Chapter 4 Chapter 3 Parenting

The burden of parental care for young is greater for the naked ape than for any other living species.Other species may perhaps equal the naked ape in the care of their young; but they can never equal the naked ape in the extent of responsibility for child-rearing. Once a woman is conceived, the embryo begins to develop in the womb, and the woman's body changes immediately.Menstruation stopped, and she felt nausea in the morning, her blood pressure dropped, she was slightly anemic, her breasts gradually swelled and became soft, and her appetite increased.Pregnant women are gentle and docile, and this change is particularly typical.

After about 266 days of pregnancy, the pregnant woman's uterus begins to contract vigorously and rhythmically.The amniotic membrane ruptures, the amniotic fluid flows out, and then through the strong contraction of the uterus, the fetus is pressed out of the uterus and delivered out of the body along the vagina to the world.After a brief pause, uterine contractions resume, and the placenta exits the uterus and out of the body.The umbilical cord connecting the fetus to the blastodisc is severed.In other primates, the umbilical cord is bitten off by the mother; no doubt this is the method used by our ancestors as well.However, when we delivered the baby today, we ligated the umbilical cord to stop the bleeding, and then cut it with scissors.The stump of the umbilical cord on the baby's stomach, which dries up and falls off after a few days.

In today's world, women all over the world are accompanied by other adults when they give birth.Maybe it's an extremely old procedure.The need to walk upright was not kind to a human woman giving birth: her punishment for this evolutionary step was hours of agony.It appears that during the early stages of evolution from tree-dwelling apes to hunter-apes, females needed the cooperation of others in giving birth.Fortunately, the cooperative nature of hunting apes grew along with the evolution of upright walking, so this source of pain also provided a cure for it.Generally speaking, after a chimpanzee mother gives birth, she not only has to bite off the umbilical cord of the cub herself, but she often eats part of the placenta. She also has to lick up the amniotic fluid, wash the cub, hold it, and protect it Infringed.In our species, the exhausted mother is completely dependent on her midwifery partner for each of the above activities (or their modern counterparts).

After delivery, it may take a day or two for the mother to produce milk.Once milk production begins, she breastfeeds her baby regularly for up to two years.But generally speaking, less than two years, the habit of modern people is to reduce the breastfeeding period to 6-9 months.During breastfeeding, the mother's menstruation is generally interrupted; the mother's menstruation usually does not resume until breastfeeding is stopped and the baby is weaned.If weaning is abnormally early, if artificial feeding is used, the return of menstruation will not be delayed, and the woman can start giving birth earlier.Conversely, if she had followed a more primitive method of breastfeeding, breastfeeding her baby for up to two years, she would probably only have one baby every three years. (Sometimes people deliberately prolong breastfeeding as a contraceptive technique.) A woman's reproductive period is about 30 years. If she has one child every three years, her natural fertility is about ten.If artificial feeding is adopted, or if weaning is premature, theoretically speaking, her number of births can rise to thirty.

The act of breastfeeding is a more difficult problem for human females than for other primate females.There is nothing a human baby can do, and the mother has to be more active when feeding, holding the baby in her arms and instructing the baby how to suckle.Some mothers have trouble getting their babies to suckle effectively when they are breastfeeding.The usual reason for this difficulty is that the nipple is not inserted deep enough into the baby's mouth.It is not enough for the baby's lips to hold the nipple tightly. The nipple must be inserted deep into the baby's mouth so that the front of the nipple is in contact with the palate and tongue.Only this kind of contact can stimulate the baby's upper and lower jaws, tongue and cheeks, making it produce a strong sucking action.To complete these parallel actions, the breast fibrous tissue next to the nipple must be flexible.The size of its flexibility determines the depth of the baby's grip on the nipple, which is very important for breastfeeding.For breastfeeding to develop smoothly, the newborn's sucking action must be perfect four or five days after birth.If a baby repeatedly fails to suck during the first week of life, he will never be able to respond perfectly to the act of feeding.It then develops ingrained habits and relies on more rewarding (hand-feeding) options.

Another difficulty with breastfeeding is the so-called "tip grabbing," which some newborns have.This reaction gives the mother the impression that the baby does not want to nurse.In fact, it means that the baby is trying to suck so hard that he can't because he can't breathe.The baby's head is not positioned properly against the breast, which blocks its nose; plus it's on the nipple, so it can't breathe.The reason why it wants to "grab its head" is not because it doesn't want to eat milk, but because it wants to take a breath.Of course, inexperienced mothers face many such problems.However, I have only singled out the above two questions because they seem to provide illustrations that women's breasts are primarily a sexual device rather than an enlarged milking machine.The root cause of the above problems is the firm and round shape of the breast.Just look at the design of the teat on the bottle to see what shape of the breast is best for your baby to feed on.The nipple on the bottle is much longer than the nipple of the breast, and the part behind the nipple does not expand rapidly into a rounded hemisphere; the breast bulges into a spherical shape, which is why the baby's nose and mouth are blocked, making it difficult to breathe.The nipple is designed to more closely resemble a chimpanzee breast.The chimpanzee's breasts are not high, and even at the peak of lactation, she has flat breasts and flat chests, not breasts and breasts like human women.Chimps have longer and more prominent nipples, and their young have less trouble starting to suckle.Since the burden of breastfeeding is quite heavy for women, and since the breast is clearly part of the nursing apparatus, it is natural to assume that the protruding and rounded shape of the breast must be an essential part of the mother's breastfeeding activity.This assumption now appears to have been wrong; in humans, breasts were designed primarily as sexual traits, rather than as a mother to breastfeed.

