The Social Necessity of Nurturance.

Man is born of love and exists by reason of a love more continuous than in any other form of life.

--Loren Eiseley

Clinical investigations of man show that the lack of a normal interpersonal environment may be devastating to the developing individual.

--S. L. Washburn

Andrew Hartman, in his chilling Humanist article "U.S. Prisons Mean Money" (November/December 2000), describes prisons as a profitable growth industry in the United States--a nation with 5 percent of the world s population but 25 percent of its prison population. We can somehow find money for jails but not for measures that could give our babies and children a good start in life and thus drastically reduce the need for such institutions.

Is this the wave of the future: more juveniles committing more crimes at ever earlier ages? Will the nation follow California's lead, as it so often does, and ultimately spend more on jails than on education? Aren't the Draconian measures used to address crime as violent as the crimes themselves and thus part of the problem rather than the solution? Is there no other option?

Of course, there is. To find it we must first learn two fundamental things about our species: how we evolved into the large-brained Homo sapiens we are; and the nature of a mother's role as primary caregiver. Once we understand these two factors we will be better able to determine how best to support her during pregnancy and lactation and how to enable her to give more of herself to her infant at least during the crucial first year, when the child's brain doubles in size, and preferably for the first five years, while the brain trebles in size to attain three-fourths of its final growth.

How did we become human? What brought our ancestors to the threshold between our animal ancestors and our hominid selves, which we crossed about four million years ago? We can't even begin to solve in any meaningful way our multiple, interlocking social pathologies except from the perspective of our evolution.

In the 140 years since Darwin published The Origin of Species--which overturned comfortable certitudes and showed a new and expanded view of life--accumulated evidence from geology, paleontology, botany, zoology, anthropology, genetics, microbiology, and every other scientific discipline has confirmed that evolution is the unifying principle that makes elegant sense of our planet's intricate web of life. To deny that life evolved is as disconnected from reality as to deny that the Earth is round and circles the sun.

Evolution binds us to the biota that engendered us and which, in our ignorance, we are ravaging. It explains how we descended from our ape ancestors. It offers us clues as to what is going amiss and why.

Our humanity doesn't sever us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We are the johnny-come-lately product of 200 million years of mammal evolution, sixty-five million years of primate evolution, and four million years of hominid evolution. Our ancestors lived in closely knit tribes in which cooperation and loyalty were essential. It was within that matrix--with devoted infant care and strong interpersonal links--that the brain enlarged from the size of a chimpanzee's to double that in Homo erectus and quadruple that in our Neandertal cousins and ourselves.

This astonishing advance begins with our mammalian heritage. All mammal mothers by definition gestate, bear, and suckle their offspring. In some species, mothers tend their young on their own. In our species, a societal context is integral. This is especially true of our suborder, the anthropoids, and our family, the hominids. Clearly, then, leaving mothers to cope entirely on their own flouts everything inherent to our nature and risks disastrous results.

A look at our hominid past helps us to understand our pathological present. About four million years ago, one line of apes assumed bipedal posture. This freed the hands, with their opposable thumbs, for grasping, which brought eye-hand coordination, which led to larger brain development, for which nature selected. However, because the birth canal could dilate only so far and the pelvic girdle not at all in bipeds, the skull had to mature after birth. The hominid solution was to bear increasingly unfinished infants who required increasingly intensive and extensive care. Lacking instincts to make them self-sufficient, the young required assiduous nurture. This pattern continued with the resultant cycle of increased helplessness; need for more care, more social interaction, more communication; formation of more complex and larger brains; demand for even more nurture.

Thus we became a species whose helpless newborns must have others on hand for them twenty-four hours a day, preeminently the mother due to her ability to breastfeed. The growing infant continues to need close attention much of the time, especially for the first twelve months. Theoretical physicist Robert Jastrow explains why: the reptilian part of the brain--the most ancient--is wired at birth, its millions of neurons in place; but other billions of neurons are not prewired and can make the correct connections only with continuous stimuli from caregivers.

