Read an Excerpt
What Every Child Needs
Getting to the Heart of Mothering
By Elisa Morgan Zondervan Publishing Company
Copyright © 1997 Elisa Morgan
All right reserved. ISBN: 0310211514
Chapter One
Security: Hold-Me-Close Love There. Finally he was down for the night. Sweet-smelling from his bath. Cozy in his cotton sleeper. Tummy full from feeding. Burped. Rocked. And now sound asleep. His lacy lashes touched his cheeks as he lay snug beneath his blanket. A little bump in a big crib.
Janis tiptoed out of the room and down the hall. Six weeks into mothering, she felt like she was getting the hang of her new responsibility. She loved her child beyond words, but sometimes, as she repeated the routines of bathing, feeding, and changing him, she questioned if just anybody could meet these needs for him.
What's so uniquely special about me-his mother? she wondered as she slipped into her own bed and pulled the covers up under her chin. Musing on this question, she soon fell asleep.
Some time later, she awoke with a start to a loud clap of thunder and the sound of rain beating down on the roof. It was pitch-black in the bedroom. Even the night-light in the bathroom was out. Strange. She searched in the darkness for the clock. It, too, was out. Just then a flash of lightning pierced the darkness, followed immediately by a crack of thunder.
Then she heard baby Samuel's cry. She bounded out of bed and rushed down the hall toward his room. His crying sounded more like a pitiful wail now, a different cry than she'd ever heard before. In the past few weeks, she'd started to identify his cries: "I'm hungry. Feed me!!!" or "I'm wet. Change me!!!" or "Ouch. Something hurts in my tummy!!!" But this cry was new. What did he need?
Opening the door, she realized that his night-light was out as well. Tree branches scraped the window near his bed, making eerie sounds in the darkness. Thunder boomed again. She rushed to the side of his crib and looked down. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that his little fists were balled up, his mouth open, and his feet flailing. He looked so helpless! So alone! Something touched Janis deep inside. She suddenly knew exactly what her baby needed. She hadn't read about it in a book or heard it from her doctor. The response came straight from her heart.
It's as if his cry said: "Hold me close, Mommy! Are you there? I need you! Hold me close!"
Janis scooped up Samuel's rigid little body, wrapped her arms around him, and nuzzled him close to her neck. "There, there, my little one," she said in a reassuring tone as she backed into the rocking chair. "Mommy's here. Everything's okay. I've got you now. You're all right." Tenderly she talked to him as they gently rocked. Gradually Samuel calmed down, his gaze fixed on her eyes. His tiny fist caught the edge of her nightgown, and he seemed to respond to her presence-her voice, her smell, her eyes, the touch of her gown. Soon his little body relaxed. His breathing became regular, and he closed his eyes again.
As the thunder rumbled outside, Janis continued to rock her precious baby-boy bundle. Slowly, the understanding came to her. Her baby's frightened cry in the night had spoken a new language to her-the language of a baby's need for his mother. He needs me, she thought. He needs me uniquely. Not just for food. Or a clean diaper. Or help with a gas bubble. No. His cry tonight communicated a need for security. The message couldn't have been more clear if he had enunciated the words: "Hold me close, Mommy! I need you!"
SAFE AND SECURE
As moms, we know that our children have many needs. The question of how we can ever learn to meet them all plagues us. We want so much to be good moms and to take care of our children's needs. But how and where do we begin? Sometimes we feel overwhelmed and confused by the enormity of the task.
Perhaps the starting place is with the most basic of all needs: the need for security-to feel loved and safe and protected. A child needs security to develop. On this basis he slowly builds his ability to cope in the world: to trust, to learn, to experience a sense of confidence and well-being, and to develop loving, lasting relationships with other people. Without a sense of security, a child may exist, but he will not grow to be all that he can be. A mother's nurturing love, which provides for her child's security, is one of her first and greatest contributions to his whole life.