Leaving aside the question of infant feeding, there are one or two points worth examining in relation to the behavior of mothers at other times of child-rearing.The caressing, cuddling and washing of a baby usually goes without saying, but the position of the baby in the mother's arms is very telling.Careful research in the United States shows that 80% of mothers hold their babies with their left arms and stick them to the left side of their chests.If one were to ask what the significance of this choice was, most would say that it is clearly because most Americans are right-handed; mothers who hold their babies in their left hand free up their more dexterous right hand.However, a closer analysis shows that this is not the case.It is true that right-handed women and left-handed women hold their babies differently, but the difference is not enough to adequately explain it.The results of the analysis showed that 83% of right-handed mothers held their babies with their left hands, but 78% of left-handed mothers held their babies with their left hands.In other words, only 22 percent of left-handed mothers had their dexterous left hand free for tasks.Obviously, there must be another, less obvious explanation.

There was only one other clue: the heart was on the mother's left side.Is the sound of the mother's heartbeat the most important factor?How does it affect a mother's position in holding her baby?Thinking along these lines, it can be considered that during the process of growing up in the mother's body, the fetus has developed a fixed reflection (leaved a "mark") to the mother's heartbeat.If this is true, then hearing the familiar heartbeat again after the baby is born obviously has a calming effect on it, especially when the newborn is suddenly thrown into the new and strange external world that frightens the baby. Apparently has a calming effect.If this is true, then the mother will always find out quickly whether because of intuition or through unconscious trial and error; the child is more quiet when held on the left side close to the heart, but not so quiet when held on the right.

The above reasoning seems far-fetched.However, the experimental results have proved that the above conjecture is the correct explanation.In the baby room of a hospital, groups of newborns were asked to listen to heartbeat recordings, and their rhythm was the standard 72 beats per minute.There were 9 babies in each group.It was found that when the recording was not played, there was always more than one baby crying continuously, about 60% of the time.Conversely, if the recording was played, the baby's crying time dropped to 38%.Neonates in the listening and non-listening groups showed greater weight gain compared to those in the listening and non-listening groups, although the listening and non-listening groups had equal food intake.Apparently, babies in the non-heartbeat group burned more calories because of the effort involved in crying.

Another trial with slightly older infants was done before they fell asleep.In some experimental groups, the bedroom was silent; in some experimental groups, lullaby recordings were played in the rooms; playing heartbeat recordings indoors.The results of the groups were then compared to see which group took the time to fall asleep faster.The comparison showed that babies who listened to heartbeat recordings took only half as long to fall asleep as the other groups.Experiments not only prove that the sound of the heartbeat is a powerful stimulus to calm the baby, but also show that the baby's response is very specific.The sound of a metronome mimicking a heartbeat doesn't hypnotize babies -- at least not newborn babies.

It can be seen from this that it seems to be quite sure to explain the mother's habit of holding the baby in her left hand.Interestingly, someone analyzed 466 portraits of the Virgin holding Jesus (the earliest portraits were made hundreds of years ago), and the results showed that in 373 portraits, the Virgin put the Holy Child on the left chest.This result also shows that the percentage of left-handed spores is also at the level of 80%.This posture is in stark contrast to the observed posture of women holding packages.The posture of women holding the package is half on the left and half on the left. What other possible consequences of this heartbeat imprinting?Perhaps it explains why we ascribe our feelings of love to our hearts rather than our heads.As the lyrics in the song say: "You have a heart!" Maybe it can also explain why mothers shake their children to lull them to sleep.The rhythm of the mother shaking