There are many, increasingly, fortunately, studies that are being carried out with babies to learn how they respond to different stimuli from parents.
The reason for doing so is that, although babies then grow up and do not remember their childhood, the brain is growing virtually exponentially, creating neurons and neurons, which appear based on the experiences of the moment. In other words, the brain that is being created when a baby grows up will be somewhat conditioned to the experiences that baby is having.
Along these lines, researchers from the University of Toronto, in Canada, have shown that two minutes without paying attention to a six month old baby is enough to make it stressed and that, just by entering the same place the next day, babies already increase their stress levels, showing that they know they can be ignored again.
It is curious, because at six months most babies are not yet able to sit and many then start eating something other than milk. So early, so small, and they are already stressed if they don't get their parents' attention.
In Babies and more Seven ways to calm your baby's cryHow did they do the study
To do the study, the researchers invited 31 mothers to their laboratory with their respective 6-month-old babies and divided them into two groups. The babies were seated in car seats and the mothers were urged to talk and play with them.
In one of the groups the mothers were told that between the games interspersed periods of two minutes in which they had to look over the baby's head without making a face or expression. The mothers of the other group did not have to do anything special, just keep talking and playing with their children.
The researchers took saliva samples at the beginning of the session, at 20 and 30 minutes, and observed that the levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, skyrocketed when babies were ignored by their mothers. The next day, when returning to the laboratory, cortisol levels rose again even before mothers ignored them.
The group of babies that were not ignored did not change their cortisol levels either on the first or on the second day they went to the laboratory.
In Babies and more, why can't a baby cry (or should) be ignored?What were the conclusions?
These results, and above all to observe that on the second day they were already stressed just thinking that their mothers were going to ignore them again, made the experts in child development think that repeated episodes of stress could affect more than imagined so much in health in childhood as in the life that babies will carry in the future, when they are adults.
David Haley, principal investigator of the study, said the following:
The results suggest that human babies have the ability to produce a stress response in advance, based on expectations created based on the treatment of parents in a specific context.
Things to say about the study
Two minutes is very little time, so little that we can all remember without much effort periods of two minutes in which our children have been without the encouragement and support of their parents, that is, crying.
Now, one thing is for your mother to stand in front of you and look over your head as if you did not exist, with a poker face, and another is that your mother is doing something at that time and cannot assist you. Personally, the first one would stress me much more than the second one, so maybe the same thing happens to babies ("one thing is that you can't, another very different thing that you ignore me").
In Babies and more An investigation shows why the crying baby should always be taken care ofWhen I read the study I could not help remembering the methods to teach children to sleep at night, which are based on ignoring the baby for a few minutes (many times more than two) until they learn to sleep alone or, rather , until they learn that there is no need to call parents because they will not get the answer they think they deserve.
I have remembered that because if the babies in the study significantly increased stress levels, babies who cry at night, for several nights, are probably stressed too much, even if this is not explained (nor will it ever be explained) in The books that explain it.
I personally appreciate these studies being done because give value to all those hours that many parents have spent cradling our children, to the back pains for carrying them in their arms, to the hours invested in calming their tears and their sufferings and to all the hours of sleep that have remained along the way, which are not few.