But what does this love look like? How does a child express the need for this love, and how does a mother meet that need?
Quite simply, the need for security is a need for a Hold-Me-Close Love, expressed by the child in messages like: "I need you to hold me close when I feel afraid. Or when I have an owie. Or when my tummy hurts. Sometimes I just need to know that you are near so you can hold me close and help me feel safe."
This kind of love is described as the bond between mother and child.
THE BOND DEFINED
We hear lots about the importance of maternal bonding. We have pictures in our minds of what it looks like. The newborn baby is placed on the mother's tummy immediately after delivery, and, for one incredible moment, they make eye contact. Instinctively, the mother begins to tenderly caress her child. Later, the mother carries her baby around in a cloth sling or front pack, so the child is snuggled close to her heart as she goes about her work. The mother rocks her baby and speaks in soothing tones, developing a unique body-and-soul love language with her child.
This bond between mother and child is one of the most basic and important ingredients in a baby's development. It is mother love. Connection. Attachment. Whatever you call it, this bond is the basis of security in every individual. Infant researcher Stanley Greenspan identifies it as an "essential partnership." Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner defines a bond as "a strong, mutual, irrational, emotional attachment (with someone) who is committed to the child's well-being and development, preferably for life." It is a deep, unchangeable confidence of permanent connection. A "young child's hunger for his mother's love and presence is as great as his hunger for food," writes John Bowlby in his book Attachment.
Notice several key terms in these descriptions. First, this bond is mutual. It is a two-way connection. The baby must bond with the mother. The baby must become convinced that she is present and that she can be trusted to meet his most basic needs. And the mother must bond with the baby. She must become convinced that she is uniquely needed in her child's life and that she alone best meets certain needs. Meeting her baby's needs can touch and satisfy deep places of longing within her.
The bond is also irrational. It is illogical and absurd. The mother looks at her red, wrinkled, raisin-like newborn and exclaims, "Isn't she beautiful!" Undoubtedly, she is rational, but she is bonding!
The bond is child-focused. It centers primarily on the well-being of the child. A mother sacrifices to meet the needs of the child, even when it isn't convenient or valued by others. A mother loses sleep to soothe a fretful baby or changes a schedule to be available for a child who needs her.
The bond is also permanent. The mother is committed to the child for life. And the child to the mother. Day in and day out. Being there. Meeting needs. Teaching one another that relationships that persevere are relationships that last.
Most important, the bond is foundational to the child's future. For decades, child experts have agreed that this mother-child bond is the basis upon which everything else in life is built.
Physically. A baby's brain is a jumble of trillions of neurons, a work in progress, waiting to be wired into a mind. Newsweek magazine reported that the experiences of early childhood, specifically the basic bond of mother and child, help form the brain's circuits for music, math, language, and emotions. All learning and feelings are built upon the foundation of this bond.
Socially. John Bowlby, who studied the attachment of babies and mothers, said that babies need a "secure base" from which to venture out to explore their world. From this base, a baby develops a sense of his own worthiness, conscience, and the capacity for intimacy in later significant relationships.
In 1940, Sigmund Freud wrote that a baby's relationship with her mother is "unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love object and as the prototype of all later love relationships for both sexes."
Emotionally. In their book The Mom Factor, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend attribute many of the components that make up our "emotional IQ" to our bond with our mother. "Not only do we learn our patterns of intimacy, relating, and separateness from Mother, but we also learn about how to handle failure, troublesome emotions, expectations and ideals, grief and loss ..."
Dr. Brenda Hunter, an expert on attachment issues, stresses that early bonding with the mother affects later success in all endeavors: Mother "remains bound to us by an invisible tether as we mature. If the relationship is close, we remember those feelings of warmth and security we had as children while we are making our own mark on the world."
