#321 | Spoil Your Baby: The Neuroscience of Thriving Baby Brains with Dr. Greer Kirschenbaum, PhD

Neuroscientist and author of The Nurture Revolution, Dr. Greer Kirschenbaum, PhD, joins us today to discuss the profound impact of nurturing care in the first three years of life. Drawing from decades of brain research, Greer explains how responsive, connected parenting in early life lays the neurological foundation for emotional regulation, mental health, and lifelong resilience—and why this critical window is so often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed.

We also explore the neurobiology of fatherhood: how the dad's brain transforms during the postpartum period, how these changes depend on direct contact with the baby, and why emotional and hormonal shifts in men—though delayed in comparison to those in mothers—are no less critical. Greer shares research on baby-wearing, skin-to-skin, and how even daily rituals like bathing or making a habit of smelling the baby cause a rapid and necessary rewiring of the paternal brain toward deeper connection and long-term involvement. 

We also discussed trends in parenting, from the "be home by dinnertime" style of the 80s to the scheduled, anxious, overbearing parents who followed that generation. We considered the impact of parents who place excessive emphasis on a school-age child's emotions day in and day out, at the risk of foregoing important opportunities for teaching resilience.

This conversation challenges outdated notions of independence, debunks harmful myths around bonding and separation, and makes a strong, evidence-based case for what Greer calls the "nurture revolution”. 

Dr. Greer on Instagram

Nurture Neuroscience

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Transcript

So I think the first thing is that we have to be a bit patient with dads, because their brain changes don't happen during pregnancy, whereas moms will dads will start to happen postpartum, and it's dose dependent on the amount of contact he has with the baby. So if a, you know, two and a half year old has some really scary, traumatic event. If they had this really strong sense of safety in the first three months of life, they're going to deal with that a lot better than a baby who may have been separated at birth. The first three years of life is when the brain is developing really, really rapidly. And so that is, theoretically, is the window where we want to provide as much nurture and safety. And it's not actually just even a normal amount of nurture and love and providing safety and responsiveness and sensitivity and attunement. It's actually extravagant amounts like that. Is why I'm really saying, like, spoil your baby. When people say, Don't spoil your baby and like, no, no, go overboard.

I'm Cynthia Overgard, owner of HypnoBirthing of Connecticut, childbirth advocate and postpartum support specialist. And I'm Trisha Ludwig, certified nurse midwife and international board certified lactation consultant. And this is the Down To Birth Podcast. Childbirth is something we're made to do. But how do we have our safest and most satisfying experience in today's medical culture? Let's dispel the myths and get down to birth.

Hello. My name is Greer Kirschenbaum. I'm a neuroscientist, a doula and a mother, and my passion is to bring together science and love, to bring mothers and babies closer together, as well as fathers and caregivers and families closer together with babies and really understand what babies need, because when we give them what they need in the first three years of life, they can flourish for the rest of their life in all measures of health. So I put all my years as working as a neuroscientist and a doula together and a mother into my book The nurture revolution, and my wish is for all families to read it, to understand some of the science that we know of that's just incredible about babies and mothers and fathers development, because it has the power to really change our world. I would love for everyone to know about it. Can you talk a little about what a neuroscientist does? Is it just the study of is it the study of the brain, the mind? Is it the physiologic aspects of neuroscience. What exactly did you study, and what did you do like on a day to day basis? What is that like? There's so many kinds of neuroscientists, which is really interesting.

So some you know that you can really study the brain on all different levels, and that's what neuroscience means. It means, you know, the science of the nervous system, and so that includes the brain, the entire nervous system in the body. And there's so many disciplines, right? So we can study motor systems. How do we walk? How do spinal cord injuries heal? We can study the mind and mental health, and how do we think, what is consciousness? What is anxiety and depression and addiction? And how do we help that we can study vision, you know, we can study all parts, right? So there's, you know, there's probably 1000s of disciplines. My interest was always, how does early life experience impact the brain to to form the people that we become. And so through my career, I studied that in all different ways, but my most interesting field was the mental health aspect. It's remarkable that how much of our brain is created in the first three years of life.

And in my PhD, I studied a gene and how genetics and experience interact together to influence all different mental health outcomes, so anxiety, depression, addiction, social ability. And then I did a postdoc as well, and studied connectivity in the brain. And my field was studying animal models. Right when we study people, we're a bit limited in what we can do in terms of looking at the the really kind of nuts and bolts of all this neuroscience. Human Research is also really valuable. But I was really interested in in knowing the molecular what was going on the molecular level, the genetic level and things like that. So let's take it. Let's take it to day one of life.

