Mother and child

In the Ramat-Gan Safari, lives a pack of lions. The females, naturally, give birth to lion cubs. But in this case a serious motherhood disruption occurred: the lionesses abandon their cubs. They do not know how to nurse the new cubs, despite the fact their udders were full of milk. The reason for this phenomenon is due to the fact that in the 1980s the lionesses were treated with contraceptives, in order for the zoo to be able to control the number of lions in the small yard. For this reason it was prevented from the lionesses to get pregnant for a few successive years, and during this time, their motherly knowledge needed for raising the cubs was completely forgotten. It seems that young lionesses learn how to care for the cubs while watching the behavior of the adult lionesses. The motherly behavior of the lionesses is not instinctive but rather it is acquired, therefore this basic knowledge was lost when the succession of births was broken. As a result of this, the zoo caretakers have to send the cubs to a foster family, and this process perpetuates the deserting from one generation to another.
After a careful observation we have to admit that we are not different from those lionesses from Ramat-Gan. The natural (original) knowledge of the proper care for babies has been forgotten during the passing thousand years. This phenomenon has worsened since the 1940s, when western women stopped giving birth at home and started giving birth in hospitals' delivery rooms. In the 1960s Israeli babies were separated from their mothers at the moment they were born. In those days, it was recommended to separate the baby from its mother, for a period of 24 hours, so that the exhausted mother will get some rest after the hard labor. Separating babies and mother continues today: many parents decorate the baby's room during the pregnancy. They decorate it with love and with all their imagination and mind, but they are very wrong. The decorated room indicates that the parents ignore the only stimulation that the baby really needs. A baby born in the west is exactly like his baby brother in one of the hunters-collectors tribes. It needs constant and loving physical contact, all the time, twenty four hours a day, in the first years of its life.
Jean Liedloff is an American psychotherapist that spent two fascinating years of her life living with the people of an Indian tribe (hunters- gatherers) living in the rainforests in Venezuela. She discovered that the babies and children are happy, relaxed, independent, and never cry. According to Liedloff, the reason for the calmness of the babies rests in the fact that the babies and young children are (always) being carried in the arms of one of their family members, until they reach three years of age. Liedloff comes out against today's conventional norms of the west, such as using a stroller, a playpen or cradle. She recommended parents to stay close to their children during the day and during the night. She determines that the baby should be carried in his parents' arms all the time and even sleep with them in their bed. According to her, babies need the physical contact since “providing the baby continuous contact during the first months of its life is necessary and vital so the baby can construct self confidence, a whole feeling of “self” and trust toward the world…” ¹
To support Liedloff’s ideas and arguments, let us examine a famous and significant experiment that was performed at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 by Harry and Margaret Harlow. In the experiment they removed baby Rhesus monkeys from their mother shortly after they were born. Those babies could choose between two different surrogate mothers. The first was a wire dummy that provided food (milk) while the other was identical wire dummy that had no food but was covered with terrycloth. The result was clear and unequivocal: all Rhesus babies chose to cling to the terrycloth mothers, despite the fact they provided no food and they remained hungry. In other words, the need for continuous and comforting physical contact was more important for the babies that the need to feed in order to survive.
When this experiment ended, the baby monkeys were retuned to their original group, but most of the time they sat at the corner of the cage and seemed very sad and lonely. They lacked the basic social skills acquired through the childhood games that baby monkeys play. The Harlows gradually managed to rehabilitate the confidence of the (emotionally) hurt baby monkeys by integrating them in a small group of young healthy and friendly monkeys that were housed with them in a separate cage. The complete healing process of the monkeys that participated in the experiment lasted a number of months.
Harlow’s experiment was originally planned to examine the medical claim prevalent during those times that babies do not need the physical touch of their parents. Until the middle of the last century most psychologists and doctors believed that babies do not need physical contact with their parents, and the only stimulus a baby cares for is hunger for food. This belief dominated western medicine until the end of the 1960s, and it was brilliantly and completely refuted by the results of this experiment. The Harlows proved (and demonstrated) by a controlled scientific experiment the great importance of physical contact for the baby’s development.

In the next chapter we shall examine the ancient survival mechanism dictating the biological needs of babies, and examine its influence on our lives as adults.