the baby is close to the rhythm of the heartbeat, which once again "reminds" the baby, causing it to relive the sense of rhythm already familiar in the womb; the mother's huge heart beats above them and the fetus develops a sense of rhythm. Not only can explain the above two phenomena.We continue to see this phenomenon well into adulthood.We cannot help shaking our bodies in pain.We also stood and swayed when we had conflicts.The next time you're listening to someone lecture or watching someone give a speech after a dinner party, notice that the rhythm of his shaking matches the rhythm of his heartbeat.He confronts the audience's discomfort, leading him to adopt the movements that are most comfortable for him in this confined environment.So, he used the heart rhythm he was already familiar with in the womb. Whenever you feel insecure, you may find this or that hidden comforting heartbeat.It is no accident that much of folk music and dance is syncopated.In this field, music and dance moves also bring people back to the peaceful world in the womb of the past.It is no accident that the music of teenagers is called "swing music".In recent years, teenage music has been called "beatmusic."The name is more telling.Let's look at their libretto again: "My heart is broken." "Your heart is given to someone else." "My heart belongs to you." The subject is fascinating, but we must not stray too far from the original discussion of parental care for children.So far we have considered mothers' behavior in caring for their children.We tracked her actions from the dramatic moment of her delivery to watching her nurse, hold and comfort her baby.Now, let's go back to the baby and study the development process of the baby. The average baby weighs a little over 7 pounds at birth, just over a twelfth of the average mother's weight.Growth is rapid during the first two years of life, and fairly rapidly during the next four years.However, the growth rate plummets by age 6.This gradual period of slow growth lasts until age 11 in boys and 10 in girls.Then, at puberty, the growth rate explodes again.Juvenile is from 11 years old to 17 years old, and girl's body grows rapidly again from 10 years old to 15 years old.Girls start puberty slightly earlier, so they outgrow boys at age 11-14.But, from the age of 14 onwards, boys outgrow them and stay ahead.Women's body stops growing around the age of 19, and men's body growth stops much later, until they stop at 25 years old.The first few teeth come in at six or seven months, and the full set of baby teeth usually comes in by two or two and a half years of age. The permanent teeth start to appear at age 6, but the last molars (wisdom teeth) don't erupt until around age 19. Newborns sleep a lot.The common belief is that newborns only get about two hours of sleep a day during the first few weeks, but that's not the case.They were lethargic, but not to that degree.After careful study, it was found that the average sleep time of newborns in the first few days was 16.6 hours a day.However, there are great individual differences. The most sleepy babies sleep an average of 2 hours a day, and the babies who wake up the longest sleep an average of only 10.5 hours a day. The ratio of sleep to wake time gradually decreases during childhood, and in adulthood, the sleep time is reduced from the original 16 hours per day to 8 hours on average.But some adults fall far short of the typical eight hours of sleep. 2% of adults only need 5 hours of sleep, and another 2% need 10 hours of sleep.Adult women need slightly more sleep than adult men. The 16-hour sleep of a newborn is not concentrated at one time at night, but scattered over several periods of the day.But even in swaddling, newborns have a tendency to sleep more at night.Over several weeks, the one night sleep period gradually lengthened to become the main sleep period.Babies "nap" several times a day during the day and one longer nap at night.This change gradually reduces the amount of sleep a baby gets each day, down to an average of 14 hours a day by 6 months.Over the next few months, the daytime naps were reduced to two—one in the morning and one in the afternoon.In the second year, the morning nap tends to disappear, reducing daily sleep time to 13 hours.After entering the fifth year, naps also disappeared, which reduced the daily sleep time to 12 hours.From then until puberty, children need another three hours less sleep; so by the age of 13, the teenager's sleep time is reduced to nine hours per night.Throughout adolescence thereafter, the sleep patterns of teenagers and adults