A brand new brain. What is the first and most important thing for the brain on day one, the brain of a brand new baby?

Oh my gosh, yes. The most important thing for a brand new baby is to be extravagantly bathed in oxytocin and the birth of the mother and the father or and, you know, other parents as well. We're all born on that day, even if it's not our first baby, but certainly if it is our first baby. And we really want to do everything we can to give babies that just incredibly nurturing experience. And babies are expecting to be taking mother in with all of their senses, every sense that a baby takes us in with, you know, is exploding in their brain, oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins. It's creating this sort of chemical bath for their for their little brain to start to grow and develop in. And it sets babies and mothers and fathers and, parents on a pathway to continue that oxytocin flowing to continue a really close relationship. And so if babies don't get that experience as early as possible, right? Sometimes it's not possible the second they're born, but we can pick up on it when we can it does the opposite, and it can actually set babies and parents on a in a place where they're not going to be receiving those benefits, and the relationship can struggle quite a bit. It's very important. I remember, I always get nervous hearing things like that, because so many, so many women can't help that their baby must be separated at birth. Yeah, and one of my very best friends since college had her babies at 31 weeks. They were two and three pounds each. They were twins, and they bonded to machines, one for eight weeks, one for 10 weeks, before they were ever held by her. I mean, I can't What is that woman supposed to hear when you say that like are? Is this a situation where bonding always happens, it just has to happen differently and later. Or is that, has that ship sailed and there's no recovering from it? Yeah, it's such a good question. And I was separated from my mother at birth, not in a NICU kind of experience, but I was separated immediately at birth, and I can share more about my experience processing that. And my son was born at 34 weeks as well, and he was in the NICU for for 10 days too, right? And so we don't always have influence, you know, if we can be with our babies right away and and have that experience right? Certainly not in cases where babies are born early and need extra care. Or mothers are born or, you know, need extra care.

So everything leaves an imprint.

And we, you know, don't have to judge them as good or bad or harmful, or, you know, healthy. It is what it is. Right? We all have unique experiences coming into the world, and they do have an impact and an imprint on us.

Having said that, I always will say, when medically necessary, we want to, you know, go back to that reunion. Go back to that, you know, welcoming and slowing down and having lots of time together, because the brain is growing for those entire three years of infancy, we have a huge amount of time to make connections, and the brain is incredibly resilient, right? I mean, the brain is plastic, and it can adjust, and it's resilient, and it's so much better. It's just so much better for a parent to know that they might need to do some extra work if this happened, than to not know at all. It's painful for somebody who has that experience to think, Oh, my God, and I didn't know, yeah, I wish I would have known. And that's why we have to have these conversations. Absolutely like I would, I would wish for all babies to be, you know, held skin to skin, for, you know, as much as possible in the weeks and months postpartum. And, you know, be really well responded to and have really sensitive care, but especially for our little ones who have been in the NICU or we've had separations. You know, the other thing that parents really do need to know is best practice for babies who are in the NICU is actually zero separation, and it's not being done in many hospitals. It is being done in some this. This is a hill I'm going to die on because it is such a problem, especially in North America, in the United States and in Canada, the restriction of moms and babies postpartum when they're in the NICU is actual abuse. It's so wrong. It's so unhealthy for the mom and the baby. And I'm so you know, I'm so happy to hear somebody with your kind of experience and knowledge talk about it, because this is really how.

Has to change. The system has to change. Around the world, babies where they don't have NICUs are kept skin to skin with their parents, and they thrive. From you know, 25 weeks on, they thrive. Those babies do better than babies who are separated in incubators or in NICUs. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about the the brain and what's happening with oxytocin and all that, with skin to skin and bonding after birth? Yeah, absolutely. And for people who may experience this, you can look up Niles Bergman's research. He's done research showing that babies, as soon as if they can survive, they can breastfeed, actually, and they can do they, like you said, flourish, being skin to skin, even if they have tubes and wires and everything, that is where they should be, right?

And so we do need to change what's going on in a lot of hospitals. We need a revolution. We need everything to absolutely, and it needs to be redesigned. Everything has to change a complete and that's it. It's expensive to redesign them like, you know, where I gave birth to my son actually was, it was like a network of hospitals in California, and they actually had other hospitals that were doing the proper rooming in and where the mom and the baby were one patient. And I was absolutely a patient after my birth too. I needed, I still needed medical care. I needed to elevate my legs. I needed someone to help me eat and drink. And I was put on like a folding chair, basically beside my son. And they were like, Oh, we cared about you yesterday, but you're done. And it was terrible. It was terrible. And I was just like, thinking at the time, I'm like, if I had just known, I knew my son was going to be born early. I had placenta previa. If I had just someone had given me this advice, like, you know this is very likely going to happen. Go pick that hospital where you're going to be treated properly, because they sometimes they will exist, right? So that's it's good for people to know, but yeah, oxytocin, and, you know, there's a whole cascade, right? Of just beautiful molecules that neurotransmitters that accompany this.

