A mother’s relationship to her infant during the first few months of life is an archetypal one. That means that baby sees the mother not as a personal mother, but as the “great mother” — the all sustaining mother earth. The infant’s connection to the mother is very much a primal one, for he depends on the mother for his very survival. Understanding this can help one appreciate the joys and sorrows an infant goes through during the day. For when the mother is with the infant nursing him calmly, his whole world is at peace. And when she leaves him for a short period, sometimes it is as if the whole world had deserted him and left him totally alone.
Mothers need to trust their deepest intuitions at this time, for they are usually the best guides to follow in nurturing their infants. Nature has provided mothers during the first few months of an infant’s life with instinctual behaviors that help them nurture their children in the best possible way. In some ways, they are guided by the same deep instincts that bond mother and child together in the animal kingdom. Trust those bonding impulses, for they have been worked out and refined in the course of millions of years of evolution.
For more about the importance of the mother-child bond,, see my book The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life
This article was brought to you by Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D. and www.institute4learning.com.
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