stern and Merzenich 1994).

Another boffin known for his scientific brilliance, anatomist Vincenzo Malacarne, has noted that breastfeeding is an especially powerful cognitive experience because it involves, in his words, "learning under high stakes conditions, which is just the sort of learning that drives changes in the brain". In his work he discovered how lactation increases synapses in the part of the brain's cortex that deals with attention and complex tasks. This however, he did not find surprising: "In breastfeeding, you are relating to another person like you never related to anyone before. In a sense, you are one person, and it's pretty educational to have another human being extending into the makeup of your own self" (Ellison 2006). Indeed, breastfeeding forces moms to use certain talents up-close, constantly and repetitively. And, unlike the mental challenges of studying or working at a job, it's much harder to check out for any length of time when you're on the spot for nourishing. Add to this the fact that breastfeeding reduces stress via oxytocin, and opportunities for learning are improved even further. Have you ever tried to learn something new when you're under stress? Breastfeeding strikes the perfect balance between keeping mom alert and yet also relaxed - an equalibrium which improves her overall comprehension skills.

Enhanced Efficiency

Does breastfeeding make a woman a more efficient mother? Formula apologetics would unsurprisingly argue - no. However suppose we did an experiment. Perhaps this experiment could involve depriving families of food and then watching to see which mothers were most efficient at obtaining it. Who would come up trumps, breastfeeders or formula feeders? This would, of course, be highly unethical, and so the hypothesis can never be tested on humans, but other mammals - bring it on. And that's exactly what psychologist Dr Craig Kinsley did with our friends, the rats. He looked at the behaviour of age-matched rat moms, comparing those who were lactating and those who were not. The rats were temporarily deprived of food and then given crickets. In order to feed, the rats had to capture and kill the crickets whilst Kinsley's team observed.

In the animal world, a heightened ability to capture prey means a decreased amount of time the mother spends away from vulnerable offspring and this decreased window of vulnerability means a lower infant mortality rate. The results of Kinsley's study showed that lactation gives mothers the edge, with the non-lactating rats taking around 290 seconds to catch the crickets, whilst the lactating group only took about 70 seconds. Speaking of his findings, Kinsley commented: "The lactating brain expresses a great deal of plasticity and creativity in service to, and in support of, reproduction. In other words, mothers are not born, they are made through breastfeeding" (Kinsley and Lambert 2006). And what's more, the breastfeeding rats' gains in learning and memory were lasting up to twenty-four months, a full eighteen months past their last litter, and the equivalent of about 80 years of age for a human! 80 years, people!

Another research team, this time from Okayama University in Japan, found more evidence to support the existence of permanent change. They discovered something called 'long-lasting, long-term potentiation', known as L-LTP, in the hippocampi part of the brain of lactating mammals. L-LTP is a psychological marker of long-term memory foundation, involving an actual increase in the efficiency of synapses - i.e. the structure that permits a neuron to pass a signal to another cell (Tomizawa et al 2003). Essentially: the changes to a mother's brain do not subside once mom stops breastfeeding. Scientists have good evidence to believe that permanent changes occur. They base this partly on research showing that humans and other mammals respond more readily, and emotionally, to their second baby than to their first. This is much more than a matter of knowing what to expect: the differences appear to become hard-wired, even influencing mothers' milk flow, which is generally freer second time around (Ellison 2006).

In short, breastfeeding mothers are more present, focused, and organized - changes which last for the entirety of a woman's mothering AND grandmothering journey. Just as nursing rat mothers build a nest, protect their young from danger, and keep them clean, so nursing human mothers perform in comparable ways - and keep on performing.

Adoptive mothers and formulas feeders can also lap up these benefits. How? Well, it's not easy. When virgin rats are injected with breastfeeding hormones (doing this to humans would be deemed 'unethical' so here we have the rats again), they go from their usual behaviour of rejecting rat pups, to nurturing them (Moberg 2011). Adoptive human mothers can induce lactation to produce the same effect. Formula feeders can relactate.