It's a really powerful cocktail for the brain, for for both babies and parents. So for babies, essentially, you know, while we can deliver this the majority of their time through their life, zero to three years, will shape all of the systems in their emotional brain, where our mental health essentially resides like the sort of the basis of our mental health. It will dramatically form these structures to be resilient, well equipped to handle stress, well equipped to handle all of the challenges in life, well equipped for social, you know, great, healthy social relationships and doing well in school and reading and, you know, everything that parents care about. And for parents, it actually in a sort of a dose dependent way. It's dose dependent for babies and parents actually will dramatically change parents brains, both mothers and fathers as well. So it's a really mutually beneficial kind of exchange. I was going to ask you that, how does the father's brain change? It makes so much sense that the mother's brain changes, because not only the baby came from her and is designed to be dependent on her, but the father could literally die and the baby and mother would still go on basically physiologically unaffected, not emotionally, but physiologically. So he comes off so ancillary. But we know from research he does change dramatically, and he does have a response to the baby, which I find fascinating. I mean, is it just by virtue of, I guess, not conception, but like living with the mother through pregnancy, or is it driven by his emotions when his baby is born? Is it higher when he's in the room when his baby is born, as opposed to when he's not in the room when the baby is born? Like, how does the father's body and brain respond, and what's driving that response? So many great questions. I don't think we know all the answers, but we know some so I think the first thing is that we'd have to be a bit patient with dads, because their brain changes don't happen during pregnancy, whereas moms will, dads will start to happen postpartum, and it's dose dependent on the amount of contact he has with the baby. So I would say my gut is saying, you know, psychologically, being there to welcome the baby, and you know, holding baby in the early hours will be, would be wonderful only if you know mom, if that's available, if mom wants her baby on her you should take his shirt off, hold the baby skin to skin, if not in the hours postpartum, in the weeks postpartum, absolutely.

All 100% okay, and so it's also mediated through oxytocin. So the more you know that dad has Baby Skin to skin, you know there's, there's really specific nerve endings in the chest of baby and dad, when those C afferent neurons, they will get stimulated. Those will release dopamine in dad's brain, and that will begin his transformation. So we want dad skin to skin with baby baby wearing. There's a great study on baby wearing, how one hour a day for three weeks transforms dad's brain in a beautiful way. Having baths with baby, smelling baby's head, touching baby, sleeping with a baby. Is that? Yep, well, like of the baby, like sleeping with on dad's chest is really great for co sleeping. It take, we actually want dad's brain to fully mature before we have him sleeping beside, you know, safely co sleeping beside a baby, because I said we have to be patient. It actually takes that's almost comical, the way that comes off, like, like, that spring isn't ready just yet, so we're still baby and mom are waiting for dad to catch up. It's wild. It's so instinctual. And a mom too. There I was just talking to a mom in my practice yesterday who's just like, Yeah, you know, no, just not dad yet, like I just don't trust him quite yet. We trust ourselves with a newborn, but it takes a little time, and that's just that's like nature's instinct, and also, just to be fair to Dad, this is not, obviously, we all know this. It's not an intelligence thing. It's almost like, the way I view it, if I'm understanding it correctly, is she's wired, like to the extent that she's bonded. She's wired for anxiety as well. She's barely going to sleep. She's going to wake up if the baby needs her. It's like, it's almost a function of what must happen. We need a hyper vigilant parent, really, to be well, maybe the hormone prolactin, which, of course, is the hormone that skyrockets after birth and with breastfeeding, is does wire the brain for that hyper vigilance. That's part of its purpose. Yes, absolutely. So the all, yes, all the hormonal changes that happen postpartum, those will all be wiring mom's brain completely, and so a lot of that hypervigilance and protection of baby is mediated in a brain area called the amygdala. And that baby wearing study that I mentioned shows that that the amygdala is the biggest place where they see changes in dad, so he becomes also hyper vigilant and extra protective. Does he ever, ever reach her level? Or is it just dramatic from where his starting point was? It's definitely dramatic from where it started from. So Ruth Feldman's lab has looked at gay like studies of gay dad, and they show that the primary caregiving dad, a lot of his brain changes.

