FIRST 1000 DAYS
Creating a sense of belonging and safety for children until the age of two is crucial to setting a positive trajectory for the rest of their lives, a new book says
Technically, the first thousand days of a child’s life are from the moment of conception until their second birthday. Research over the past 20 years has shown that by focusing on this window – especially by meeting the unique needs of pregnant women, babies and toddlers – we can significantly improve the trajectory of a child’s life. A strong, healthy start is not just about safety, good nutrition and receiving support. While all of that is incredibly important, creating a robust and secure start in life goes even deeper.
Humans are a social species, which means we are meant to live in relationships in systems such as families and communities. This sense of belonging and safety can impact babies even before birth. The research is quite strong that intergenerational trauma, or trauma experienced during pregnancy, can significantly impact the developing baby. At a conference I attended in Vancouver in Canada in 2012, American paediatrician Professor W. Thomas Boyce gave a lecture titled, “What the Genes Remember: The New Epigenetics of the Early Years”. In groundbreaking longitudinal research, it was shown that childhood adversity, particularly poor attachment (by age three-anda-half), can change the genes, especially the serotonin transporter gene. This in turn will increase the chances of school failure, chronic illness such as diabetes and cancer, and heart disease and cardiac death.
I have to be honest – I was pretty stunned at that moment. To think that the genomes in our DNA can change after birth due to environmental influences challenged everything about the nurture v nature debate. Essentially, this means that no matter what DNA a child is born with, the influences of nurture, that is the environment they are in, can change that coding. And it works both ways – safe, loving environments can change the DNA positively, while environments where babies and toddlers feel threatened or unsafe can set them on a trajectory towards ill-health. As girls often have better memories and can be more emotionally responsive, their environment is a particularly important influence.
The first fundamental need for all babies is to
have strong, safe and warm connectedness with their key caregivers, hopefully their biological parents or with other adults who are present significantly in their lives. This is called “attachment” and it is the superglue that holds a child in close proximity to a parent/caregiver. A child is meant to seek or pursue proximity, which means being close to their “big” person, so they feel safe and so they are safe. Attachment is as important to healthy child development as eating or sleeping. Much of the research indicates that strong attachment and bondedness can be among the most significant influences on emotional wellbeing, mental health and physical health for life. The research that our little ones need to be completely dependent on us in order to grow into their own independence in the future is also quite compelling. One of the key features of healthy attachment is that the grown-ups caring for a baby are sensitive to and respond to the infant’s unique cues and needs with warmth and tenderness. Ensure your little girl knows you will always be her safe base.
If your daughter needs to find her way into your bed sometimes for a night or two, or sometimes for a few weeks or longer, it can be a sign that the outside world has become a little more uncertain for her. Every new experience, like starting to eat solids, too much sensory stimulation, changes in key caregivers or change of bed, is a potential stress trigger that can overwhelm the nervous system. Given that poor sleep impacts every level of a child’s life, please prioritise getting good sleep. Meet her fears and anxiety with comfort and soothing. As she gets older, she will be able to better manage her nervous system, and one day you will miss the fact that she no longer wants to curl beside you at night.
In my book 9 Things: A Back-to-basics Guide to Calm, Commonsense, Connected Parenting Birth–8, the first of the nine things is called connected mothering.
What really matters is that our little ones are mothered well, which means they come to experience a strong sense of healthy connectedness and attachment. Fathers can mother, grandparents can mother, foster parents can mother and step-parents can mother. Connected mothering takes enormous amounts of time and energy in the first thousand days of life, but it needs to be a priority for anyone who becomes a parent.
In traditional cultures, women were surrounded by many other women having babies and raising little ones. There was always a warm lap and a tender heart close by, and all children were seen as the responsibility of everyone in the kinship village. As civilisation has progressed, the reality of having a supportive and caring village around a new parent has become more difficult to achieve. However, living through a global pandemic has emphasised to us how incredibly important our long-distance village still remains for our emotional and mental wellbeing, especially in the absence of face-to-face communication and safe intimate touch.