Wow. You've just sat through a neuroscience lecture. That's a lot of learning, and being a badass breastfeeder, you probably soaked it all up. Let's sum up this post: Breastfeeding is so much more than nutrition - it changes the architecture of the brain. The way neurons in a woman's brain are restructured in response to lactation enables her to respond to her baby with a richer and more enhanced behavioural repertoire. In the blood, lactation hormones govern milk ejection, while in the brain they affect behaviour. And these changes are the most profound and permanent of a woman's life. Mother Nature knows her stuff.

Now, of course, since breastfeeding is the biological norm for humans, an accurate conclusion from the science is not "Breastfeeding makes mothers more empathic, more intelligent and more efficient" but rather: "Formula feeding makes mothers less empathic, less intelligent, and less efficient". Oh dear, sirens are going off at Formula Feeder HQ...

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I first gained a GNVQ in Health and Social Care, then a BTEC National Diploma in Nursery Nursing. After that I went to university and got a first class hons degree in Early Childhood Studies. Then changed unis and got another first class hons degree, this time in Law.

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How Breastfeeding Changes Your Brain - The Alpha Parent

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'Motherhood changes you forever' - the cliché your own mother forewarned you. And she was right. Motherhood, and specifically breastfeeding - the most central physiological act of mothering during infancy, changes you because it literally alters your brain - structurally, functionally, and in many ways, irreversibly.

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Close contact may change your child’s genome

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Close contact may change your child’s genome

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This evidence supports the observational evidence that responsive parenting changes how babies develop

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The amount of close and comforting contact that young infants get doesn't just keep them warm, snug, and loved. A new study says it can actually affect babies at the molecular level, and the effects can last for years.

Based on the study, babies who get less physical contact and are more distressed at a young age, end up with changes in molecular processes that affect gene expression.

The team from the University of British Columbia in Canada emphasises that it's still very early days for this research, and it's not clear exactly what's causing the change.

But it could give scientists some useful insights into how touching affects the epigenome - the biochemical changes that influence gene expression in the body.

During the study, parents of 94 babies were asked to keep diaries of their touching and cuddling habits from five weeks after birth, as well as logging the behaviour of the infants - sleeping, crying, and so on.

Four-and-a-half years later, DNA swabs were taken of the kids to analyse a biochemical modification called DNA methylation. It's an epigenetic mechanism in which some parts of the chromosome are tagged with small carbon and hydrogen molecules, often changing how genes function and affecting their expression.

The researchers found DNA methylation differences between "high-contact" children and "low-contact" children at five specific DNA sites, two of which were within genes: one related to the immune system, and one to the metabolic system.

DNA methylation also acts as a marker for normal biological development and the processes that go along with it, and it can be influenced by external, environmental factors as well.

Then there was the epigenetic age, the biological ageing of blood and tissue. This marker was lower than expected in the kids who hadn't had much contact as babies, and had experienced more distress in their early years, compared with their actual age.

"In children, we think slower epigenetic ageing could reflect less favourable developmental progress," says one of the team, Michael Kobor.

In fact, similar findings were spotted in a study from 2013 looking at how much care and attention young rats were given from a very early age.

Gaps between epigenetic age and chronological age have been linked to health problems in the past, but again it's too soon to draw those kind of conclusions: the scientists readily admit they don't yet know how this will affect the kids later in life.

We are also talking about less than 100 babies in the study, but it does seem that close contact and cuddles do somehow change the body at a genetic level.

Of course it's well accepted that human touch is good for us and our development in all kinds of ways, but this is the first study to look at how it might be changing the epigenetics of human babies.

It will be the job of further studies to work out why, and to investigate whether any long-term changes in health might appear as a consequence.

"We plan to follow up on whether the 'biological immaturity' we saw in these children carries broad implications for their health, especially their psychological development," says one of the researchers, Sarah Moore.

"If further research confirms this initial finding, it will underscore the importance of providing physical contact, especially for distressed infants."

The research has been published in Development and Psychopathology.

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Babies Who Get More Cuddles Have Their Genetics Changed For Years, Study Shows

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The amount of close and comforting contact that young infants get doesn't just keep them warm, snug, and loved. A new study says it can actually affect babies at the molecular level, and the effects can last for years.

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Swansea University - 'Put Down the Baby Care Books' Animation

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Our new animation for Swansea University College of Human and Health Sciences explains that a good baby is a perception held by our society that babies should act in a certain way, and that some baby care books take advantage of this by suggesting parents should encourage babies to be in a strict routine for their feeding and sleep.