They get pretty close to a primary caregiving mother. Again, it's it is different in some ways, but certainly that vigilance that, I believe, that was also looked at in the amygdala, they got pretty close, right? So the person who's, you know, attending baby the most, spending the most time, that most contact, they're gonna their brains are gonna change the most, right? And if two parents want to contribute a lot, we want them both to be spending quite a lot of time. Yeah, it's so important to encourage, encourage that closeness. Whenever my husband actually took some time off when my son was born, but when he did go back to work, the second he came in, I was like, take off your shirt.

Here you go. Do your skin to skin.

And yeah, it's paid off in beautiful ways, especially in relationships where a mother is exclusively breastfeeding a lot of the time, the dads feel a little bit left out, and they think that in order to bond with the baby, that they need to be bottle feeding. And I'm always trying to reiterate to them that no, no, no, that does come and take the baby and go skin to skin after she breastfeed, so she can take a nap and you can spend an hour with the baby, and that's all you need to do. You don't need to feed the baby to bond with the baby. Oh, yeah. I would love for everyone to know that. It's, it's, yeah, that is a bizarre idea to me as well. You know, I think it's, it's great to address that need for dads too, like they do feel left out right in those in those early days and and also for them to be assured that, like they become main character at some point too, right? It's maybe not going to be in those early days, but yes, certainly having the skin to skin bathing was a great bonding experience. I would put my husband and the son in the bathtub together, and that was their special time. You know, in the early weeks as well. Greer, how did you yourself process your own separation from your mother at birth? And what can mothers know about helping their children, their babies, their one year olds, their 10 year olds, their 20 year olds to process?

If they were separated at birth, a lot of us were I would I was separate. Interestingly, to just make another point, scientific point, I was separated because I had low blood sugar when I was born. We actually know that skin to skin regulates blood sugar, right? So they took me away where I should have just been put on my mom, you know, it was something that I really wasn't. It was too painful to look at for a very long time for me. And then my son was separated, too. And then I was just, sort of, for many years, just sort of like putting up blinders. I was like, I don't want to know of I'm not ready for this. It's, it's too painful. But more recently, I've been open to it in a really nice way. So there is a discipline called Birth psychology, and the therapist you know who practice in this way with birth psychology have a lot of therapeutic tools to help us from those separations at birth. So for me, I was separated for many hours, and the story was, my mom, like took it, was taking a shower, and they came, they brought me into her room. I was screaming, you know, hysterical, and they said to my mom, she's been like this for hours. You have to take her. There's nothing we can do, right? Really brutal. There's nothing we can do. You have to take her. Said the nurse to your mother, did I hear that? Right?

That's all gave her to me like you didn't my mom while she was covered in soap. You know, still, you know, that's so sad. So it was really sad. It was a really, really tough experience. And, you know, I've been able to work, you know, work with therapists, to kind of go back there to, you know, reimagine, what if I was just put on my mom's chest as I needed to be. It was a very healing therapeutic experience, and then also to sort of understand what beliefs and kind of personality traits and what what transpired between my relationship with me and my mother based on that experience and the significant, it's pretty significant. So there are therapists who are engaged in this. They can work with children, they can work with teens, with adults, with people at any at any point who want to repair it, yeah. What kind of therapist would that be?

So there is an association called Appa, APPAH and they have a directory of people, yeah, yeah. That that can help. Can you explain a little bit about what happens with memory and the imprints in under age three? I mean, we've always been told that you don't, you can't really remember anything until age three. So what happens before then doesn't really matter that much.

And we know somewhere how, somehow we know that that's not actually true. There's an imprint in the brain. Can you explain that? Yeah, actually, a new study just came out on this this week, which is, which is pretty interesting. And so, you know, we usually think of memory as our who, what, when, where, kind of memories, right? Like, oh, I remember going to the amusement park. I remember biking down a certain path with my parents. You know, whatever it was, but there are so many types of memory in the brain. We have, motor memory, you know, you learn to ride that bike once your brain remembers. You know how to do it forever, right? There's implicit memory, which is the memory that you know we talk about that babies have. So during the years of infancy, from zero to three, babies will have both the autobiographical memory, the who, what, when, where memories. So if you ask a two year old what happened two weeks ago, or, you know, do you remember seeing grandma? Of course, they remember their own life like within that period. But as we age out, as we get closer to 4, 5, 6 and up, we actually lose access to those, to those autobiographical memories from early life. So that's how that that part works. The implicit memory basically means that we have experiences that leave lasting connections in our brain, leave lasting changes in our brain that, you know, can stay there and continue to affect us and our you know, the way we act, the way we connect, the way that we we do things later on In life, right?

