Psalm 22:8-10
8 “He trusts in the LORD;
let the LORD rescue him.
Let him deliver him,
since he delights in him.”
9 Yet you brought me out of the womb;
you made me trust in you
even at my mother’s breast.
10 From birth I was cast upon you;
from my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Throughout this blog, you will see the word attachment mentioned often. Most of the general public would not understand exactly what I mean by that word. The shortest way I could possibly explain attachment is the natural process that occurs between parents and babies in the first year that wires their brains for trust. When you see the word attachment, think the word trust.
The briefest history without the dates and contributors to the body of science we call attachment research is this…..
In the mid 1900’s, there were theories of development that supposed that the first year is important for a child’s social development.
Throughout the last half of the 1900’s and the first part of this century, attachment research has proven, in as much as you can use that word in speaking of research, that the first 3 years of a child’s life is critical to developing trust, learning to regulate one’s emotions, and attaining a good foundation for mental health throughout one’s lifespan.
After all this studying and reading and thinking and treating attachment issues I have done, I find the verse at the top of this page. It was said long before “research” was even being done on this subject. The time and place a person learns to trust is on his mother’s breast.
For what is a mother’s breast used in infancy and early childhood?
1) Breastfeeding…..nature’s way of forcing mother and infant to bond, especially in this day and age where mom’s are so very busy and contributors outside the home. I learned from breastfeeding that my baby came first during that time. Breastfeeding is really the sole activity that adjusted me to that truth. I was 30 at the birth of my first child and had plenty of time to adjust to being all about me, and a CRASH COURSE in learning to adjust to being all about Eli. Breastfeeding is a “dance” between mom and baby, in which the mom very carefully watches and learns her baby, and the baby learns how get himself fed by using his instincts to get his mother’s body to produce the exact amount of milk he needs. It’s an absolutely fascinating, wonderful system God created for nourishment, optimum growth and health, and most importantly-bonding.
A good website to learn all about breastfeeding is as follows: www.kellymom.com
2) Calming….another useful activity on mother’s breast. Babies in their first days of life love to be no where else but on their mother’s bare breasts with their bare breasts and tummies, listening to mom’s heartbeat. It reminds them of the womb, the place they were safest, best cared for, never hungry or cold. As babies grow, they still seek their mother’s breast as a place of safety and a resource for soothing. Regardless of whether a mom chooses to breastfeed, mother’s breasts teach a baby to trust by offering a place to calm.
3) Sleeping…. Each child with “attachment issues” I have worked with has difficulties sleeping. They have night terrors, difficulties settling, wake up in a state of panic often in the night, etc. A child has to feel calm and safe in order to sleep at all or sleep well. Both my children, even now at 3 1/2 and 16 months old, love to snuggle up into mine or my husband’s chest to fall asleep. When they were infants, they spent a great deal of time on our chests upright and sleeping because they would not sleep lying flat in a crib. Both of them had reflux, and the contents of their stomach ended up in their mouth, in the crib, in their noses, which is not conducive to sleeping!! So we did what we had to do to get them and us some sleep, we had them on our chests sleeping.
The modern invention of the crib has been deemed in the medical community, therefore, all of society, the only safe place to sleep. If you would like to see how allowing a very natural process of bonding and sleeping to take place can be very safe and beneficial to your infants development, see the mother /infant research lab at Notre Dame University.
http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/
I guess the point of any of this is to point out how great our Father God really is.
He built within babies and mothers across all cultures in our world a natural bonding system that enables us for the rest of our lives to have the capacity to trust that we are loved and important and worthy of getting our physical and relational needs met. All we have to do is work with nature, NOT against it, for this process to unfold just as it’s meant to unfold.
AND… in His goodness, He tucked a verse into His Word to let us know that after all our theories and all our research and all our reworking of common sense and nature with modern opinions and inventions,that HIS WORD very simply states what we painstakingly have come to know,
That all of us learn to trust on our mother’s breast.
Tags: adoptive parents, attachment parenting, breastfeeding, Christian culture, co-sleeping, parenting, parenting principles