did not show any difference, and they slept no more than 8 hours a day.It can be seen that the last sleep rhythm period of a person develops towards the time of sexual maturity, rather than coincides with the final finalization period of human body development. Interestingly, among preschoolers, the more intelligent tended to get less sleep than the less intelligent.After the age of 7, the relationship was reversed.Smarter schoolchildren slept slightly longer than less intelligent schoolchildren.By this stage, it appears that children do not rely on their waking hours to learn more; since they have to learn a great deal, children who are more responsive are exhausted after a day's work.In contrast, intelligence level and sleep duration seem to have little relationship among adults. Healthy adult men and women need an average of about 20 minutes to fall asleep.The time to wake up should come naturally.If artificial methods are required to wake up, it means that the sleep is not enough, and the level of vigilance after waking up will be reduced. Newborns are less active during their waking hours.It is not like other primate young, its muscles are very underdeveloped.Newborn baby monkeys have the strength to hold on to their mothers from the moment they are born.Even during the birth process, the baby monkey's forelimbs can tightly grasp the mother's fur.In contrast, a human newborn is weak and helpless, making only slight movements with its limbs.Babies cannot hold their heads up when lying on their stomach until one month old.At two months, it can support its chest off the ground with its hands. 3-month-old babies can only raise their hands to touch hanging objects. It took 4 months to be supported by the mother to sit up. At 5 months, she can sit on her mother's lap and grasp things with her hands. It takes 6 months to sit up in a higher chair and grasp hanging objects with hands. 9 months to stand with the help of furniture. 10 months to crawl with hands and feet. It takes 11 months to be a toddler with the support of parents. It takes 12 months to stand up on its own with a solid object. 13 months to climb a few stairs. 14 months to stand up without support. Fifteen months is an amazing time when babies can walk without help. (Of course, the above descriptions of the stages are average muscular development, but they are at least roughly indicative of the rate of postural and motor development in human infants.) About the time the baby learns to walk without external help, he also begins to learn speech; a few very simple words at first but his vocabulary soon flourishes with astonishing speed.By the age of two, children can speak a vocabulary of nearly 300 words.By age 3 his vocabulary had tripled again.By the age of 4 he will have a vocabulary of almost 1600.By the age of 5 he had learned 2100 words.Such an astonishing speed of imitating spoken language is a uniquely human ability that should be considered one of our greatest achievements.As we saw in Chapter 1, it is associated with group cooperation in hunting activities; during this period, accurate and efficient communication becomes an urgent need.The closest surviving primate relatives to humans have no similar abilities, or even close ones.In terms of operant imitation ability, chimpanzees are as clever and dexterous as humans, but they have no verbal imitation ability.Very serious efforts have been made to train a baby chimpanzee to speak, with little success.The baby orangutan lives in exactly the same environment as a human baby would at home.They used a combination of food rewards and lip manipulation to teach young orangutans to say the simplest words.By the age of two and a half, young orangutans can say "mama", "papa" and "cup".Eventually it learned to say the three words in the right situation, whispering "cup" when it wanted to drink water.The arduous experiment continued, and by the time the chimpanzee was six years old (by which time human toddlers have learned well over 2,000 words), their vocabulary had grown to a total of seven words. This difference is a difference in brains, not a difference in pronunciation.Chimpanzee vocal organs are perfectly structured to produce many different sounds.Its vocal organs are not defective, which is not enough to explain its inability to speak.Its weakness is concentrated in the head. Unlike chimpanzees, some birds have a remarkable capacity for verbal imitation.Parrots, budgerigars, mynas, crows, and some other birds can imitate entire sentences without difficulty.Unfortunately, their avian brains conditioned them to make full use of