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And why flash cards etc don’t have a place in their learning. Lng read with a lot in it.

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Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Pausing in the hallway of their Boston home for Grandpa to snap a photo, they chattered happily over the precious newborn son swaddled between them.

This normal-looking suburban couple weren't exactly like other parents. Roy was an AI and robotics expert at MIT, Patel an eminent speech and language specialist at nearby Northeastern State University. For years, they had been planning to amass the most extensive home-video collection ever.

From the ceiling in the hallway blinked two discreet black dots, each the size of a coin. Further dots were located over the open-plan living area and the dining room. There were 25 in total throughout the house - 14 microphones and 11 fish-eye cameras, part of a system primed to launch on their return from hospital, intended to record the newborn's every move.

It had begun a decade earlier in Canada - but in fact Roy had built his first robots when he was just was six years old, back in Winnipeg in the 1970s, and he'd never really stopped. As his interest turned into a career, he wondered about android brains. What would it take for the machines he made to think and talk? "I thought I could just read the literature on how kids do it, and that would give me a blueprint for building my language and learning robots," Roy told me.

Over dinner one night, he boasted to Patel, who was then completing her PhD in human speech pathology, that he had already created a robot that was learning the same way kids learn. He was convinced that if it got the sort of input children get, the robot could learn from it.

Toco was little more than a camera and microphone mounted on a Meccano frame, and given character with ping-pong-ball eyes, a red feather quiff and crooked yellow bill. But it was smart. Using voice recognition and pattern-analysing algorithms, Roy had painstakingly taught Toco to distinguish words and concepts within the maelstrom of everyday speech. Where previously computers learned language digitally, understanding words in relation to other words, Roy's breakthrough was to create a machine that understood their relationship to objects. Asked to pick out the red ball among a range of physical items, Toco could do it.

Patel ran an infant lab in Toronto and Roy flew up there to see what he could learn. Observing the mothers and babies at play, he realised he'd been teaching Toco badly. "I hadn't structured my learning algorithm correctly," he explained to Wired magazine in 2007. "Every parent knows that when you're talking to an 11-month-old, you stay on a very tight subject. If you're talking about a cup, you stick to a cup and you interact with the cup until the baby gets bored and then the cup goes away."

His robot had been searching through every phoneme it had ever heard when it was learning a new object, but Roy tweaked its algorithm to give extra weight to its most recent experiences, and began to feed it audio from Patel's baby lab recordings. Suddenly Toco began to build a basic vocabulary at a rate never seen before in AI research. His dream of "a robot that can learn by listening and seeing objects" felt closer than ever. But it needed to feed on recordings, and these were hard to find.

No one had ever truly studied "in the wild" what happens to a child in those first crucial years. The norm for researchers were weekly hour-long observation sessions - that was how Patel studied mothers and infants in her lab. If you were going to study the way a baby learned to talk, you'd need someone eccentric enough to rig up a house with hidden recording devices.

I first heard about Patel and Roy's experiment while working as a teacher at a London comprehensive. Most of the children I taught arrived at school aged 11 far behind where they we were expected to be with their language, and as a novice I struggled to help them catch up. Whereas everything I tried seemed outdated, Roy's approach was scientific. I hoped his findings would unlock a secret that could help kids to realise their full potential. If we could create machines that learned like humans, could we also develop ones that could help us perfect human learning?

Before pressing record, Roy and Patel agreed some ground rules. The recordings would be available only to their most trusted inner circle of researchers. If at any time they felt uncomfortable with the filming, they would junk the footage. When privacy was required, the system could be temporarily shut down. It was a leap of faith, but they agreed it was worth it. Their experiment had the power to unlock new insight into the workings of the infant mind.

Toco was Pinocchio to Roy's Geppetto. But whereas he was wondering what real kids could teach robots, I wanted to know if those home videos might hint at how to enhance learning for the youngest humans.

n 1995, two researchers, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, published the results of a study in which they trailed 42 Kansas City families to compare the experiences of preschoolers from poor families with their richer peers. Starting when the infants were nine months old, they observed them regularly over a two-and-a-half-year period, recording and transcribing all parent-and-child speech during their hour-long visits. The findings were stark. The number of words a child heard by their third birthday strongly predicted academic success aged nine. The difference was barely fathomable. They estimated that, at the age of four, the richest kids had heard 30m more words than the poorest.

