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As we grow, and throughout our lives, our interactions with each other are informed by our approach/avoid reflex: we either approach or avoid someone as a result of repeated positive or negative interactions with them.
In order to have a social response to a person, you first have to notice them. That is why we call the orienting reflex the foundation of our social reflexes. We orient when any of our five senses detect something significant in our environment. And that includes each other.
Expressing our emotions—even (and perhaps especially) the negative ones—is an essential part of building strong connections, supporting a baby’s development, and protecting mothers from postpartum mood disorders. Here, Drs. Welch and Dumitriu sit down to talk about the science behind emotional connection and how it impacts a mother and baby’s health and resilience.
When you approach bath time from a Nurture Science perspective, it can become a way to strengthen your emotional connection and improve your and your child’s health and mood.
A Nurture Science perspective on picky eating, dinnertime meltdowns, and how changing our approach to mealtime can have immediate and lasting benefits for the whole family.
At the Nurture Science Program, we use sensory activities to help moms and babies connect to each other. One of our go-tos is Kangaroo Care. But we’ve also added an element called Emotional Expression, which is key to fostering an autonomic emotional connection, which significantly improves outcomes for babies and supports parents’ health and resilience.
Through Family Nurture Intervention (FNI), the Nurture Science Program has developed a way to help connect moms and babies. And one of the most rewarding results from our study of FNI was that moms felt less depressed and anxious, and more confident caring for their babies.
Smell plays a pivotal role in relationships. For mothers and babies, smell is a large part of how they recognize each other, and form a deep emotional connection. When a mother’s sense of smell has been altered, it is vital to foster that connection through her other senses.
Over the course of this extraordinarily difficult and scary year, masks have saved countless lives. While masks will continue to protect us from the virus, they also pose some challenges to emotional connection between babies and mothers. Luckily, those challenges can be overcome.
With some people receiving the vaccine, many families are reuniting with older generations for the first time in a year. Other families still won’t be able to reunite for awhile. Here we share some emotionally-connecting activities that can help: from a distance or up-close.
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