When your firstborn is born, so too are you born as a parent. Biological parents can experience a significant identity shift in the first thousand days of their newborn’s life, and it can be a confusing time, no matter how much you love your new baby.
It is important to remember that parenting is
one of the hardest things you will ever do, and ensuring you have access to support, guidance and respite really does help. All parents can benefit from the formal and informal supports of positive people who care and who they can rely on when some of those tricky, challenging experiences arrive, often unexpectedly.
Our world of screens and technology is definitely displacing some of the wonderful, authentic and meaningful connectedness that little ones need with safe grown-ups. Nothing works better than humans interacting with humans in the same room.
John Medina in his book Brain Rules for Baby wrote about research that showed that babies and toddlers under three years of age do not tend to take in sound from external sources like TVS and ipads. They are biologically wired to process sounds from humans because they are learning how communication, including non-verbal communication, takes place. Facial expressions are being wired into your little ones at the same time.
The first thousand days is a fantastic window within which to marinate little girls in as much human sound as possible, preferably out of the mouths of humans. Reading to them, singing to them and talking to them not only helps to build that relationship, it is forming the foundations in their brain so they can understand fundamental sounds that will help them communicate and learn to read in the future.
A study by Hart and Rissley (1995) shows that the greater the amount of language a child hears in the early years, the better they will be able to read. The study found that families in higher socio-economic situations tend to speak more to their children, and the difference was estimated to be 30 million words over the first five years of life. Children from a higher income family were exposed to nearly twice as many words as working-class children, and close to four times as many words as children from families on welfare.
There is no question that smartphones are stealing precious moments of communication between little ones and their key grown-ups, and this can lead to a form of digital abandonment. If you have forgotten the words to nursery rhymes or songs that children like, by all means use your technology to find the words. But the secret is to sing along with the child, not just allow the remote sound to take place. As a grandparent, I have been quite annoying for my
Attachment is as important to healthy child development as eating or sleeping
sons and daughters-in-law with my endless singing of The Wheels On The Bus, This Old Man, Five Little Ducks and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Thankfully, my grandchildren do not care that I really can’t sing in tune. My favourite site for wonderful audio resources in Australia is the ABC Kids Listen app.
The wonderfully wise Sally Goddard Blythe, director of The Institute for NeuroPhysiological Psychology in the UK, has concerns about parenting today. She has observed that our modern world is making it more difficult for babies and toddlers to spend significant time with their parents, which is where she believes the healthiest mothering can occur. On reading Goddard Blythe’s book, What Babies and Children Really Need (2008), it turns out that what they really need – time – is what many 21st-century parents simply cannot provide because we live in a society that does not allow for it. Many countries prioritise potential economic wellbeing over the real, genuine wellbeing of little ones. If society acknowledged and promoted the importance of the first thousand days to the future growth and wellbeing of their children, parents might be able to make different choices when navigating the journey of raising their young ones. This does not mean they are unable to work, or that being a working mum is a negative thing, it simply suggests that choices around who cares for their baby would be made much more consciously.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SECONDARY ATTACHMENT
Many countries in the world have recognised the importance of primary attachment and they provide paid parental leave to either or both parents. Secondary attachment is not only possible, it is seriously valuable. This occurs when a baby or toddler has a sense of strong connectedness to a grown-up who is not a biological parent. This can include grandparents, nannies or early childhood educators.
I once worked with an early childhood centre in Sydney, and I was curious about the age of the youngest child they had ever cared for. The director remembered instantly a little girl who was born on the Friday and brought to them one week later. This girl’s mother was a project manager for a large corporation and was needed back at work much earlier than she had hoped. The director explained that staff were tearful on that first day. They cried because they were being gifted such an important, tiny baby to take care of, and they cried with sadness for the mother–child relationship. Two of the educators were assigned to be significant secondary attachment figures, and the little girl attended the centre until she began school. After she had begun primary school, she would often drop by on her way home from school to catch up with her special grown-ups. The director had tears in her eyes as she explained that these same two educators had been invited to her high school graduation, such was the loving bond the girl still felt.