"The problem of skill differences among children at the time of school entry is bigger, more intractable and more important than we thought," Hart and Risley said. Their research showed it was worth intervening as early as possible. "The longer the effort is put off, the less possible change becomes."

If the problem was stark, the solution seemed simple. There was a gap, and it had to be filled with words. Hart and Risley's findings fuelled a word-rush that endures today. Across the English-speaking world, parents flocked to buy flashcards and brain trainers for their tots.

But my experience in the classroom suggested that the interpretation was a little simplistic, equating the development of the human mind with the inputs and outputs of computers. I suspected that there was more to infant learning than the quantity of words you heard.

A professor of early-childhood development at Temple University in Pennsylvania, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, seemed to agree. She had written that "just as the fast food industry fills us with empty calories, what we call the 'learning industry' has convinced many among us that the memorisation of content is all that is needed for learning success and joyful lives". She had also written an influential book that laid out her reservations about the word-rush: Einstein Never Used Flashcards: How Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. I thought she might have some answers.

Hirsh-Pasek is legendary in the field of early child development. The author of 12 books and hundreds of academic articles, she is a distinguished faculty fellow who runs Temple's Infant and Child Laboratory, whose slogan is "Where Children Teach Adults".

At the lab, scientists were putting tiny humans through their paces. Researchers had developed ingenious experiments that measured changes in heart rate to show some of the things that eight-month-olds already knew. "They know the mobile won't fall on them," said Hirsh-Pasek. "They know that if I drop this plate on the table, the plate won't go through the table. That's amazing. They know that if I'm sitting across from you, and you can't see the bottom part of my body, I still have one."

Until recently, scientists had tended to think of infants as irrational, illogical and egocentric. In his Principles of Psychology in 1890, William James had described babies' experience of sensory overload: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion." This understanding had contributed to a mechanistic view of learning, and the idea that the sheer repetition of words was what mattered most. But it wasn't true.

Even in utero, babies are learning. At that stage, they pick up sounds. One-hour-olds can distinguish their mother's voice from another person's. They arrive in the world with a brain primed to learn through sensory stimulation. We are natural-born explorers, ready made for scientific inquiry. We have to understand this if we were to realise our learning potential.

"We enter the world ready to 'read the perfect cues out of the environment'," said Hirsh-Pasek. I thought back to Toco. He read the environment, too - or at least what his eye cameras saw and ear microphones heard. But robots can only reach out in ways they have been programmed to, can only learn from stimuli they were instructed to pay attention to. It limits them to a small range of experiences that would shape their behaviours. There is no meaning in their methods. Babies, on the other hand, are social learners.

"We arrive ready to interact with other humans and our culture," said Hirsh-Pasek. The real genius of human babies is not simply that they learn from the environment - other animals can do that. Human babies can understand the people around them and, specifically, interpret their intentions.

s we evolved, social and cultural transmission became possible. Language was our starting point - the possibility of two beings ascribing a shared meaning to an otherwise abstract concept or symbol. Couldn't we see the beginnings of this in babies' behaviour? Infants under a year engaged in proto-conversations with carers. They babbled away, held eye contact, exchanged things, mimicked their expressions or actions. They also experimented with tools, sticking them in their mouths, bashing them on things.

At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Prof Michael Tomasello wrote that our young learn "in an environment of ever-new artefacts and social practices, which, at any one time, represent something resembling the entire collective wisdom of the entire social group throughout its entire cultural history".

If all of us are to achieve our potential as learners, the question we have to answer is how we ought to shape this environment. Human brains have specially adapted to learn. Our long period of immaturity is a risky evolutionary strategy, making us vulnerable early on to predators or sickness, and delaying for many years our capacity to reproduce, but the payoff is immense. We can actively incorporate enormous amounts of the latest information from our environment and social group into our cognitive development.

Scientists have long recognised the nature-v-nurture debate as fallacy. A huge amount of our brain development takes place in the first three years. In those years, the brain grows in relation to the environment, forming itself in interaction with sensory experience. As Hart and Risley showed in their study of the word gap, that experience can have a huge effect on who that person becomes.

