How Toxic Stress Affects Us, and What We Can Do About It

This messaging from Harvard Center (and US medical training) leaves too much out. Human Biology doesn’t care about good intent or how much you tried.  Human biology cares about experience and the timely repair of bad experience. The human brain is built, for better or worse, around an infant and child’s experiences. There are parents who would want to know that babies need to be carried, rocked and held a lot, that skin to skin contact with a mother is incredibly important, that screens are terrible for infant development, that it is dangerous to let babies “cry it out” and that a securely attached infant will link up EEG rhythm, HR and RR with the attuned mother.  These things are what parents who want to give their children healthy brain development, awesome social skills and a great IQ need to know in addition to being encouraged to reach out to others.  In tribal times, no mother would ever be forced to do all this alone.