Page 7 - The First 60 Days Magazine - October 2023

RESPONSES TO

CRYS ARE EXPECTED

AND ESSENTIAL

An Excerpt: Why I No longer Believe Babies Should

Cry Themselves to Sleep

“...People cannot consciously recall what they “learned” in the first year of life, because the brain structures that
store narrative memory are not yet developed. But neuropsychological research has established that human
beings have a far more powerful memory system imprinted in their nervous systems called intrinsic memory.
Intrinsic memory encodes. the emotional aspects of early experience, mostly in the prefrontal lobe of the brain.
These emotional memories may last a lifetime. Without any recall of the events that originally encoded them,
they serve as a template for how we perceive the world and how we react to later occurrences.

Is the world a friendly and nurturing place, or an indifferent or even hostile one? Can we trust other human
beings to recognize, understand and honour our needs, or do we have to shut down emotionally to protect
ourselves from feeling vulnerable? These are fundamental questions that we resolve largely with our implicit
memory system rather than with our conscious minds. As psychologist and leading memory researcher Daniel
Schacter has written, intrinsic memory is active “when people are influenced by past experience without any
awareness that they are remembering.”

The implicit message an infant receives from having her cries ignored is that the world — as represented by her
caregivers — is indifferent to her feelings. That is not at all what loving parents intend.

Unfortunately, it’s not parental intentions that a baby integrates into her world view, but how parents respond to
her. This is why, if I could relive my life, I would do much of my parenting differently.
When the infant falls asleep after a period of wailing and frustrated cries for help, it is not that she has learned
the “skill” of falling asleep. What has happened is that her brain, to escape the overwhelming pain of
abandonment, shuts down. It’s an automatic neurological mechanism. In effect, the baby gives up. The short-
term goal of the exhausted parents has been achieved, but at the price of harming the child’s long-term
emotional vulnerability. Encoded in her cortex is an implicit sense of a non-caring universe.“

Read the full article at: by Stephanie Lee

Source: www.GaborMate.com
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