Pre-birth:

• Foetuses hear voices in the womb –  D Querleu, X Renard, F Versyp, L Paris-Delrue & G Crepin, 1988

• Foetuses recognises Mum’s smell from the amniotic fluid in which they live  – A J MacFarlane, 1975
• “We know they taste and smell the amniotic fluid in which they live” - Peter Hepper & L G Leader, 2000

“Being able to attach to your mother through sound and smell has a distinct advantage. After all, you can’t see your mother from inside the womb!” – Hepper, 2000

Post-Natal:

• The focal length of a baby’s eye under a month old is fixed at around 8 inches – the approximate distance of a baby’s face from its mother’s while breast feeding – H Haynes, B L White & R Held, 1965
• Babies have an innate predisposition to look into their caregiver’s eyes, look away and look back again in a kind of rhythmical dance - Daniel Stern, 1977
• Early physical contact  - ‘skin to skin’ contact - between baby and mother is essential for bonding. Mothers who cuddled their baby in a critical period after birth enjoyed better relationships with their child than those mothers who did not have that opportunity   – Marshall Klaus & John Kennel, 1976
• Limited period of surging hormonal changes at birth and immediately after facilitate bonding, with failure to bond during the surge making it less easy to bond afterwards – Colwyn Travarthen, 1979
• Breastfeeding within the first hour of birth enables the baby to distinguish the smell of their mother’s milk from another woman’s – Mary Kroeger & Linda Smith, 2004
• The mother’s body makes antibodies in her milk that are specific to her baby’s needs – Lars Hanson, 2004

• In a large-scale longitudinal study (over 10,000 mother-child pairs) only 6% of breast-fed children exhibited behavioural problems by the time they were 5 compared to 16% of bottle-fed – though the researchers were unsure how much this may be due to fatty acids, growth factors and hormones in breast milk helping with growth of the brain and nervous system and how much was due to closer physical interaction between child and mother - Katriina Heikkilä et al, 2011

• Sensitive Period for imprinting of attachment ends between 1-3 years – John Bowlby, 1969

Evaluation:

• Not all research has supported the importance of bonding in a critical period. However, in the short term mothers who have immediate contact are more likely to be more tender in their interactions with the child. They are also likely to spend more time looking at them than mothers who do not have immediate contact.

• It is more difficult to demonstrate longer-term effects of immediate contact; but, according to Helen Bee 1989 , early contact does seem to be related to general adequacy of parenting.