Supercharge Your Baby’s Brain: One Thing ALL Parents Can Do

In 1920, a popular New York pediatrician reported a startling and heartbreaking problem: Institutionalized babies were dying. In fact, all institutionalized babies were dying. The death rate was 100 percent for children under two. What was happening? They had shelter. They had food. Their diapers were changed. They were otherwise healthy. So what was the missing link?

The missing link was touch. These babies received little to no touch and caring, and thus could not thrive. The surprising (or not so surprising) truth is that babies require touch, love, and cuddles to survive. Touch is the only sense a child cannot live without. Deaf children will survive, blind children will survive, but unless a child can touch and be touched, he will die.

Now, I’m guessing our ancestors never worried about giving their children an adequate amount of touch. Babies were carried and held because that’s how mammals do it. Evolution made it so. The safest place for babies was in the arms of a caretaker. In many traditional hunter-gatherer societies like those observed in The Continuum Concept, babies are held constantly in the first six months of life. In Bali, at the age of three to six months, families will perform a ground-touching ceremony to celebrate the first time a baby’s feet touch the ground. Humans aren’t the only species that need copious amounts of touch. In his famous studies in the sixties, Dr. Harry Harlow found that rhesus monkeys preferred softer, cloth-covered dummy mothers to wire ones, and in times of distress preferred the cloth dummy if it offered no food, even if food was available with the wire dummy.

Science offers an explanation for this innate need for touch that mammals have. It has to do with the “drug store” in our brains. Certain chemicals in our brains, for example oxytocin and opioids, create a sense of calm and content, and the ability to handle stress well. But the only way to activate these chemicals in the human brain is through loving human touch! Research with other mammals indicated that the more physical contact infants had with their mothers, the less fearful and the more confident they were. They were also more mentally healthy later in life and were calmer and more attentive with their babies, and coped well with the stress of unfamiliar environments. Dr. Henry Chapin, the famous pediatrician who made the observation about institutionalized children, also found that animals who did not receive enough touch tended to be frequently tense and exhibited impulsive, anxious, irritable, and aggressive behavior.