This is why breastfeeding is so vital to a child's development. It shrinks the uterus postpartum, serves to inhibit another pregnancy during lactation, and, above all, provides the food, cuddling, and love that babies must have--the bonding between mother and child that lays the foundation for future growth. Much of this was overlooked by moderns until only a decade or so ago when we began to appreciate its enormous value.

Our evolution has resulted in a species whose infants can't thrive without continual, loving attention. Here, then, is the clue to raising fewer unhappy, alienated, violent youth for jail fodder. We must offer more and better care, beginning in the prenatal stage when, as is now thoroughly established, the woman's nutrition and general health are important to both herself and the fetus within her.

There are, in fact, indications that some supposedly genetic disorders may actually be caused by poor prenatal nutrition. According to health reporter Jane Brody: "Many people with heart disease who have attributed their ill health to heredity or unhealthy habits may have another culprit to blame: their mothers' diets during pregnancy." This is hardly surprising when you contemplate the complex processes involved as, in only nine months, the zygote is transformed into a fully formed infant, with hands and feet and eyes and ears and internal organs and brain ready to tackle life. How could diet not profoundly affect embryo and fetus?

Good nutrition remains vital particularly during the early years. An Indian food minister lamented some years ago that 30 percent to 40 percent of the children in India suffered permanent brain damage because of protein deficiency by the time they reached school age. A good diet, of course, is also necessary for the mother as she suckles her infant so that she not only passes on nutrients to her child but doesn't endanger her own health by depleting her reserves.

Every human infant must have unconditional love; without it, an infant's health and growth will be stunted. Professor Alexander Cockburn, head of Glasgow University's Department of Child Health, concluded: "A mother breast-feeding, with a supportive family structure around her ... is the way the human species has evolved." Anthropologists, neurologists, child psychiatrists, and all other researchers into child development unequivocally agree and have sought for decades to alert society. For example:

Rene Dubos (microbiologist): "The growth rate of the human brain reaches a peak at about the fifth month of fetal [development], is maintained at the maximum level until birth ... the very structure of the brain and the fundamental patterns of its functions can be profoundly influenced both by the conditions of intrauterine life and by the experiences of early extra-uterine life. Malnutrition [may cause] mental backwardness which cannot be corrected in later life."

Ashley Montagu (anthropologist): "The prolonged period of infant dependency produces interactive behavior of a kind which in the first two years or so of the child's life determines the primary pattern of his subsequent social development."

Alfred Adler (psychiatrist): "It may be readily accepted that contact with the mother is of the highest importance for the development of human social feeling.... We probably owe to the maternal sense of contact the largest part of human social feeling, and along with it the essential continuance of human civilization."

Selma Fraiberg (child psychologist): A baby without solid nurturing "is in deadly peril, robbed of his humanity."

N.J. Berrill (biologist): "The capacity for affection and love develops only in response to appropriate stimuli and during a particular phase in the development cycle."

George Wald (biologist): "We are no longer taking good care of our young. We have introduced them into a world that offers them very little that they want and threatens their very existence .... We need to take care of ... all children everywhere much better than we are doing."

Ian Suttie (psychoanalyst): "The child is born with a simple attachment-to-mother who is the sole source of food and protection.... The infant mind ... is dominated from the beginning by the need to retain the mother--a need which, if thwarted, must produce the utmost extreme of terror and rage."

Theodosius Dobzhansky (geneticist): "The importance for human development of the helplessness of the human child and its complete dependence on its mother can hardly be exaggerated."

James Prescott (neuropsychologist): Monkey juveniles "deprived of their mothers were at times apathetic, at times hyperactive and given to outbursts of violence ... showed behavioral disturbances accompanied by brain damage ... studies suggest that during formative years of brain growth, certain kinds of sensory deprivation--such as lack of touching and rocking by the mother--result in incomplete or damaged development of the neuronal systems that control affection."

Richard M. Restak (neurologist): "Scientists at several pediatric research centers across the country are now convinced that failure of some children to grow normally is related to disturbed patterns of parenting."

