26/08/2025
“In any Introduction to Biological Anthropology class, students learn that the human infant is the most vulnerable, contact dependent, slowest developing and most dependent primate-mammal of all, largely because humans are born neurologically premature, relative to other primate mammals. In order for the human infant to safely pass through its mother’s small pelvic outlet, which is an architectural requirement to walk upright, the infant has to be born with only 25 percent of its adult brain volume. This means that its physiological systems are unable to function optimally without contact with the mother’s body, which continues to regulate the baby much like it did during gestation. Ashley Montagu, my personal intellectual hero, called human infants “extero-gestates.” Touching infants changes their breathing, body temperature, growth rate, blood pressure, body temperature, stress levels and growth itself. In other words, the mother’s body is the only environment to which the human infant is adapted. As Dr. Winnecott, the famous child psychologist put it, “There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone.” - Dr. James J. McKenna, Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame
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