We have evolved to be a species of teachers and learners. Our ability to understand other people arrives around the ninth month, at a moment in their development at which babies begin to check the attention of others by holding or pointing at objects. At a year, they can follow another's attention, gazing at, touching or listening to the same thing. At 15 months they can direct it. Listen to that! Look over there! Shared attention is the starting point of conscious human learning. It is why infants don't learn to talk from video, audio or overhearing parental conversations. We haven't evolved to. That's why it matters that we talk to our children. It's also why we can't learn from robots - yet.

The implication for understanding how we learn sounds like common sense: each generation ought to ensure the next is steeped in their earliest years in the tools, symbols and social practices of the current culture.

n search of the kind of learning environment that might best cultivate our natural abilities, I visited Pen Green Early Childhood Centre, a specialist centre in early child development in the Northamptonshire town of Corby. The outdoor space was cold and overcast, but that wasn't deterring the children. By a bamboo bush, two small boys splashed at an ever-running tap. "Don't get me wet!" they squeaked with delight. A teacher bent down to comfort a toddler in a "Be Fast or Come Last" T-shirt. Four small girls were deep in a serious conversation while absent-mindedly digging sand into colourful buckets.

Pen Green had a global reputation for excellence in early child development and family support, a prototype that had inspired successive early-years interventions by government, including Sure Start and Early Excellence. I spoke to the director, Angela Prodger. She had just taken over from the legendary Margy Whalley, who set up the centre in 1983. In the 1980s, Corby was among the UK's poorest towns, its population of Scottish migrant workers unmoored by the closure of the steelworks for which they had moved south - 11,000 people had been made redundant. The centre was intended as a lifeline for the next generation. Today it serves 1,400 of the UK's least well-off households.

I asked her about language learning. We knew words mattered, but I'd not heard much talk at playtime. "If we're not addressing personal, social, emotional development first, you're not ready to learn," said Prodger. She explained that before children could acquire the tools of speech and language, you had to ensure they felt a sense of "being and belonging". Too frequently, she thought, our approaches to early learning skipped these steps. It sounded to me like a nice-to-have, not an essential, but research showed otherwise.

In the 1950s, British psychoanalyst John Bowlby proposed a theory of "attachment". He hypothesised that infants, unable to regulate their own feelings, were prone to get upset when they were hungry, sad or lonely. A carer was needed to help them "co-regulate" their feelings, which over time would teach the child to self-regulate, provided their early experiences helped them do so. If negative experiences weren't alleviated with love from a parental figure, they could become established.

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Illustration: Guardian Design

The implications for children growing up in poverty-stricken or traumatic environments were significant. This was why Pen Green took care to put the being and belonging of its children first. It also explained some of the behaviour at the school where I had taught. Where I'd missed the signs of kids responding to the stress of the environment in which they were growing up, at Pen Green they worked closely with carers to ensure children built strong, nurturing relationships that would help them thrive in the nursery and ultimately at school. I'd always believed children wanted to wreak havoc. It had never occurred to me that they might simply have been conditioned by their environment to act in a certain way. "Behaviour is always just a sign of children trying to tell you something," said Prodger.

As we toured the building, Prodger told me that the skill of the practitioners at Pen Green was in learning to attend to what was going on in the minds of the kids, and interpreting it as evidence of what the youngsters were signalling, even before they were able to verbalise it themselves. Children were constantly communicating with us, she told me. We just had to learn to understand.

"It's about looking," Prodger said. "What are the children trying to explore? What are they trying to find out?"

Creative play is the foundation on which creativity, language, maths and science are built. If you start too early with flashcards, you lose this developmental stage. "It's about being free," Prodger said. "It's about risk-taking."

They take the kids out to the forest a few days a week, light fires, let them experiment with scissors and ride BMX bikes. If they want to be outside, they go outside. If they fancy returning to the snug, where the youngest infants roll around, that's where they would go. The environment dictates the learning. The adults aim only to connect and share attention with the children. Reading and writing could wait. Nurseries ought to be as social as possible, and follow kids' lead in their play. Before kids can get on with learning, we have to ensure they belong.

