Mother’s Maternal Instincts

1. Mother’s Maternal Instincts By: Josh Clark

2. Pro’s list for maternal instincts • Mother’s have a special bond because of carrying and giving birth to the child. • Mother’s have basic maternal instincts passed down from nature to naturally care for a child. • Society gives custody to mothers over fathers because of the known maternal instincts needed to be given to a child. • Breast feeding brings the mother closer to her child, and shows her instinct of knowing when the baby is hungry. • Women have more estrogen than men which has been shown to make women more emotionally sensitive to the needs of a child.

3. Con’s against maternal instincts • Maternal instincts can be affected by drug and alcohol use. • If the woman had a poor upbringing her maternal instincts might reflect that of her mother. Nature vs. Nurture. • Young mothers seem to have a more difficult time with maternal instincts due to the immaturity of the mind. • Maternal instincts can be affected by the society the mother is raised in. ex. Third world countries, the south vs. north, rich vs. poor neighborhoods.

4. My personal thoughts • I think basic maternal instincts are naturally given to all women through nature, but mostly depend on how the woman was raised. • My mom was a caring mother, as was her mother, and so on. • My brothers ex wife recently threw boiling hot water on my nephew and gave him second and third degree burns over 40 percent of his body. Alcohol and drugs are more important than her child, so it affected her common sense/maternal instincts to raise a child. • Every woman has the basic knowledge on being a good mother, but outside sources are the main reasons why their maternal instincts can be effected in a negative way.

5. Article for natural maternal instincts • A mother’s impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain, a new imaging study shows. • Tokyo researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (M.R.I.) to study the brain patterns of 13 mothers, each of whom had an infant about 16 months old. • First, the scientists videotaped the babies smiling at their mothers during playtime. Then the women left the room, and the infants were videotaped crying and reaching for their mothers to come back. All of the babies were dressed in the same blue shirt for the video shoot. • M.R.I. scans were taken as each mother watched videos of the babies, including her own, with the sound off. When a woman saw images of her own child smiling or upset, her brain patterns were markedly different than when she watched the other children. There was a particularly pronounced change in brain activity when a mother was shown images of her child in distress. • The scans suggest that particular circuits in the brain are activated when a mother distinguishes the smiles and cries of her own baby from those of other infants. The fact that a woman responds more strongly to a child’s crying than to smiling seems “to be biologically meaningful in terms of adaptation to specific demands associated with successful infant care,” the study authors noted. • “This type of knowledge provides the beginnings of a scientific understanding of human maternal behavior,” said Dr. John H. Krystal, in a press release. Dr. Krystal is the editor of Biological Psychiatry, which published the study last month. “This knowledge could be helpful some day in developing treatments for the many problems and diseases that may adversely affect the mother-infant relationship.” • Because the study only looked at mothers, it’s not known whether fathers have similar brain responses to a child’s smile or tears.

6. Article for learned maternal instinct • One scientist who believes that mothering behavior is learned and not instinctual is Sarah BlafferHrdy, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Davis and author of Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Hrdy has studied primates for more than three decades and believes that the desire of a mother to care for a child depends on her desire to be a mother and the amount of time spent bonding together. Although she concedes that maternal responses exist, she believes they are biologically conditioned, but not true instincts. In an interview with Salon.com she said, "A woman who is committed to being a mother will learn to love any baby, whether it's her own or not; a woman not committed to or prepared for being a mother may well not be prepared to love any baby, not even her own." • Hrdy argues that human babies are genetically engineered to convince their parents that they are worth raising, citing the plumpness of human babies (not seen in other primates) and their irresistible smile as examples. And given the right circumstances, even fathers can display maternal behavior, as seen in 1986 when a small boy fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Jersey Zoo in the United Kingdom and was - surprisingly - protected by an otherwise aggressive male silverback gorilla. • According to Hrdy, natural selection is the primary reason that males do not typically display maternal behavior. The paternity of a child can always be questioned, and if a male were to spend his time tending to offspring that were not his own, he could be limiting his own gene pool. But because maternity is never in doubt, females are more naturally inclined to tend to babies. • Hrdy acknowledges that in order to survive, babies must become attached to a caregiver, but she contends that the individual need not be the infant's biological mother. It is simply because of birth and lactation that the baby will probably form its closest relationship with its mother and she in turn will be motivated to care for the baby.

7. Closing • I believe basic maternal instinct like breast feeding is from nature, but overall maternal instinct is actually learned. • Location of upbringing plays a large role in maternal instinct. • Our society gives the mother custody of the child in most cases because of the maternal bond shared between mother and child. • Scientists are currently split between nature vs. nurture when it comes to maternal instincts.

8. Resources http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/maternal-instinct-is-wired-into-the-brain/ http://www.parentingweekly.com/pregnancy/breathingspace/vol39/pregnancy_health_fitness.asp