For working parents who have other significant adult carers for their sensitive children, especially working mums who may have guilt around this issue, the key advice is to:
1. If possible, delay having your child cared for outside of your home, especially full-time, for as long as possible in the first 1000 days
2. Transition gradually so your child can adapt to the change
3. Develop a special relationship with one key early childhood educator as your child transitions into care. Build this relationship slowly and gently if possible
4. View your early childhood educator/s as an extension of your family, and work together to identify the unique needs of your child and create ways to respond to them that are consistent.
I do have some good news about little girls. They do tend to be better at bonding to key caregivers. In one study, it was noted that if a baby girl was lifted out of her cot, she was more likely to focus on the face of the grown-up who had picked her up than a baby boy was. Given that neuroscience has shown the incredible importance of “mirroring” due to the presence of mirror neurons, it means that baby girls can form stronger attachments earlier and more efficiently. The phenomenon of smartphones has led to a tendency for mothers to be engaged in what has been called “brexting”, which is either texting, scrolling or engaging in social media when feeding babies. Given the incredible importance of face-to-face connection, this is something to be aware of. However, I do know how incredibly supportive it can be for the mothers of babies and restless toddlers to be able to connect to friends and mother allies in the wee hours of the morning, so it is not all bad.
Parents can experience a significant identity shift in the first thousand days of their newborn’s life, and it can be a confusing time
PARENTAL STRESS
There is no question that for the majority of parents today, parental stress is much higher than it was 30 years ago. The digital world has given access to an enormous amount of information that can be helpful for parents, however it can also add to the confusion. Social media has had positive effects as well as some negatives. Many parents, mums especially, feel social media can provide a platform for parental competition and judgment from others.
Many mums of young babies and toddlers tell me they are drowning in exhaustion and stress. The lack of a village with supportive women is costing mums of little ones in terms of their emotional and mental wellbeing. Being a part of a group on Whatsapp or Facebook that is supportive and protective of members can be a lifesaver for many mothers who are parenting in isolation. But the opposite is also true when an exhausted mother “doomscrolls” or looks for connection and positivity and instead finds herself negatively impacted by disrespectful online participants.
The first thousand days can definitely be the trickiest as a new parent. The first 12 months of a baby’s life is when parents have the most disturbed sleep, and sleep deprivation is one of the biggest stressors of being a parent. Tired and exhausted mums and dads are often unable to meet the needs of their babies and toddlers with calmness and unconditional love. It is very difficult to be joyful and patient when you are exhausted.
Fostering strong, healthy attachment means a child will grow to feel loved and secure in themselves. Unconditional love is not imagining you can have your children grow up in a field of daisies with no prickles. On some days, providing unconditional love means you will need to dig deep inside yourself to find the strength you didn’t know you had. It will mean that on the day that your toddler daughter smears your most expensive face cream all over the carpet, the dog, the wardrobe and themselves, you’ll be able to take a deep breath and realise that she is a curious toddler doing exactly what she is supposed to be doing ... exploring the world around her using all her senses.
Healthy attachment requires plenty of human connectedness often, but not every minute of every day. I believe that finding moments to saturate your little girl with loving interaction and respectful, child-centred care in an unhurried, calm environment as much as possible is the key to achieving healthy attachment. This is impossible 100 per cent of the time and parents, particularly mothers, need to stop feeling anguished if they have days when things don’t work out as they wished. Try to avoid self-criticism or revisiting every decision you made, especially when you’re trying to fall asleep. Good enough is good enough. Everyone will have days they struggle. I can still remember hiding in the toilet at times, wondering why I decided to have children! Strong, healthy attachment can be formed with imperfect parents who are good enough most of the time.
Focus on the good moments, be gentle with yourself, nurture your sense of humour and surround yourself with authentic humans who genuinely care about you. Before you know it, the first 1000 days will be done and dusted.