their imitative powers.They can only repeat what people teach them, and imitate the sounds in it. They can only repeat mechanically in a fixed order, and they cannot connect the imitated sounds with external events.Surprisingly, however, chimpanzees and monkeys are not able to go any further than they are today.Learning even a few simple, culturally-conditioned words would have greatly helped them in life in their natural habitat; so it is difficult to understand why they could not have learned a few words in their evolution. Back to us humans.The grunts, groans and exclamations we share with other primates have not been supplanted by our newly acquired remarkable language abilities.Our innate vocal cues are preserved, and so are their vital functions.They are not only the phonetic basis on which we build language skyscrapers, but also have their inherent right to exist as a unique means of communication for human beings.Unlike verbal signals, they do not require specialized training to occur, and they have the same meaning in all cultures of the world.Screaming, choking, laughing, growling, moaning, and rhythmic crying send the same message to people everywhere.Like the sounds made by other animals, these innate sounds are linked to our basic emotions, and they immediately create an impression of the motives of the person who makes them.Likewise, we retain our instinctive expressions: smiling, grinning, frowning, staring, frightened, scowling, and so on.These facial expressions are also the same in different societies.These same facial expressions persist even as people learn the unique postures and postures of their respective cultures. It is interesting to see how the common basic voice and expression of human beings develops in ontogeny.Rhythmic crying from the moment of birth (we are very familiar with this. Smiles appear later, about five weeks later. Laughter and tantrums do not appear until 3-4 months. Carefully It is worth examining these patterns. Crying is the earliest emotional signal sent out by people, and it is the most basic emotional signal.Smiling and laughing are fairly specialized signals unique to humans, but crying is a sound common to humans and thousands of other species.Virtually all mammals (not to mention birds) scream, hiss, wah, and howl when frightened and in pain.In higher mammals, facial expressions evolved as a means of visual signaling, and their screams were accompanied by frightened facial expressions.Regardless of whether such responses come from juveniles or adults, they are indicative of a big problem.Young animals alert their parents, and adults alert other animals in the same group. During our infancy, many things make us cry: we cry when we are in pain, when we are hungry, when there are no adults around, when we are confronted with unfamiliar stimuli, when we suddenly lose a source of comfort, when we cannot get much-needed comfort. Cry when something.The reasons for the various categories above boil down to two important factors: physical pain and insecurity.In either case, once the signal is given, it immediately produces (or should produce) a protective parental response.If the child is not with the parent when the signal is sent out, it immediately has the effect of shortening the distance between the child and the parent, until the parent comes to the child, holds him in his arms, or shakes, pats, or strokes.If the baby is already in your arms, if the baby is still crying after being held, then you need to see if there is pain on the baby.The parental response ceases only after the cue of the child's crying has disappeared (in this respect, crying is fundamentally different from the pattern of smiling and laughing). The act of crying causes muscle tension, accompanied by bloodshot redness of the head, watery eyes, mouth widening, corners of the mouth drooping, increased breathing intensity, increased panting, and of course, a high-pitched cry.Older children have to run to their parents and hold them tightly. Although crying is familiar to everyone, I delineated the pattern in detail because it is from this pattern that our specialized signals for smiling and laughing have evolved.When someone says, "He laughed and cried," he is talking about the relationship between the two.However, from an evolutionary point of view, the relationship between the two should be reversed - we learn to cry before we learn to laugh.How is this going?First, it is important to recognize that crying and laughing are very similar as response patterns.Because the emotions reflected by the two are so different, we often