Science and connection.
Hi, everyone! Lily and Eduardo here again.
Connection is touchy-feely. Ah, toughen up! These are Millennials' problems!
WELL, neuroscience doesn't think so.
The circuits.
Remember when you were 5 days old and couldn't feed yourself or change your own diapers? You needed someone to satisfy those needs for you, so they fed you, they cleaned your bottom, they put a warm and soft blanket over you and that's precisely the time when social bonding started to become a thing in your brain.
The facial expressions, the soothing voices, gentle touches, it all made your brain create neural patterns that associated these sensory experiences with positive emotions. Your body released dopamine and other feel-good hormones, which in turn, taught you to associate those social interactions with feelings of safety and happiness.
As you grew older, your brain's prefrontal cortex, in charge of smart thinking and how you act around others, began to shape up through those early social experiences. Having good times with people actually helped kickstart a process where our brain cells establish meaning to human connection. From now on, that baby's brain will crave connection through the rest of its life. The amount, intensity, and frequency of connection we need varies from person to person - but that's for a future newsletter.
In many ways, the more our brain develops, the more complex our neural web of social bonds gets. But one thing is a fact - the social interactions sit within the top tier of needs for humans, side-by-side with food and water. And exactly in the same way as hunger and thirst, when we don't have it, we crave it - water, food, and connection. From a neuroscientific standpoint, they in fact share the same circuitry. And these same circuits established during childhood are repurposed over and over in all future relationships.
Big priority.
See how it’s all connected?
That’s why we say that connection is a process - a beautiful one - and not an event. One thing builds into another. The fact that everything starts when we are babies does not mean that the great bond we had with our caregiver cannot be broken - hello traumas! The opposite is true, if we had a tough experience as a baby, we can still reestablish healthy neural pathways to build healthy social bonds. Neuroplasticity is real.
During the past 20 years, scientists learned more about the human brain than ever before. A ton of research is there to show us that a present, intentional, affectionate, and dedicated adult is pivotal in defining the quality of kids' relationships in the future. So based on that, yeah… we can for sure say that building a strong connection with your kid is not touchy-feely or woo-woo. It, in fact, should be as much of a priority as feeding them.
As mentioned, we'll be talking a bit more in-depth about the relationship between dopamine and these connection cravings - as well as the amount, intensity, and frequency of them, in a future newsletter.
WHAT NOW?
Start paying attention to a few things:
1. Do you know how to recognize if you are craving connection?
2. Do you know how to recognize when your kids are craving connection?
3. Do they know how to recognize it in themselves?
Since very young we figure out that when our mouth is dry, we are already dehydrated. When we have a rumbly empty stomach, we are already hungry. It’s easier to identify the physical signs and we even created ways to prevent it from getting to that stage - we drink water and eat a few times a day.
When it comes to connection, the signs are more subjective, mostly on an emotional level. As we continue to explore how we can identify these signs and ways to maintain a strong bond, here's an idea for a more preventative approach:
Find opportunities for connection in small moments with your kids with the same consistency that you give them water and food. Five mins here and there go a long way!
NERDING IT UP
Mother-child behavioral and physiological synchrony (Read)
A hunger for social contact (Read)
The importance of early bonding on the long-term mental health and resilience of children (Read)
Science of social bonding (Listen)
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