Relationship Between Mother And Infant

Babies are unfamiliar with the outside world when born. They need to find familiarity and they do this by a process called “Perceptual discrimination”. Although babies can’t see well they discriminate between faces, sounds, and smells starting as early as three days old. This helps them feel calm and trust their environment. During the many studies conducted pertaining to the baby’s visual perception they show that the babies tend to have more visual stimuli when looking at a familiar face. Especially when looking at their own mothers face rather than a strangers face. When doing smell tests it showed that the babies preferred their mother’s breast milk rather than another women’s breast milk and they also prefer the smell of their mother to

Babies enjoy rhythm time and peek a boo games of hiding and repetition. The use of blurring and babbling will occur. The bonds with parents are

At 6 weeks infants develop a social smile, at 3 month laughter and curiosity develop, at 4 months full responsive smiles emerge, from 4-8 months they develop anger, from 9014 months they develop a fear of social events, at 12 months the are fearful of unexpected sights and sounds, and at 18 months they are self-aware, feel pride, shame, and embarrassment. In the first two years, infants develop from reactive pain and pleasure to complex patterns of social awareness. Emotions in infants are produced from their body as opposed to their thoughts. Therefore fast and uncensored reactions are common in infants. During their toddler years, the strength of their emotions will increase.

There were several differences in age related behaviors between the groups. The youngest group did not seek the parent’s face as frequently as did the older grouped children. The older children’s preference for making reference to the parent’s face may reflect their understanding that facial expressions provide a significant source information about events. The youngest children may have lacked such understanding or they may have been more concerned with simply establishing their parents secured presence rather than using them as a resource for appraising the toys. The looking pattern of the youngest children suggest that they may have not detected the fear effect of the parental communication or understood that the message referred specifically to the toy. However, the fact that the youngest group spent less time playing with the toy associated with the fearful message indicated that some communication did occur. By the end of the first year of life, children can be expected to have at least some understanding of the meaning of fearful expressions as well as referential communications, and they appear to have taken their parents negative messages seriously. Infants of about 12 months of age have frequently been the focus of social referencing studies, and the results of the present investigation suggest that social referencing effects may indeed

Children's interactions with their system impact their development. The system can include the parents, other kids, other adults and family members (Hutchison, pg. 423, 2013). In this stage as long as infants are receiving adequate

Harlow’s research elucidates and analyzes emotional and social development among infants when presented with stress and/or fear. “One function of the real mother, human or subhuman, and presumably of a mother surrogate, is to provide a haven of safety for the infants in times of fear or danger“ (Harlow & Zimmerman, 503). As the former experiment showed, both surrogate mothers were available at all times during this trial. Once presented with emotional stress, an extensive percentage of the test subjects hastily rushed to the cloth mother, regardless

Another important part of this study was looking at how these effects occurred during different stages of prenatal development, as the “consequences of prenatal maternal stress were determined by the

It was theorized that this condition exists in depressed mothers. The researchers wanted to determine if training in social referencing could increase social referencing the infants. Forty-four 8-12 month old infants with mothers showing significant symptoms of depression participated in the study. All infant-mother pairs were divided into two groups, a control group and an experimental group. All pairs were observed interacting spontaneously in the pretest condition. In the posttest condition, the control group was again observed interacting spontaneously, but the experimental group received training in behavioral procedures referenced in social situations; in this research, these procedures included discrimination training reinforcement. The researchers found that training significantly increased the infants’ action of looking toward their mother and the appropriate behaviors in response, indicating that training improved social referencing in the infants.

Research has shown that the way the caregiver and infant interact has a significant effect on the maturation of the infant's nervous system,

The concept of infant-mother attachment is as important to the child as the birth itself. The effect this relationship has on a child shall affect that child for its entire life. A secure attachment to the mother or a primary caregiver is imperative for a child’s development. Ainsworth’s study shows that a mother is responsive to her infant’s behavioral cues which will develop into a strong infant-mother attachment. This will result in a child who can easily, without stress, be separated from his mother and without any anxiety. Of course the study shows a child with a weak infant-mother relationship will lead to mistrust, anxiety, and will never really be that close with the mother. Without the

This paper will explore the phenomenon of enmeshment between a mother and her child. It will begin by first providing a working definition for the concept of enmeshment, then go into more detail about how and why this manifests within the mother and child dynamic. Next it will discuss maternal enmeshment’s impact on the child’s development during childhood using the theories of Erik Erikson and John Bowlby as a framework of understanding. It will conclude by providing a brief overview of some ways enmeshment can adversely influence the child across the lifespan.

The researchers evaluated 28 participants, male and female, from age three years and six months to five years and ten months. Among them, none had recently attended the laboratory where the experiment was

Infants are very helpless and extraordinarily dependent. Their earliest behaviors are goal driven for gaining a caregiver to focus and engage reciprocity in their behavior (Sroufe, 2011). The infants task is to gain their survival needs and regulate fear and stress by creating contingent responses so that the world may be predictable and comprehensible (Sroufe, 2011). Regulating emotions can only occur in relationship with the parents; an infant is ill equipped to reduce arousal on their own (Seigel, date, Sroufe, 2011, cite.) The infants work is most effective when circumstances and contingent responses are anticipated and more challenging when they encounter unpredictability and transitions (Hughes, 2014).

Observation of an infant in the family setting 'provides the observer with an opportunity to encounter primitive emotional states in the infant and his family...' (Rustin in Miller, 1989, 7). According to Rustin infant observation allows to 'explore the emotional events between infant and mother' and 'the aim is to describe the development of the relationship between infant and others (...) and try to understand the unconscious aspects of behaviour and patterns of communication' (Rustin in Miller, 1989, 7). Early infant observation plays a vital role in the psychodynamic training and it gives a thesis of how early emotional development is being influenced by subconscious family dynamics.

People always think that once you have a kid, it will be all sunshine and daisies. Maybe sometimes it can be like that, but not always. There are joys and challenges with everything in life. Many people have different ways of describing the joys or challenges of taking care of an infant, for example, some people would find that first outing as a joy and some people find it as a challenge. Men and Women both have perspectives with how they raise their children, whether together or as a single parent.