The children seemed happy here, learning to belong and laying down foundations for their future success through play. And yet I wondered if we couldn't do still more to accelerate early learning. The implication of Deb Roy's robot experiment was that every moment counted. Could we afford to leave so much to chance?

he accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality in the US," wrote economist James Heckman. It's equally true in the UK today, where the strongest predictor of academic achievement is how much your parents earn. Though two-thirds of our kids attain a C or above in English and maths GCSEs each year, that number falls to just over a third of kids on free school meals. Heckman has also shown that the best way to tackle this inequality is to invest in children's development as early as possible in their lives. It isn't enough to transform schools - we have to start much earlier than that.

At Temple University, Hirsh-Pasek told me that we can't simply drop kids in front of iPads and expect them to catch up - but that doesn't mean we should give up entirely on intelligent machines. Some of her lab's experiments are aimed at closing developmental gaps between rich and poor kids. Others cover topics such as language development and spatial awareness, and all use technology in different ways. "What the machine can't do is be a partner," Hirsh-Pasek told me. "It isn't social. It's interactive without being adaptive."

Hirsh-Pasek's mission was to change the way we thought about learning, especially for the poorest kids. "We had this vision that it was so important to get the basics into poor kids," she told me. "We thought we should drop recess - even though we know being physical helps kids learn, helps build better brains. And we thought we should just do reading and maths, and cut out the arts and all this superfluous stuff like social studies."

'From the earliest ages, we learn from people' ... Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

It weighed heavily on her. Policymakers and laymen had twisted the science to fit their own ends. No scientist thought flashcards worked. No scientist believed you should start learning to read and write at an ever younger age. It was a fantasy of governments. More recent research has added depth to the language lessons of Hart and Risley's Kansas Study. In 2003, the psychologist Patricia Kuhl experimented with teaching American infants Mandarin. Split into three groups (video, audio and flesh-and-blood teacher) only those with a human tutor learned anything at all. In 2010 a study of the wildly popular Baby Einstein vocabulary-building DVDs (Time called them "Crack for Babies") revealed that infants who watched them "showed no greater understanding of words from the program than kids who never saw it". Nor did babies learn words by eavesdropping on parental conversations or listening to In Our Time on Radio 4, however soothing the mellifluous tones of Melvyn Bragg. More than words, it took a human being for a baby to learn language. They c\ouldn't learn from screens.

Schools are still guilty of ignoring these insights into infant learning. Erika Christakis, early-childhood expert and author of The Importance of Being Little, charts the slow descent in preschool learning from a multidimensional, ideas-based approach to a two-dimensional naming-and-labelling curriculum. Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia asks if kindergarten is really the new first grade. The expectation that kindergarteners - aged five or six - can read is now commonplace. Yet this is counter to all the evidence. A Cambridge study comparing groups of children who started formal literacy lessons at five and seven found that starting two years earlier made no difference at all to a child's reading ability aged 11, "but the children who started at five developed less-positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those who started later".

These findings are clear: if you start on the decoding before you have an underlying understanding of story, experience, sensation and emotion, then you become a worse reader. And you like it less. Treat kids like robots during early learning and you put them off for life.

Instead, Hirsh-Pasek wanted kids to embrace the joy in learning and growing up. Apart from kids, her other great love was music. She often used to break into song, especially on the phone to her granddaughter.

In her book, she suggested six Cs for modern learning: collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence. Truisms, I had thought, but unlike much education policy, drawn from scientific evidence. If I was to take away one thing, she said, it should be that "from the earliest ages, we learn from people".

It was the same insight that had prompted a pair of suburban scientists to hit the "record" button.

eb Roy was dressed in black and still looked youthful when we met at MIT. A few flecks of grey in his hair were the only evidence of 11 years of parenthood. Looking back, the Human Speechome Project - as his and Patel's home-recoding experiment had been named - seemed a quirk of turn-of-the-millennium enthusiasm about artificial intelligence. In all, they had captured 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio. The 200 terabytes of data covered 85% of the first three years of their son's life (and 18 months of his little sister's). But now the footage had been gathering dust. "I still have the whole collection," he said. "I'm waiting for his wedding day, just to bore the hell out of everyone."

