Baby On Board
| Chapter 4: Why is learning to settle your baby so important? |
When humans take their baby home they actually don't take a full-term newborn. In comparison with most other mammals, human babies are premature, with brains that are only 25 per cent formed.
Other mammals … have over 80 per cent of their brains formed when they are born. …..
Why do humans do it that way? It's because of these two characteristics:
- We walk upright on two legs. This means the whole weight of our body falls on our hip joints. ….
And to make matters worse …
- Humans have big brains. Great for designing computers but difficult for their big-headed babies to fit through this narrow athletic pelvis.
The solution to this evolutionary dilemma was to have our babies earlier in pregnancy, while they were still small enough to be delivered safely.
Only 25 per cent of a baby's brain is formed at birth. The rest of the brain to be formed is mostly the connections between them. The neurobiologists tell us that much of this wiring is laid down in the first 18 months after birth.
The way babies are brought up - their experiences, relationships and surroundings - profoundly change the way their brains make these internal linkages
We can all mould and adapt our babies to our particular circumstances through the way we bring them up.
Chapter 5: How evolution designed our babies
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