And is that because of how the hormones in the brain respond to certain stressful situations or nurturing situations, like you either get wired for safety and security.

Top level of it is, is how the stress system is formed in the early life. Like, that's, that's the, you know, there's certainly psychological domains that are formed that I kind of touched on, you know, with my birth experience. But there are also really, really hardcore neuroscience changes that we see as well. You know, I always focus on this, and my teaching is the stress system, because the stress system is, you know, the seat of so much of our our mental health and our physical health as we age, and so the memory of how our stress is managed and how our all of our emotions actually are managed and sort of scaffolded by our caregivers. Those will permanently change the way that the stress system develops. So will our stress system release tons of stress when we perceive a threat, or will it, you know, and that could lead to mental health issues, physical health issues, wearing down the brain and body as we age. Or is it going to grow in a way where when we release stress, it's a good amount, it's just enough to respond to the threat and then bring us back down into a safety state?

And are we creating a protective system in humans when we foster that early on, in those early in those early weeks, like, is there a time frame that's optimal for creating this very strong, nurturing connection? So if a, you know, two and a half year old has some really scary, traumatic event, if they had this really strong sense of safety in the first three months of life, they're going to deal with that a lot better than a baby who may have been separated at birth. Is that true? Yeah. So, I mean, it's for the first three years of life, is when the brain is is developing really, really rapidly. And so that is, you know, theoretically, is the window where we want to provide as much nurture and safety, and it's interesting too, like reviewing the studies, you know, it's not actually just even a normal amount of nurture and love and providing safety and responsiveness and sensitivity and attunement. It's actually extravagant amounts like that. Is why I'm really saying, like, spoil your baby. Like you whatever people say Don't spoil your baby and like, no, no, go overboard. You cannot. Like every, every, everything you do from zero to three is building their brain to be so, so incredibly strong. So be very responsive to your baby, eye contact, respond to their needs. What else comes to mind when you're holding them, holding them, holding their hand when they're walking. But what? What else? Yeah, I kind of divided up into both physical and emotional, okay? Because, you know, some people will say, Oh, you're just talking about Attachment Parenting, right? Which is baby wearing, breastfeeding, bed, sharing, responding to cries, relieving the cries. You know, things like that, taking time for yourself is one of them as well, which is also important.

But yes, those are, those are really the physical ways that we can nurture babies. And those are really important, but they don't include the emotional side. The emotional side is equally important. What does that look like? You know, we talk about, I always talk about, babies can be in a few different states, right in their awake and alert states, where they want to play and connect. We can have beautiful communication with babies just beautiful. And I usually, like, freak people out when I meet their baby and I start, like, having a conversation with the baby. Because this is not, we don't really see it around that much, right? So if anyone wants to see what these look like, you can Google, serve and return interactions. That's sort of what we call it in the research, and it's it's not intensive. It doesn't mean we need to be like locked eyes with our baby all day, every day, but throughout the day, when they are in these kind of receptive states, including from day one, like I do this with newborns, they're already right away, you just kind of sit with them, calmly, lock eyes, regulate yourself, take some breaths, and just sort of be open to receive what they want to send out. And they will make noises. They will make facial expressions, and you can just kind of go back and forth with them. And just a really beautiful way to have these conversations. And they're they're beautiful to form the relationship, but they're also in the brain forming a critical self regulation circuit that that person will use anytime they're stressed for the rest of their life to modulate their stress. It's important for early literacy, you know, for.

Cognitive skills. That's a really important one. So like the what comes to mind for me when I think about this? My mother always worked with children. She's a speech pathologist, and she always naturally did this with my children. She would sort of have conversations with them. If she would hold them up on her lap, and they would make a face, she would go, Oh, did it and did it. And if they would laugh, she would laugh with them, and she would say, that's so funny, but she would keep responding to them. Is that sort of what you're talking about? Absolutely, absolutely. What comes to mind for me when I when I think of her doing that is, um, is just taking babies seriously? Yeah, they're real people. And when they laugh, laugh with them or participate in it. Like, it's so easy to just observe them because they're fascinating, but if we take them seriously, I think we do engage with them a little differently. That's what comes to mind completely. It's a huge eye opener for people. Right to Know, baby talk, basically, right? Like, how do we communicate with these little ones? Why are parents? Why are parents so afraid that they're going to create spoiled children if they do this? I believe it is most parents instinct to want to do this, but they're very afraid that if they hold their baby too much, if they go to their baby too soon, if they respond to their baby too often that they're never going to have independent children. And I believe the exact opposite, and that's the rest of the emotional part of taking care of the baby is like, you know, like you said, taking their emotions seriously,