In a way, it was also a great lost home video. With his team at MIT, Roy had developed new approaches to visualising and studying the data they had captured: "Social Hotspots" showed two tightly knotted lines, visual traces of tender moments in which parent and child came together to chat, learn or explore; "Wordscapes" were snow-capped mountains ranged throughout the living room and kitchen, the highest peaks rising where particular words were most often heard. The tools had turned out to be fantastically lucrative as a means for analysing talk on Twitter. Roy and a graduate student had spent the decade building a new media company.

Roy was now back at MIT. His new group was called the Laboratory for Social Machines. He had given up building robots that would compete with humans and instead turned his attention to the augmentation of human learning. What had changed his mind was the process of actually raising a child.

The first time his son uttered something that wasn't just babble, Roy was sitting with him looking at pictures. "He said 'fah'," Roy explained, "but he was actually clearly referring to a fish on the wall that we were both looking at. The way I knew it was not just coincidence was that right after he looked at it and said it, he turned to me. And he had this kind of look, like a cartoon lightbulb going off - an 'Ah, now I get it' kind of look. He's not even a year old, but there's a conscious being, in the sense of being self-reflective."

"I guess, putting on my AI hat, it was a humbling lesson," he continued. "A lesson of like, holy shit, there's a lot more here."

Roy was no longer sure you could bring a robot up like a real human - or that we should even try. It didn't seem there was much to gain by developing robots that took exactly one human childhood to become exactly like one young adult human. That's what people did. And that was before you got into imagination or emotions, identity or love - things that were impossible for Toco. Watching his son, Roy had been blown away by "the incredible sophistication of what a language learner in the flesh actually looks like and does". Infant humans didn't only regurgitate; they created, made new meaning, shared feelings.

The learning process wasn't decoding, as he had originally thought, but something infinitely more continuous, complex and social. He was reading Helen Keller's autobiography to his kids, and had been struck by her epiphany at understanding language for the first time. Deaf and blind after an illness in infancy, Keller was seven years old when she got it. "Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten," she wrote, "a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life."

Roy had recently started working with Hirsh-Pasek, following her insight that machines might augment learning between humans, but would never replace it.

He had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn't be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds.
Natural Born Learners by Alex Beard will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 12 April. To order a copy for £16.14, go to guardianbookshop.com
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How babies learn - and why robots can't compete

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Deb Roy and Rupal Patel pulled into their driveway on a fine July day in 2005 with the beaming smiles and sleep-deprived glow common to all first-time parents. Pausing in the hallway of their Boston home for Grandpa to snap a photo, they chattered happily over the precious newborn son swaddled between them.

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Position paper by the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health

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Position paper by the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health

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Sums it up, with references

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A loving mother's caress is more than simple comfort to an infant. Scientists have known for decades that touch is critically important for a child's healthy development, according to an article in the journal Pediatric Child Health.

But now a new study shows that the amount a baby is touched can leave lasting, measurable effects - not just on behavior or growth, but all the way down to the molecular level of the DNA. Those changes, the scientists speculate, could have negative effects on the way the child grows and develops.

For the study, scientists at the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute followed about 100 infants over four years. They asked parents of five-week-old babies to keep a journal of their child's behavior - things like crying, sleeping, and feeding. They also asked parents to keep track of how long and how often they gave care to their child that involved physical contact, according to a press release.

When the children were about four and a half years old, the scientists swabbed the inside of their cheeks to take a DNA sample, and then checked to see if there were any differences between children who were touched often as infants and those who were touched less often.

The researchers looked at a process called DNA methylation, the scientists explained in the release. In a body cell, there are structures called chromosomes that contain the genetic code of a person. They determine things like sex, physical appearance, and how the body operates and grows.

In DNA methylation, some parts of the chromosome are "tagged" with molecules that can control how active that portion is, the scientists explained in the release. Scientists can generally predict how this should go as we age.

When they compared the methylation between the children, they found that there were consistent differences between the low-physical-contact and high-physical-contact children. In effect, the cells of the low-contact children were less mature than they should have been given the child's actual age.

That could result in the child experiencing delays in development and growth, said Michael Kobor, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics, in the release.

