Impacts of Nurturing Styles of Babies on Society & Culture
Welcoming Prof. Darcia Narvaez to Substack
I am very heartened to see that Prof.
has joined the Substack community: is her new Substack. Prof. Narvaez speaks strongly to many of the themes we also cover here, including Adverse Childhood Experiences and Development Trauma.
Below are some quotes from her initial two posts, as a way of introduction.
“… a set of common characteristics documented around the world by ethnographers in the type of society in which humanity spent 99% of its existence over millions of years… especially important in shaping a healthy fetus, baby and child, but it also maintains health and prosociality in adults…. nine components… : [including] welcoming social climate, affectionate touch (and no negative touch), responsive care, multiple nurturers, self-directed play, nature immersion and connection, and regular healing practices.
“[Not for] babyhood alone. [They] are for the rest of us too.”
“I will be pointing out the aspects of… what happens when they are provided, or not, in terms of a person’s neurobiology, sociality, morality and lifeway orientation. And, I will discuss what can be done to heal when a person was not nested in childhood (most of us).”
This link between how nurturing [or lack of] affects our morality as adults is one of the most profound contributions of Prof. Narvaez. Indeed, she has written whole books on this topic, including “Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom” and “Embodied Morality: Protectionism Engagement and Imagination”:
“…describes how human morality develops dynamically from experience in early life and it proposes that the methods in which humans are raised bring about tendencies towards self-protective or open-hearted social relations. When the life course follows evolutionary systems, then prosocial, open-hearted capacities develop, but when the life course goes against evolutionary systems it should not be a surprise that self-focused values and behaviors develop such as violent tribalism, self aggrandizement and a binary orientation to others (dominance or submission).”
“… a deeper source of illbeing typically goes unmentioned, the mismatch between what babies need for optimal normal development and what is provided to them. Babies (0-3 or 3.5 years) must be distinguished from children because of babies’ incredible vulnerability and malleability—towards wellbeing or illbeing.”
“Why babies? Because that is when and where each person’s health trajectory begins, in the shaping of the immune, endocrine, respiratory, stress and other systems from the interaction between innate maturational schedules for these systems and baby’s experiences. A plethora of studies are demonstrating the effects of prenatal and early postnatal experience on brain development and lifelong health.”
Above all, Prof. Narvaez’s work is pragmatic and actionable, it teaches us how we can create a better culture and society by giving babies what they actually need, but also for those of us who’s own parents were given very bad advice by western medicine and scientism, how to re-parent ourselves.
So in the spirit of “providing a welcoming social climate”, may I suggest we give Prof. Narvaez a warm Substack community welcome, by signing up to her substack, and perhaps re-stacking her initial posts above?
Gidday Gary. As a former primary school teacher, trained in a dedicated teachers training college, we studied early human development at depth, and I have studied it ever since. I learned much from fifty years of close association with tribal Aborigines of Arnhem Land, north Australia, where there is a 24,000 year continuity of child-raising law in which every member of the extended family has his or her special role in the development of babies, infants and children. I have compared this with Kung and Inuit, and several other cultures, which is pretty much akin to time travel. Nothing was as people today think it was, but in general terms, a healthy human commences with a healthy mother prior to conception. Ourproblems in the west commenced with the industrial revolution, when we caome to cities and left the grandparents behind. We had to invent parenting from scratch and seriously screwed this up. We have never recovered. Now the same is happening to Aborigines as colonial white administrations replace extended family with western roles of teachers, police, TV, social media, and social workers. I just thought I would pass those thoughts along because of your expressed interest in this subject. It is possible that Darcia too, might be interested.
We are all children, just at different life stages.