Responding promptly when they need help. They can't regulate their stress on their own, and to be fully accepting of them, not to be rejecting of them when they have certain emotions, right? This is, this is, you know, the seat of a lot of mental health struggles when we do this to babies. So why do parents worry? The seeds of worry were planted, at least in North America, starting with a doctor called Emmett Holt, he wrote, he was essentially the first pediatrician in America. You know, in the early 1900s he wrote a book, and he said, You're going to spoil your baby like he had very strict rules of baby care, like, shut the door at 7pm open it at 7am don't kiss your babies. If you have to kiss them, do it once and quickly on the top of their head. Right?

I'd love to have to kiss them. I mean, like I do not kiss them. I used to kiss my children like 100 times a day, constantly kissing them when I've carried them on my hip. I was like kissing them constantly on their cheeks, because that's natural and instinctual and the right thing to do, yeah, and it's, you know, again, beautiful for that oxytocin flow for everybody, it's connecting, and you're also sampling them so that your breast milk makes the right antibodies to protect them. Right? There's so many reasons that we need to be so intimate and close with our babies. Does this go into children who are so basically, hold them as much as possible, love them as much as possible, and when they're 10 years old, don't give them an iPhone and send them off into middle school like I think, I think everyone has lost sight of what loving is versus spoiling, and we don't want self indulgent young children, preteens, that really is going to change them in ways that everyone fears when they're babies and we're holding them all the time. But is there, you know, I don't know what, what, how to describe this, but there's also just to take this to the the most contrarian position for a second, is there ever a time where children are, let's say, 789, years old? Is there ever a time parents are too indulgent, where the children go through a mildly challenging thing, like, Okay, we had a substitute teacher day today, and we didn't get to do story hour. And it's like, I bet that was really hard, huh? That must have been really hard day. I'm, I'm personally not a believer that that's very healthy either. I think we have to teach resiliency through a little bit of like, well, okay, well, you'll see your teachers soon enough, and you'll have Story Hour. Like, is, am I wrong about that? Or what is you were saying? Yeah, what's I'm so happy you're bringing it up. I'm so happy bringing it up because there, you know, even with the babies, sometimes this message gets, does get to a point where it's like, I have to inhibit, you know, block any stress from happening to my baby, right? Really, that kind of like, what's been called, like bulldozer parenting, or helicopter parenting, intensive parenting kind of things, right? We actually need our babies and children to be stressed and to recover, right? They really need us, certainly in the early certainly zero to three and through their childhood, to help them through these stressful experiences. What you mentioned is very mild.

Be stressful. But, yeah, I'll get to it. But parents are doing that. That's exactly what and parent even, you know, parents are afraid to say no, to have, you know, to have boundaries, to be teaching, you know, and guiding the baby. And that's that's really important too, right? We can be the source of our baby stress, and by saying no to things that are, you know, do you want 10 cookies? Like, no, you can have one, and you can be so upset.

But I'm in charge of your your safety and health right now, and we're gonna have one. That's what your body can have. And I'm here for it. I'm here for it, right? Like, I'm here to to help you, you know, get through this feeling that you're having, right? And that goes for the older kids too. You know, it's, it's, we need to believe them when something, when they say something is stressful or, you know, be curious about it.

But that's for them to go through. And setting boundaries is actually a very loving thing to do. Setting boundaries is a very nurturing thing to do. Children test boundaries because they want to know how much you care. If you just roll over.