"We plan to follow up on whether the 'biological immaturity' we saw in these children carries broad implications for their health, especially their psychological development," said lead author Sarah Moore in a press release. "If further research confirms this initial finding, it will underscore the importance of providing physical contact, especially for distressed infants."

In the release, the researchers said the findings are the first that show that touch "has deeply-rooted and potentially lifelong consequences on the epigenome - biochemical changes that affect gene expression."

But the concept of touch being vital for healthy development is far from new.

One of the most well-known studies on the subject was performed by American psychologist Harry Harlow on rhesus monkeys in the 1950s. Harlow separated monkeys from their real mothers and had them drink milk from either a cold, wire lookalike mother or a different lookalike mother covered in soft cloth. The monkeys spent much more time with the comforting cloth mother, and when Harlow gave them no choice, the monkeys who only had the choice of the cold, wire mother had severe behavioral abnormalities - and they stayed that way even if being introduced to more nurturing environments later, according to a summary from the University of Oregon.

Other studies have found similar results in humans. One found that children who grew up in orphanages away from traditional nurturing had much higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and another found that touch-deprived infants have abnormal levels of hormones that regulate social behavior.

The takeaway from the science? Infants need to be held, touched and engaged with to thrive.

"(Engaging with infants) teaches babies basic lessons that they have some agency in the world, so that allows them to explore the world and feel like they can affect their environment as opposed to just being helpless to whatever happens to them," Ann Bigelow, a professor and researcher of developmental psychology, told Scientific American. "We're basically a social species, and we learn those things through interacting with others."

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Touch-deprived infants have measurable differences in their genes, study suggests | Miami Herald

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A loving mother's caress is more than simple comfort to an infant. Scientists have known for decades that touch is critically important for a child's healthy development, according to an article in the journal Pediatric Child Health.

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Holding distressed infants - or not, can leave traces on their genes

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Holding distressed infants - or not, can leave traces on their genes

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The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The study showed that children who had been more distressed as infants and had received less physical contact had a molecular profile in their cells that was underdeveloped for their age - pointing to the possibility that they were lagging biologically.

Although the implications for childhood development and adult health have yet to be understood, this finding builds on similar work in rodents. This is first study to show in humans that the simple act of touching, early in life, has deeply-rooted and potentially lifelong consequences on the epigenome - biochemical changes that affect gene expression.

"In children, we think slower epigenetic aging could reflect less favorable developmental progress," said Michael Kobor, a Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics who leads the "Healthy Starts" theme at BC Children's Hospital Research Institute.

The study, published Nov. 22 in Development and Psychopathology, involved 94 healthy children in British Columbia. Researchers from UBC and BC Children's Hospital asked parents of 5-week-old babies to keep a diary of their infants' behavior (such as sleeping, fussing, crying or feeding) as well as the duration of caregiving that involved bodily contact. When the children were about 4 ½ years old, their DNA was sampled by swabbing the inside of their cheeks.

The team examined a biochemical modification called DNA methylation, in which some parts of the chromosome are tagged with small molecules made of carbon and hydrogen. These molecules act as "dimmer switches" that help to control how active each gene is, and thus affect how cells function.

The extent of methylation, and where on the DNA it specifically happens, can be influenced by external conditions, especially in childhood. These epigenetic patterns also change in predictable ways as we age.

Scientists found consistent methylation differences between high-contact and low-contact children at five specific DNA sites. Two of these sites fall within genes: one plays a role in the immune system, and the other is involved in metabolism. However, the downstream effects of these epigenetic changes on child development and health aren't known yet.

The children who experienced higher distress and received relatively little contact had an "epigenetic age" that was lower than would be expected, given their actual age. A discrepancy between epigenetic age and chronological age has been linked to poor health in some recent studies.

"We plan to follow up on whether the 'biological immaturity' we saw in these children carries broad implications for their health, especially their psychological development," says lead author Sarah Moore, a postdoctoral fellow. "If further research confirms this initial finding, it will underscore the importance of providing physical contact, especially for distressed infants."

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bc children s hospital research institute

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Holding infants - or not - can leave traces on their genes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The amount of close and comforting contact between infants and their caregivers can affect children at the molecular level, an effect detectable four years later, according to new research from the University of British Columbia and BC Children's Hospital Research Institute.