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80 Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain 81 Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain by Sue Gerhardt Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and Author of ‘Why Love Matters’ and ‘The Selfish Society’ SUMMARY Why babyhood rather than childhood? The case that I want to make is that babyhood is much more important to our lives than many people realise. A lot of the behaviour that worries us in later childhood, such as aggression, hyperactivity, obesity, depression and poor school performance, has already been shaped by children’s experiences in babyhood. For those of you who have not studied the scientific literature, this might seem a bit…show more content…
But first let me make the case for the importance of infancy. “Research now shows that many challenges in adult society – mental health problems,obesity/stunting, heart disease, criminality, competence in literacy and numeracy - have their roots in early childhood.” (World Health Organisation) The over-riding importance of early conditions The strange fact is that very often the early conditions of our lives have a profound impact on the whole of our development. Let me start by describing how this works with regard to the body and physical health, which might seem more obvious, because we can see that nutrition affects the body. The body grows or it does not. It develops healthy organs or it Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain 83 does not. And actually, the early development of the body’s organs and other systems are affected by the nutrition available at
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