They keep pushing it when you when you set boundaries, they're like, whoa. You know that they see that as love. I believe that 100% I noticed with my son, and I haven't seen this documented anywhere, but he would sort of get to a new level of ability, right? And then, you know, he'd, you know, grow six months or something, whatever it was like, he was, like, whatever, age three, let's say, and he can do more with his body. He can think in a different way. And then he would just have like, a period of, like, pushing all the boundaries, right? And I feel like that's a really natural way to grow where it's like, how far can I, like, I can do more now. So, like, where is the line now, right? And so we would have a few weeks of, like, lots of reminding, lots of boundary setting, and then he'd be good with those boundaries for a while, and then he gets smarter, and he get more physically able to do things. And he's like, can I use scissors now, you know, or like, whatever it is. And it's like, let's figure out where our new boundaries are, which is a very health, healthy, healthy thing. And we do need to be in charge of our, of our, of our children, like we are their guides. We absolutely have to have healthy boundaries sometimes. Yeah, I think it makes them feel safe. Boundaries is what makes them feel safe. And when they want to know we're protecting them, that's right. And when they feel safe, they can feel calm, and their nervous systems can be calm, and it's very dysregulating for babies and children to think that they're in charge Exactly. There's a beautiful book written by Donna Tartt called The Secret History. And the part that stuck with me after all these years, and the same part stuck with my mother, who also read the book, was this really powerful chapter about the son who's now, I think, in a prep school or college his childhood, and you're reading about this sort of parents who they were negligent. They were just sort of there, and they weren't really looking at him at all. They kind of had their token child and were raising him. But the sentence was very powerful when he described something and ended it with, who is flying this plane? And that always stuck with me that children need to know someone is flying this plane like they are. It's like what Trisha said. They'll they view boundaries. How did you say that Trisha, they view boundaries to test how much you love like they test boundaries to assess how much you love to I mean, it sounds crazy. That's a great line. Yeah, it's like being protected. Then they can feel free to explore, be curious, play. They don't need to be the hyper vigilant one monitoring the safety and protection, right? That that's one of the ways that we can spoil them, is with by protecting them in those ways. Yeah, I feel like parenting. I know that parenting styles moves through waves in society and comes in trends. And I know that trend was, I don't know when that book was written, you referenced, but maybe the 50s, like, don't spoil the child. Because I know around my era, it was the grandparents who still saw things that way. And then as I was growing up in the 80s, like, we're all very nostalgic for the 80s. Now, it was like, go home, you know, be home by dinner and riding our bikes all around town. At eight years old, we learned how to stop at stop signs and it stopped lights, how to be safe around the moving cars and navigate our way up and down hills to our friends homes and other neighborhoods. And I'm very nostalgic for that. And then we had the generation of mothers, I think, starting in the 90s, who, you know, play dates started to be appointments on the calendar for the first time ever in history. And I know we're all going to look back in a few decades and wonder where we were too extreme, where we might have gone wrong. And I can only guess that it might have been the hyper vigilance. So what you know, I think the 80s.

And maybe that era did raise very self sufficient, independent children just by virtue of growing up that way, like we know mom and dad are home and it's for me to go home, you know, when they're expecting me. So what? What's your opinion about this current style of parenting and the tendency toward hyper vigilance, because I'm afraid I might have been too much that way, and what? Do we know about that style? Yeah, it's definitely like a contagion, right? I feel it too, you know? I think I see my friends like giving their kids all this freedom who are just a little bit older than my son, and I'm like, Oh, I could never Trisha does it beautifully. I mean, I was once working late with Trisha. She called her son Trisha North must have been 11 years old. And you said, Go, take your bike to this state park and go for a bike ride. You said something like that. And I just thought, oh, my god, that's amazing. Yeah, some of the parents in town won't let their kids come to my house.

I was so impressed. They go in the woods and they do, they do that, you know, they go and build a fire in the woods, or they go to the just walk off to the State Park and just the trust to say, go leave like you were 30 minutes away from home, and their car is on your street, and you just go, take your bike, go for a bike ride. So Greer, what were you gonna say about that? Yeah, I think, I think that sort of like idea is really out there, and is like, gonna impact all of the parents listening, right? It's, it's a contagion, right? These kind of ideas, but it is really important to trust that our kids go out when they need to go out, and they come back, you know, to us when they need us. And I, you know, I think you know what you you've said touches on, on that not giving that freedom, that exploration and curiosity, like, you know, I was, as you were saying that Trisha, I was like, that sounds like a dream. And that's what I that's how I grew up, too. I think there's a societal pressure that if you do something like that and something happens to your child, the judgment that's going to fall upon you is like, you know, the wrath. It's just you will feel so well, obviously you will feel so terrible about what happened to your child. Accidents happen, but then just the societal pressure that you did something that's not the norm, that what people are doing, you know, the but then your child is missing out on all these opportunities to build their independence and their self confidence. And yeah, there's a little bit of risk to it, but the risk is way blown up in our heads compared to what the actual risk of something difficult happening or something bad happening and the benefit of the child having that independent experience and building that skill and that confidence just way outweighs the risk to me most of the time. Yeah. And the other thing that I thought of when you mentioned it too, was, like, the over scheduling of children, right? Because then it's like, well, we're not having free time, but you've got like, some kind of extracurricular every single day after school and all weekend, which I'm seeing a lot, and people I know with older kids, and I'm like, When is your kid gonna just like, have blue sky time? Like, we need time to be bored and figure out something fun to do and to relax, and that kind of stuff is very, very important. Boredom is extremely important. I have a great example of that this. This just happened to me this week. It was a very busy week, and my husband was in Canada, and I forgot to pick up my son from lacrosse practice. You forgot. I forgot. I just forgot the time changed. The practice changed at the last minute, and I thought it was a half hour later, and he didn't actually have his phone on him. He had left his phone at home, which is, you know, great. Good for him.