overlook the similarities between the two.As with crying, laughing involves muscle tension, mouth opening, lips retracting, increased breathing intensity, and increased panting.When laughing hard, the face is also congested and red, and the eyes also cry.But laughter is not as hoarse and piercing as crying, and it is not as high-pitched and high-pitched as crying.More importantly, laughter is shorter than crying, and its rhythm is faster, as if a baby's cry is cut into several short fragments, and becomes smoother and softer, and the pitch is lowered. It appears that the laugh response evolved as a secondary signal from the cry response in the following way.As I said before, crying is present from the moment of birth, while laughter does not appear until 3-4 months.The onset of laughter coincides with the ability to recognize the parents.A baby who knows its father may be a smart baby, but a baby who knows its mother laughs.A baby may giggle until he recognizes his mother's face and distinguishes her from other adults, but he doesn't laugh out loud.While he could recognize his mother, he also felt afraid of others and adults he didn't know.When he grows up to two months, all familiar faces make him happy, and all kind adults are welcome.But, at the same time, his fear of the world around him is beginning to mature, and any unfamiliar person can upset him and scare him to tears. (It won't be long before he learns that there are other grown-ups who will make him comfortable, and his fear of those grown-ups will disappear. But the grown-ups he no longer fears have a choice, and only the grown-ups he knows Fear not.) The baby is in an inexplicable conflict because of his fixation on his mother.When a mother's behavior frightens a baby, the mother sends two opposing sets of signals.One set of signals said: "I am your mother—your protector, nothing to be afraid of." Another set of signals said: "Be careful, this thing is scary." The baby will not be in a state until it can recognize the mother. in this conflict.For if the mother's behavior at the moment frightens the baby, the mother at the time is only the source of a scare signal.However, now the baby can recognize the mother, so the mother's behavior sends out a double signal: "Dangerous and not dangerous", in other words, "It looks dangerous, but it is a signal from me, so you don't have to take it seriously" .As a result, the baby's response was half cry and half recognition of the mother's cluck.The magical combination of the two produced a big laugh. (More precisely, laughter arose in the distant evolutionary past. Since then, it has become fixed as a separate and unique response.) It can be seen that the child's laughter means: "I know there is a danger, but the danger is not real." This is the child's message to the mother.Mothers can now play some intense games with their babies without them crying.Babies' earliest laughter is triggered by games such as "peek-a-boo," clapping, rhythmic kneeling, and lifting the baby aloft.A little older, tickling plays an important role, but not until after the 6th month.All of these games are full of shocking thrills, but they're issued by "safe" protectors.Babies quickly learn to provoke these stimuli on their own -- such as "peek-a-boo" to get the "shock" of finding something, or to pretend to run away to get the experience of being caught. Laughter thus becomes a signal for play, which allows the continuation and development of the increasing drama of the relationship between mother and child.If this signal becomes too frightening and distressing, of course the child's response may turn into a cry, which immediately reactivates the mother's protective response.This signaling system enables the child to expand his exploration of bodily functions and the world around him. Other animals also have unique play signals.But that pales in comparison to our game signal.Chimpanzees have a playful facial expression and a playful grunt that is the equivalent of our laugh.Evolutionarily speaking, these two signals share the same paradoxical nature of our laughter.When a chimpanzee cub greets, its lips are pursed and protruded forward to the limit; when it is frightened, its lips are retracted, the mouth is opened, and the teeth are exposed.The chimpanzee's play expression is evoked by a combination of friendliness and fear, so it's a mix of the two.At this time, its palate is protruding, which is the same as its gesture of fear, but its lips are also protruding with the palate, covering the teeth.It shows that the game's grunt is somewhere between a hello "goog" and