Sheila Kippley (La Leche League): "It is obvious that nature intended mother and baby to be one. ... Nature has her own built-in laws for the child's development, and today her ways are being supported by more and more researchers in the field. For example, a chief ingredient for a healthy start in life is a continuous loving relationship with one mother figure. Nature has arranged this through breastfeeding."

In the face of such overwhelming, unanimous testimony, can we doubt that we are failing our children? The dismal truth is that, on the whole, babies received more and better care 25,000 years ago, 250,000 years ago, even 2.5 million years ago, than many do today.

Compare the ruinous existence of many children growing up today in ghettos with the Cro-Magnon child's infinitely more attentive rearing--with more mothering and fathering, extended family, more wholesome diet, more exercise in unpolluted fields, forests, and lakes. The Cro-Magnon child breathed cleaner air, learned tribal traditions, and lived secure in the sense of belonging and identity provided by the tribe and for which gangs are our malignant, latter-day substitute. Even more dismaying is the likelihood that, because of starvation, disease, neglect, abuse, pollution, war, and other pestilence, the average I.Q. today is lower than it was among the Cro-Magnons.

The proliferation of prisons is a red alert that our babies aren't receiving the nurture they need when they need it. This costs us all in the end. To correct this, we must first recognize that, while both parents play vital roles ill an infant's development, the mother--like it or not--is the primary caregiver. Biologically, that's how the system works. And such an immeasurably important task cannot be sustainably carried out in her "spare time."

A woman shouldn't be forced to return to work six weeks postpartum if she wishes to stay home with her child. Society should support her. We could remove this pressure on mothers to return to work and to turn over much of their babies' nurturance to care centers, which are mostly inadequate. We could, if we chose, accord the mother-infant bond its proper priority.

Identifying the mother as the primary caregiver is not sexist; it's reality. Sexual reproduction has been around for a billion years and was a major factor when countless life forms proliferated in the seas 650 million years ago. Females are different from males--not necessarily better or worse but undeniably different. Female mammals carry, bear, and suckle their young. Males physically can't.

When dinosaurs became extinct, mammals, which had remained small and nocturnal, radiated into all of the vacated ecological niches. Humanity was geared for females to cherish offspring in the womb, bond with them at birth, and lavish love on them at the breast. It isn't sexist to esteem motherhood. It is sexist to trivialize it.

The American Humanist Association is one group that recognizes this and said so in its 1980 Statement on the Family:

   We must stop penalizing and start rewarding homemakers who take
   responsibility for rearing tomorrow's generation. They should be entitled
   to the same insurance, disability, and Social Security benefits as other
   productive workers.

It is high time for society at large to follow suit.

For all of the technology that has allowed humans to visit outer space and jammed our lives with cars and computers and television, we still haven t invented a machine that bathes a baby in constant, joyous, ego-strengthening affection. We haven't invented one that can cope with the unfortunate products of negligent rearing and the havoc they wreak on themselves and society. So far, prisons have been our only answer to the problem. This won't do.

Knowing that the care given to babies at the onset of their lives shapes them for better or worse, we have to acknowledge that millions of our most helpless and vulnerable members of society are off to a wretched start and a threatened future.

Grasping the connection between negligent infant care and adolescent violence--the United States, to its shame, having the worst record of this of any developed nation--we are obliged to act. The calamitous results of our failure engulf us. Alienated, with low self-esteem, pessimistic about the future, in schools that don't educate, the children who should be our hope for the future instead drink, smoke, take drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and commit crimes which land them in our awful jails.

More and bigger prisons will exacerbate rather than resolve the crisis we face. For a fraction of their cost--both financially and in human anguish--we could substantially reduce the need for such facilities if we would nourish young lives instead of allow them to lurch into chaos. We could tackle hunger, abuse, squalor, and vice instead of vengefully tossing the results of these evils into jails.

Prisons proclaim in neon lights our folly, futility, and failure to nurture our young adequately. If we decrease expenditures on these institutions of revenge, we could underwrite the vital nurturance that all children deserve and thus increase individual fulfillment and social well-being.

Betty McCollister is a freelance journalist who has written extensively on women's issues and evolution and edited a book on the creation-evolution controversy. She nursed her six babies at a time when breastfeeding was rare.