Hold Tight to Littles

Hold Tight to Littles

All these wee fingers and toes. They are meant to be squeezed. In indigenous and ancestral cultures, for those first nine to eighteen months, infants are typically wrapped up, with compression, and carried against the back of a caregiver. There are about 37 things that happen, neurologically, when an infant is carried in this way. First of all, what we call “swaddling” an infant—wrapping them up in a blanket like a little dumpling—is soothing to infants because the touch compression replicates sensations of being in the womb, where for the several months of development before birth, they are feeling the compression of mom’s belly around them. As they grow, they are growing into resistance, which both yields and pushes back dynamically. Swimming in their little sac, there is also pressure. Replicating this outside, in a swaddle, re-creates some of this sensory experience, and has the additional and significant benefit of neurally instantiating—the process of etching experiences into biology—a clearer sense of boundary. Touch compression is part of what helps give baby a sense of where she ends and the world begins. Now, we put her on a caregiver’s back. This immediately accomplishes two things. First, she experiences the warmth and touch of another body that loves her. We can’t over-estimate the importance of touch in the development of regulation and embodiment. On mom’s (or another caregiver’s) back, she is, at a sensate level, held close against something stably warm, and feels the sensations of movement that happen when mom turns, adjusts, etc. The other thing that is viscerally transmitted, immediately, is a felt sense of the caregiver’s heartbeat. In utero, an infant is immersed in a sound bath that includes all the internal sounds of the mother’s body, the swooshing, gurgling, and drumming of the heartbeat. Being held against the back continues this sound, but at a visceral level, because infants’ hearts entrain with their caregivers; the heartbeat of the mother is regulating the child. It is important to remember that infants have a much more permeable boundary than older children. We might argue that, initially, they don’t have a boundary, don’t have a circumscribed sense of self. They are profoundly receptive to all of the vibration around them, especially until the fontanelles close. A fontanelle, also called a soft spot, is a space between the bones of the skull. Anatomically, we understand it to have two functions: allowing the skull to compress slightly during childbirth, and allowing space for the brain to grow. Yet this anatomical perspective is only one comprehension of these structures. At an existential level, they represent direct permeability of the infant to the world around them. The posterior fontanelle closes, typically, at one to two months, the anterior at nine to eighteen months. It is probably not an accident that this corresponds to the time period during which traditional cultures carry their children. By so doing, they ensure that during the most sensitive developmental period after birth, the child has, when she is awake, vibrational contact with the ones who love her most. As our nature connection mentor, John Stokes, explains, love connected to gratitude creates a certain electro-magnetic frequency, 1.618 Hz. This value, 1.618, is known as the Golden Ratio, a number nearly equal to the ratio of any two successive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. HeartMath, one of the first organizations to commercialize a heart-rate variability monitor, has research that shows that when we enter this emotional state of love and gratitude, this turns our heart- rate variability into an integrated waveform that unites and harmonizes the bodily functions and brings us into a state of well-being. Polyvagal Theory affirms this perspective with greater neurophysiological nuance. We call this “Turning on the Connection System.” This means that an infant held against the back of a caregiver who is in connection is receiving an embodied transmission of well-being that regulates them physiologically. The child is wake-surfing the caregiver’s electro-magnetic field. (When a large boat passes through, it creates a wake that spreads behind it. Wake surfing is the practice of riding in that wake.) In this analogy, the parent’s heart is the large boat, and the child held on their back is bathed in that frequency, and is being taught. We don’t have a good word in English for this kind of teaching, but it is one that establishes neurophysiological baseline states. It is an embodied transmission of regulatory information. In her book on the relationship between indigenous child-rearing and moral development, Dr. Darcia Narvaez explains the importance of particular child-rearing practices on the development of morality. Children carried in this way are receiving nine to eighteen months of profound neural training during their most sensitive developmental period after birth. The experience enters implicit memory directly, through sensory, affective, visceral, vibrational, proprioceptive, and perhaps vestibular pathways.

Let’s take this one step further, because here is where this begins to teach the child about the world. Because of entrainment, the baby will have a visceral response when the caregiver’s heart rate and/or neural platform of behavior changes. Let’s say that baby is on mom’s back and a strange dog approaches. Baby will know, viscerally, whether or not that dog is dangerous by how mom reacts. This is not a cognitive or verbal knowing: it has nothing to do with what mom says. It is an entirely felt awareness. If mom’s heart rate elevates (e.g., if she moves toward a fight or flight response) that teaches baby something about the world. A safe dog doesn’t elevate mom’s heart rate. A dangerous dog will. Baby feels both. Now consider, also, that by nine to twelve months, baby is now looking out over mom’s shoulder at a world she can’t yet make sense of. The transfer of mom’s visceral state and neural platform—through heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, posture, gesture—is teaching baby about the world. She is correlating and organizing what happens out there with how it affects mom, which affects her. This is a kind of neuro-developmental embodied sensory learning process. A connection phenomenology mentoring process. Imagine this for a moment: how does the best mentoring work? If you are learning from an expert, first you study how they do things. Then, hopefully, you begin to imitate those things with the expert watching over your shoulder (coaching). We put you (metaphorically generally) on the back of someone more experienced, and then we have them guiding you over the shoulder. The first eighteen months have you on the expert’s (mom’s) back, at eighteen months, mom is looking over your shoulder. Initially, mom’s experience becomes the lens through which baby understands.

Contrast this for a moment with the modern practice at this age, where baby is often in a stroller three feet in front of mom, like the cow-catcher on the front of an old-fashioned locomotive, encountering an indecipherable world from the front of the train. In the Old Way, the caregiver is the shield, and the baby is safe, behind. In our world, we make the baby into the shield. We hold our modern infants out in front of us, face-first in a dangerous world: one that they can’t possibly make sense of, with no visceral reference point, disconnected from the visceral stabilization of our touch. And we do this not because we are bad people, but because we don’t understand embodied neurodevelopment. If we did, we’d utilize the ancestral technology. This category of technology, what I’m calling ancestral technology—the proper way to carry an infant to optimize their neurodevelopment—is not even recognized by many as a technology, and yet it is deeply so. It is a traditional cultural element of connection phenomenology. Jon Young, in working with the San people of the Kalahari, has undertaken an effort to catalog and organize a compendium of 512 such cultural elements. This is one of the most important research projects on our planet. These elements have also, historically, been implicit to culture. The San people know them as lifeways: just how things are done. It’s only those of us who have deviated so far from this ancestral mode who need to actively reconstruct them. Thank goodness there are those out there who still remember.