a high-pitched scream.If the game gets too rough, its lips draw back and the game's grunt changes to a short squeal.If the game becomes too quiet, its jaws will gradually close, and its lips will protrude forward, in a typical chimpanzee gesture of raising its mouth to show friendliness.The play signals are basically the same in humans and animals, but the chimpanzee play grunt is insignificant compared to our powerful and intense laugh.As chimpanzees develop, the importance of play signals decreases dramatically.On the contrary, our game signals have greatly expanded and become more and more important in our daily life.Even into adulthood, naked apes still love games.The game became completely part of his exploratory nature.He often takes things to extremes, trying to surprise and shock himself without getting hurt at the same time, and then he bursts into contagious laughs to show his relief. Laughing, in older children and adults, can certainly be a powerful weapon in social life.Mocking insults people in a double sense.On the one hand, it means that someone's strangeness is frightening, but at the same time, it means that this person is not worth taking seriously.The professional comedian deliberately assumes the social role of mocking people, while the audience pays him large sums of money for the purpose of contrasting the normal behavior of his own group with the abnormal behavior he performs. Teenagers' reactions to their idols have something to do with it.Their way of expressing pleasure as an audience is not to laugh out loud, but to shriek.Not only that, they were so happy that they grabbed their own bodies, or grabbed the bodies of their partners.They writhed, groaned, covered their faces with their hands, and pulled their hair when they were happy.These movements are typically symptoms of pain and fear, but they are deliberately stylized as signs of pleasure.Its dividing line has been artificially lowered.They are no longer cries for help, but signals communicated between listeners, expressing their own strong reactions to their sexual idols.The passions of such reactions are so feverish that, like all strong stimuli which make the emotions irrepressible, they are the reactions of pure pain.If a young girl found herself alone with her idol, it would never occur to her to scream at him.Her screams were not directed at the idol, but at the girls in the audience.In this way, the girls can reassure each other and confirm each other's developing emotional reflections. Before leaving aside the subject of tears and laughter, there is one more mystery to clarify.Some mothers suffer from the baby's constant crying during the first three months of life.The parents tried all kinds of methods, but they couldn't seem to stop the surging crying.They then concluded that the child was in a very serious physical discomfort and treated the child accordingly.Of course, they see nothing wrong with their child being unwell.However, I am afraid this is the effect rather than the cause.An important clue is provided by the fact that at three or four months, as if by magic, the child's "distressed" cries suddenly ceased.The time when the cries died down coincided with the time when the babies began to recognize their mothers.The answer to this question can be found by comparing the behavior of mothers of crying babies with those of quiet babies.The behavior of the first type of mother is tentative, with tension and anxiety, while the behavior of the latter is conscious, calm, and serene.The key point is that even at this young age, children are very sensitive to their mother's behavior, and they can distinguish between "safe" and "peaceful" feelings when their mother hugs them, and "insecure" and "frightened" feelings.An agitated mother cannot avoid sending her excited signals to her newborn baby.The child also sends back signals to the mother in appropriate ways, asking her to protect him from agitation.This signal aggravates the mother's distress, which in turn makes the child cry even harder.In the end, the unfortunate baby cried until he felt uncomfortable, and his crying body aggravated his misfortune.To break this vicious cycle, the mother simply needs to accept the situation and remain calm.Even if the mother cannot calm herself (and it is almost impossible to deceive the baby on this point), the problem can be solved by itself; as I said above, the baby's noises suddenly cease at three or four months.因为到了这个阶段，母亲的形象在婴儿的脑子里留下了深深的印痕，他本能地把母亲当做“保护人”。母亲不再是一连串不具形体而激动不安的刺激，而是有一张熟悉面孔的实实在在的保护人。即使她继续发出使人激动不安的刺激，这些刺激也不会使孩子非常惊怕，因为它们的源头是熟悉的和蔼可亲的母亲。