NO ONE BUT MOM
While children can find Hold-Me-Close Love in patches and spots in other relationships, the bond with their mother is the most unique and vital source of security for their lives. No one can meet this need in our children like we can! In their book, Mother in the Middle, authors Deborah Shaw Lewis and Charmaine Crouse Yoest list the special ways that a child responds to the mother in the bonding process.
Newborn babies prefer a higher-pitched voice. Not only are most mothers' voices naturally higher than that of a father, but mothers instinctively talk to a newborn in "mother-ese," a voice pitched higher than their usual voices.
A newborn baby moves in rhythm to his mother's voice, enticing his mother to talk to him more.
Infants recognize, attend to, and are comforted by their mothers' voices within the first week. Mothers report being able to distinguish their babies' cries from those of other babies while still in the hospital.
Babies prefer being rocked head to toe-as in a mother's arms-rather than the back-and-forth rocking of a baby swing.
By the time a baby is five days old, he recognizes and prefers the smell of his own mother's milk.
Mother's milk provides specific immunities for her child against the germs in their particular environment.
By the time a baby is three to four weeks old, an observer can look at the baby's face, not knowing with whom she is playing, and successfully tell who is interacting with the baby: mother, father, or stranger. With a mother, the baby's movements and facial expressions are smooth and rhythmic, anticipating a calm, low-key interaction. With a father, the baby tenses up, her face lights up, and movements become agitated, in anticipation of father play.
Author Katherine Butler Hathaway aptly describes the uniqueness and completeness of the mother-child bond in her writings, The Journal and Letters of the Little Locksmith. "She is their food and their bed and their extra blanket when it grows cold in the night; she is their warmth and health and their shelter; she is the one they want to be near when they cry. She is the only person in the whole world or in a whole lifetime, who can be these things to her children. Somehow even her clothes feel different to her children's hands from anybody else's clothes. Only to touch her skirt or her sleeve makes a troubled child feel better."
CAN I REALLY MEET THIS NEED IN MY CHILD?
While there's much research to support the importance of the mother uniquely meeting the child's need for Hold-Me-Close Love, more than a few moms find themselves strangling on some of the following personal doubts.
"There's Not Enough of Me for My Child."
We're tired. We never have a second to ourselves. And there goes the baby's colicky cries again. All we do is give, give, give, until there is nothing left. Sometimes we just want to let that sweet child cry. Or let someone else step in.
Not one of us is enough-by ourself-to meet our child's entire need for Hold-Me-Close Love. We are not machines, nor are we divine. We will lose our patience. We will sleep through a midnight alarm-cry for food. We will be away from our child when she wants us and only us. But we can meet this need most of the time. And that's what matters. If we take care of ourselves, making sure we eat right and try to get normal amounts of sleep and a break now and then, we'll have enough to meet our child's need for security.
"My Child's Neediness Scares Me."
The need for security runs deep. And because it is one of the first needs evidenced, it usually catches us unprepared. Somehow, when our child expresses this need for Hold-Me-Close Love, she hooks into a spot deep within our hearts and touches our own need for security. If we weren't held, listened to, or kept safe, we're bound to struggle with responding just right to providing security for our child.
Some moms find that the years of first becoming a mom are good times for reevaluating their relationships with their parents and for reexamining what they want to repeat and what they want to change in their own mothering. It's important to be gentle with yourself here. These needs are core, and they do make a difference for the future of your child. But your child is also resilient and will grow as you commit to growing too.
COMPONENTS OF SECURITY
The need for security is really a need for three major components in a child's life. Let's look at them one at a time.
Safety
To prosper, every child needs to know that he is safe. Physical safety is found in shelter, cleanliness, health, food, and protection from harm. Emotional safety comes from appropriate boundaries, expectations, and helpful interpretations by adults in the child's world. Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend express this overall need for safety in their book The Mom Factor.
As little people, we experience the world as dangerous. We feel alone. We don't have love inside-we have overwhelming needs and feelings.
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Excerpted from What Every Child Needs by Elisa Morgan Copyright © 1997 by Elisa Morgan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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