The baby emerges from the velvety darkness of her mother's womb into the brightly-lit delivery room as her white-robed father watches - nervously, eagerly, proudly. "It's a girl," says the smiling obstetrician, holding the baby aloft so the exhausted mother can see the result of nine months of pregnancy and seventeen hours of grueling labor. "She's darling," the mother murmurs softly. "Just look at those chipmunk cheeks."
The new mother glances quickly at her husband, who smiles broadly, nodding his affirmation. The baby starts to cry and the doctor places her on her mother's abdomen to be caressed. "There, there, its going to be OK," coos the mother to her crying daughter. Already this woman and her baby are engaged in what child psychiatrist Jack Raskin calls "a beautiful ballet."
During the months ahead, both mother and baby will interact in ways that fascinate child development experts. As the new mother provides for her baby's physical needs with intricate social interactions involving sound, touch, imitation, facial expressions, and body language.
"From the moment of the birth,” says human development expert William Damon, "new born babies regulate their behavior to synchronize with the pattern of human speech." Immediately after birth, a baby will turn its head toward the sound of a human voice, particularly its mother's. Not only will the baby take turns with its mother in such social exchanges as smiling, grimacing or cooing, but the new born will also imitate its mother's facial expressions.
Among my favorite possessions, I treasure a sequence of photographs of myself and my first child, Holly, when she was four months old. In these pictures, small, blond Holly wears a summery white dress and mirrors my facial expressions. When I grin with delight, Holly, seated on my lap facing me, does the same. When I turn slightly to one side and grimace, Holly, turned in the opposite direction, echoes my disdain. In a third photo, Holly faces me, I hold her tiny hands and we crow with delight. What a pair we were! I remember by surprise, my amazement, when I first saw these pictures. I had no idea my infant daughter was such an adept mimic.
Human Connections
From the raw material of social interaction with its parents, a baby creates vital human connections. In his book Attachment, British psychiatrist John Bowlby calls these earliest human connections "attachment relationships,” saying that our first attachments will shape all others.
Bowlby uses the term attachment to refer to those enduring relationships that a baby forges during the first six to twelve months of life. Although he feels that all babies (even abused babies) attach to their mothers and fathers, Bowlby clearly believes in a hierarchy of such relationships, with Mother at the apex of the pyramid. "The young child's hunger for the mother's presence," he writes, "is as great as his hunger for food." If a child loses his mother for any reason, "her absence inevitably generates a powerful sense of loss and anger."
Is there any room for Father in the passionate relationship a child shares with his mother? Recently, Bowlby has acknowledged in A Secure Base that fathers
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