婴儿和母亲与日俱增的纽带使母亲保持平静，自然就减轻了母亲的焦虑。婴儿“痛苦的”哭叫遂告消失。 迄今为止，我略去了微笑的问题未加讨论，因为它和朗声笑相比是一种更专门化的反应。正如朗声笑是哭叫派生的一种次要形式一样，微笑也是朗声笑派生的一种次要形式。乍一看，微笑的确只不过象是朗声笑的一种强度较低的翻版，但实际情形却并非那么简单。不错，烈度最低的朗声笑难以和微笑区别开来。无疑微笑正是这样起源而来的。然而，显而易见，微笑在进化过程中解放了出来，现在它必须被看作一种独立的实体。高强度的微笑——咧嘴笑，喜气洋洋的、笑逐颜开的笑——与低烈度的朗声笑在功能上是完全不同的。微笑演变成了人类独特的专门用于打招呼的信号。如果我们对人微笑示意，他知道我们的态度友好。但是，倘若我们用哈哈笑作为见面礼，人家就有理由怀疑我们的善意。 任何社会接触即使在最好的情况下都能引起轻微的惧怕。在见面的一瞬间，对方的行为还是一个未知量。微笑和朗声笑都表明惧怕是存在的，都表现出惧怕和吸引对方、接受对方的心清奇妙地掺合在一起了。但是，当朗笑声发展而为高烈度的纵声大笑时，它发出的信号却是：准备应付进一步的“吃惊”，准备进一步探索危险与安全掺半的情景。相反，假若低强度朗声笑中的微笑表情变成了别的东西——咧嘴笑，它发出的信号又是另一种意义：情况不能向那个方向发展下去；它仅仅表明，初始的情绪本身就是目的，用不着进一步推敲。相视着微笑使双方确信：双方虽然担心，但是相互之间却有吸引力。轻微的惧怕意味着没有攻击性，没有攻击性意味着友好。于是乎，微笑演变成了善意的吸引人的一种手段。 如果说我们需要微笑这种信号，为什么其它灵长目又可以不要这一信号呢？不错，它们确实有各种友好的姿势。但是，对我们而言，微笑是一种独有的信号，而且是日常生活中极其重要的信号，无论对婴儿对成人都很重要。我们的生存模式中，是什么东西把它推到前台这样重要的位置呢？看起来，答案要在我们顶顶出名的裸露的皮肤中去找。小猴降生时，立即紧紧抓住母亲的皮毛。它就这样贴在母亲的毛皮上，一小时又一小时，一日复一日地呆在那里。几个星期之中，甚至连续几个月，小猴从不离开母亲皮毛这个舒适的安乐窝。后来，小猴首次离开母亲去冒险时，仍然在受到警告之后就立即跳回母亲身边，抓住母亲不放。小猴自有它确定的办法去保证与母亲的亲密接触。即使母亲不欢迎这种身体接触（因为小猴越长越大，越来越重），她也难以拒绝小猴的要求。凡是领养过小猩猩的人都可以证明这一点。 当我们降生时，我们的处境要危险得多。不光是因为我们体力虚弱，不能抓住母亲，而且母亲的身上也没有可以抓住的皮毛。我们丧失了一切保证与母亲密切接触的机械手段，因而不得不完全依靠向母亲发出的刺激信号。我们可以声嘶力竭地哭叫，以召唤母亲的照顾；一旦得到母亲的照顾，我们还得用其它的办法来维持母亲的照顾。此刻我们需要的，就是替代抓住母亲的一种东西，一种使母亲的爱抚得到报偿的信号，使她想和我们呆在一起。我们使用的信号就是微笑。 婴儿出生以后的头几周就开始微笑，但是开头的微笑并没有确定的月标。到第5 周时，微笑变成对一些刺激的确定的反应。婴儿的眼光能固定在物体上了。开始时婴儿对他人眼睛的反应最为敏锐。就连纸板画的两个黑点，它也能作出敏锐的反应。再过几周，还需要嘴巴才能引起婴儿的注意。两个黑点之下再加一条横线表示嘴巴，能更为有效地引起婴儿的反应。不久，一张张开的嘴巴对引起注意最为重要。接着，眼睛作为主要的刺激就失去了它的重要性。在这个阶段，即在三四月前后，婴儿的反应变得更加专一。他的反应从任何熟悉的面孔逐渐收缩到母亲的面孔上。母亲的印记开始发生。 婴儿的微笑反应在发展过程中有一种令人惊诧的现象：婴儿在这个过程中完全不能区别四方形、三角形或其它线条分明的几何图形之类的事物。看起来，婴儿在认识某些形体的能力方面，有一种特别超前的成熟机制。这些形体限于和人的面容相关的东西。相反，他的其它视觉能力却掉在后面。这就保证了婴儿的视觉能集中在合适的对象上发展。它能避免婴儿的视觉固着在与人的五官相近的无生命的形体上。 到了七个月时，婴儿就彻底固恋着母亲。无论她做什么，母亲的形象总是维持不变，这个形象一直要维持到孩子生命的终点。小鸭完成这个固恋的关系，是通过亦步亦趋地跟随母亲，猿猴幼仔完成这一过程，是通过抓住母亲的皮毛。我们形成这个至为重要的依恋纽带，是借助微笑这一反应。 作为视觉刺激信号，微笑能够获得一种独特的形貌，主要借助于一个简单的动作，即嘴角的上扬。这时候嘴巴微张，嘴唇后收，与受惊时的动作颇为一致，但是微笑时还有另一个动作：嘴角微微上规。有了这个动作，表情的性质就大大改变了。这一发展演化反过来又使另一种截然相反的面部表情成为可能。这就是嘴角下垂的表情。借助这种与微笑的嘴巴线条截然相反的曲线，就可以变成一种“反笑”（anti-smile）。正如朗声笑由哭叫演化而来，微笑从朗声笑演化而来一样，这种不友好的面部表情。也仿佛是通过钟摆一样的摇摆，而从友好的面部表情演变而来。 然而，微笑的动作不限于嘴唇的曲线。我们成年人也许能在嘴唇的轻微动作之中传达自己的情绪，但是婴儿微笑时投入的动作远远不只这一点，他的动作就象打仗一样费劲。他微笑得最厉害的时候，还要蹬腿挥手，要伸手去抓外在的刺激物，要摇晃双手，要咿呀啊哇的发出欢快的叫声；同时他的头部后仰、下颏突出，身体向前倾，或向一旁扭曲，呼吸也随之加快。他的眼睛可能更加明亮，也可能略微眯缝起来。眼睛下沿和边缘出现皱纹，有时鼻梁上也露出皱纹。鼻翼两侧到嘴角两侧的皱褶更加显著。舌头可能伸出嘴巴。在伴随微笑的各种动作之中，身体的运动似乎表明，婴儿挣扎着要与母亲接触。婴儿笨拙的举动大概表明，我们灵长目祖先抱着母亲身体不放的反应仍然残存在我们身上。 我不厌其详地阐述了婴儿的微笑。但是，微笑当然是一种双向的信号。婴儿向母亲微笑时，母亲也报之以相同的信号。双方都给对方的微笑提供报偿，母子的纽带在来往的双向交流中紧密起来。你可能觉得，这是一目了然的表述。然而，这里面却可能掩盖着一个陷阱。有些母亲在激动、焦急、发火时，企图强装笑脸以掩盖自己的情绪。她们希望强装的笑脸能免使婴儿不安。实际上，这一手法是害多利少。上文已经提到，在母亲的情绪上，要想欺骗婴儿几乎是不可能的。在婴幼儿时间我们对父母激动和平静的微小征兆似乎是极为敏感的。在前言语阶段，那时符号和文化交际的庞大机器还没有压在我们身上，我们依赖细小的动作、姿态的变化和声调的变化更甚于往后。别的动物尤其善于使用这些手段来交际。“聪明的汉斯”这一头名闻道选的会数数的马，事实上它的能力就建立在敏锐的反应力的基础上，它能对训练人细微的体态变化作出反应。要它算数时。他能用蹄子敲到恰当的次数后停下来。即使训练人不在现场而由别人出题要它算时，它同样能给出正确的答案，因为等它用蹄子敲到至关重要的那个数字时，在场的陌生人的身子不由自主地也要流露出了一点紧张的迹象。我们大家都有这种能力，即使进入成年之后也保存着这种能力（算命先生算得正确的时候，就是大大借重了这种能力）。但是，在前言语阶段的婴儿身上，这种能力似乎是表现得特别活跃。假如母亲的动作紧张不安，无论她怎么掩饰，她总是免不了要将这些动作传达给自己的孩子。假如她同时装出一副喜气洋洋的笑脸，那还是骗不了孩子的，那只能把孩子搞得不知所以。两种矛盾冲突的信息传递给了孩子。如果长此以往发送互相冲突的信息，就可能给孩于造成终身的伤害，给他日后的社会交往、给他适应日后的生活造成严重的困难。 搁下微笑这一主题之后，我们现在要转向一种迟然不同的活动。几个月之后，一种新的婴儿行为模式开始出现：攻击性开始登场。发脾气和哭闹从早些时候万用的哭叫中区分出来。婴儿发出的攻击性信号，是更为断续、更不规则的尖叫，是用力用手和腿蹬打。他用手打小的东西，摇晃大的物件，碎唾沫吐东西，凡是够得着的东西他都想用嘴咬、用手抓、用手敲。开头这些活动带有随意性，彼此不协调。哭叫的反应表明；惧怕仍然存在。攻击性尚未成熟而变为纯粹的进攻：纯粹进攻还得等很久一阵子；等到婴儿有了自信心，等他对自己身子的能力有了把握，才会到来。一旦进攻性到来时，它也具有独特的面部表情信号。这些信号包括绷紧着嘴唇的疑观。嘴唇撅紧成一条线；但嘴角往前送，而不是往后收。眼睛死死地盯着对方不动，眉毛拧紧往下压。拳头握紧。孩子开始表明自己的存在和个性了。 观察发现，增加孩子的密度会增加其攻击性。在拥挤的环境中，群体成员的友好社会交往减少，破坏性和攻击性模式在频率和烈度上都会显著上升。这一点至为重要。你也许记得，其它动物借助争斗来解决霸权争端，并借此增加同一物种的空间分布。我们在第五章里再回头谈这个问题。 除了保护、喂养、清洗孩子、与孩子游戏之外，父母的职责还包括最为重要的训练。正如其它动物一样，人类的训练也运用奖惩的制度，通过逐渐修正和调整幼儿的试错学习过程来完成。然而，除此之外，孩子还借助模仿而飞快地学习——这一学习机制在大多数哺乳类身上都发展得不大好，但是在我们身上，它的确发展到无与伦比的高度，发展到尽善尽美的地步。所以，其它动物必须靠个体自己非常吃力地学习的东西，我们却可以通过仿效父母的榜样迅速地学到手。裸猿是一种有意识地向子女传授知识和技能的猿类。（我们对这种父传子受的学习方式已经习以为常，所以我们往往假定，其它动物也以同样的方法受惠，结果对传授在动物生活中的作用就作了过高的估计。） 我们成年之后的许多行为建立在童年时期靠模仿而吸收的东西之上。我们常常幻想，自己之所以按某种特定的方式行动，那是因为这样的行为与某种抽象而高尚的道德准则相吻合。然而，事实上，我们的行为要服从根深蒂固的、早已“忘掉”的纯粹模仿所得来的印象。正是由于盲目服从这样的印象（再加上我们仔细掩盖的本能冲动），才使社会非常难以改变习俗和“信仰”。即使面对激动人心、光辉灿烂的、合乎理性的新思想，而且是建立在纯正客观的智慧基础上的新思想，人们仍然顽固地坚守昔日固定居所的祖先所养成的习惯和偏见。如果我们要顺利度过少年时代这个极为重要的所谓“吸墨纸”阶段，在这个阶段里我们要迅速吸收历代前人积累的经验，那么我们就不得不背负陋习和偏见这个沉重的十字架。我们在接受富有价值的事实时，不得不同时接受传统的偏见。 所幸的是，我们开发出了一种疗效显著的“解毒药”来对付我们的这一弱点，这一弱点是模仿性学习本身的痼疾。我们富有经过磨砺过的好奇心，富有经过强化的探索冲动。好奇心和探索冲动与陋习和偏见相抗衡，由此而产生的平衡具有创造奇迹的潜力。只有当一种文化因迷信模仿性重复而过分僵化，或者是在探索中过分鲁莽轻率时，它才会跌跌撞撞地失去平衡。凡是在这两种冲动中求得完美平衡的文化，都是会繁荣昌盛的。当今世界上．我们能看见许多太僵硬或太鲁莽的文化作为例证。小型落后的社会、被沉重的禁忌和古风完全支配的社会，是大僵硬的文化例证。同样是这些社会，当它们被先进文化改变、接受先进文化的“援助”时，它们就迅速成为过分鲁莽的文化。猝然服用剂量过大的药物，过分迷恋社会新奇和探索激情，就会淹没祖传的模仿，就会使天平过分失去平衡。结果就造成文化动乱和文化瓦解。幸运的社会是逐渐求得完美平衡的社会；它必须求得模仿与好奇的平衡，求得盲目的、不动脑筋的抄袭和渐进的、合乎理性的试验之间的平衡。