Parenting Baby to Sleep

I’ve just been reading through a new book we’ve brought written by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell. This is very in line with a Brainwave trust talk I went to a while ago. (Click here to view the post where I talk about Self Soothing) It was very hard to take any notes let alone listen with Ara off for a walk every 5 minutes. So I’ve been hunting for some information which was very similar…and I feel that Daniel and Mary have got it in their book

“…These linkages are made, according to the half-century-old axiom of the Canadian physician-psychologist Donald Hebb, because “neurons which fire together, wire together.” …”

The previous paragraph was talking about if you’d been bitten by a dog while fireworks had been going off you’d probably have a fear of both things.

“…More recently, the psychiatrist-neuroscientist Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that when neurons fire (are activated) repeatedly, the genetic material inside those neurons’ nuclei becomes “turned on” so that new proteins are synthesized which enable the creation of new neuronal synaptic connections. Neural firing (experience) turns on the genetic machinery that allows the brain to change its internal connections (memory).

The brain’s development also comes about when the neurons grow and create new connections with each other, so you can see why science tells us that memory and development are overlapping processes: experience shapes the developing structure of the brain. Genes determine much of how neurons link up with each other, but equally important is that experience activates genes to influence this linkage process. It is unhelpful to pit these interdependent processes against each other in simplistic debates such as experience versus biology, or nature versus nurture. In fact, experience shapes brain structure. Experience is biology. How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement.

Nature needs nurture….”

This information is just a scratch but I feel that many parents (myself included) do not know this before we become parents and most will not even look for it once they are parents. The ideas that we are creating our children in more ways than just the “roll in the hay”…would be preposterous to most parents. Also what most of western culture feel is the way to get good behaviour is in fact the opposite in the ways that we treat children. More often than not forcing an infant/baby/toddler to become independent before they are ready creates more difficult problems for that child to possibly sort out later in life or live with in ‘pain’ of not knowing what the problems are.