And somehow I remembered, and I went to pick him up and but I was 20 minutes late, and he was like, You know what? I had the best time. I didn't have my phone. Everybody was gone, and I just laid down in the grass, and I looked up at the stars in the sky, and I saw a shooting star, amazing. And he's like, I'm so glad you were late. Don't feel bad. That's what it's about. Yeah. If he had his phone on him, he would have just been calling me, looking at his phone going on, Tiktok, whatever. Instead, he lay down and saw a shooting star. Like, kids need that. Yeah. And he didn't feel scared. Greer, in your experience and all the work that you've done, what would you say is the biggest hurdle or the biggest resistance you see parents putting up against this nurturing concept? I think the idea that it's just so much harder can be a barrier, right? So people see, you know, mothers breastfeeding for you know, no, I don't like to say extended, but natural term. You know, natural term breastfeeding. You know, breastfeeding up at least until two or three, bed sharing, being really connected to your child, having your presence be there as much as you can, and things like this, you.

Know feels like it's too much, but I always will say it is so worth it, and it's essentially front loading the work, because when we are really, really present in those early years, our kids just do so well. These kids are like magic, sparkling little people that go out into the world. And you know, you've described your children sounds like they have these qualities. People spot these kids and they're like, What did you do with your child? You know, my sister in law, like her, her school says to her, like, can you please have more children? Your children are incredible. That you don't just mean well behaved, right? Because that is how most other adults judge. That's true. Children, do you mean well behaved? Not just well behaved, right? Really, like, empathic, intuitive, that curious, exploratory, friendly, just, yeah, wonderful little demeanor that these kids have, like, it's they're incredible the other way, right? The really, no low nurture path is actually setting parents up for way more work over the lifetime. Like there's huge incidents of developmental delays and motor delays and speech delays, all of these kinds of things, even just sleep, which we haven't even talked about, right? Can be, you know, a lifelong pursuit if we're not nurturing in the first three years? So yes, I would say, yeah, it is probably a lot more, but certainly, certainly worth it and setting the whole family up for more joy and, you know, positivity for for the years to come. What advice do you have for all the women who return to work after a few months?

What should they know? What kind of caregiving should they think about? I know it's ideal if they're home with their babies. We all know that, even now, if it's a major financial hit. But what if we're talking about a woman who actually cannot either a single parent or whatever the case. Yep. What do they need to know? Yeah, they need to know that the time they do spend with their baby can still be really high quality time and can still have a huge impact on their baby. Absolutely. Does. You know there's research that stay at home moms from the 50s spent less time with their kids than working moms now. Wow, that's incredible, but I've seen Mad Men, so I believe it. Yeah, go watch television while she's lighting up a cigarette, pregnant with their little sibling, exactly, exactly. And so for you know, for moms who are going back to work, please know that it's not quantity, it's quality. And if you can make that really great quality time when you are with baby, you're doing a beautiful job. Your your relationship with them is always going to be the most important relationship that they have.

Thank you for joining us at the Down To Birth Show. You can reach us @downtobirthshow on Instagram or email us at Contact@DownToBirthShow.com. All of Cynthia’s classes and Trisha’s breastfeeding services are offered live online, serving women and couples everywhere. Please remember this information is made available to you for educational and informational purposes only. It is in no way a substitute for medical advice. For our full disclaimer visit downtobirthshow.com/disclaimer. Thanks for tuning in, and as always, hear everyone and listen to yourself.

I noticed and I loved that you said you won't use the term extended breastfeeding. I can't believe I haven't thought of that before today myself, I'm so happy to hear you say that. Don't call it extended. Call it normal breastfeeding. Did you catch that? Trisha? Yeah, totally natural. I've never said, Never Have you. Don't say extended either. No, I don't know. Make sense to me, the things we get used to saying, and I'm always talking about rhetoric on this podcast, and there I was a victim of it. Just I don't really talk about extended breastfeeding, quote, unquote, that much to begin with, but it was a term that never jumped out to me and had been normalized in my brain because I'd heard it enough. Yeah, why should we call that extended when we should call it normal? That's true. My own babies, we self weaned after two years old. Never had that thought that we shouldn't use that term until now. So thank you for changing my thinking. Speaking of neuroscience, thank you for changing my brain.