The Nurture Revolution
Grow Your Baby's Brain and Transform Their Mental Health through the Art of Nurtured Parenting
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- CHF 12.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
Research in neuroscience and parenting come together in this groundbreaking book by a neuroscientist and parent, bringing to light new realizations about the power of nurture for our children's mental and physical health.
Greer Kirshenbaum, PhD's work began with the goal of developing new treatments for poor mental health; she dreamed of creating a new medication to address conditions like anxiety, depression, addiction, and chronic stress. Over time, she realized that science had already uncovered a powerful medicine for alleviating mental health struggles, but the answer wasn’t a pill. It was a preventative approach: when babies' receive nurturing care in the first three years of life, it builds strong, resilient brains.
How can parents best set their children up for success? In this revelatory book, Dr. Kirshenbaum makes plain that nurture is a preventative medicine against mental health issues. She challenges the idea that the way to cultivate independence is through letting babies cry it out or sleep alone; instead, the way to raise a confident, securely attached child is to lean in to nurture, to hold your infant as much as you want, support their emotions, engage in back-and-forth conversations, be present and compassionate when your baby is stressed, and share sleep.
Research has proven that nurturing experiences transform lives. Nurturing is a gift of resilience and health parents can give the next generation simply by following their instincts to care for their young.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"All nurture is nourishing for our babies' brains," contends this flawed debut from neuroscientist Kirshenbaum. Defining nurture as "deliberate time spent in a physical and emotional relationship with your baby," Kirshenbaum explores how supportive parental care shapes infants' cognitive development. She debunks myths that she says lead to lackluster parenting, pushing back against the claim that "responding to cries... teaches an infant to be dependent" by explaining that newborns lack the cognitive infrastructure to self-soothe and that parental comfort helps young brains learn to relieve stress on their own. Small actions can make a big difference, Kirshenbaum posits, suggesting that merely talking to babies "significantly affects the stress systems, hormones, and neurotransmitters in their brains." While some of the accessible glosses on neuroanatomy are a boon ("The amygdala is like an alarm for the stress system"), they just as often succumb to vague language, as when she warns that "low-nurturing hormones," such as "low oxytocin," make babies more "reactive" without elaborating on what that means. The author also devotes long discussions to disproving positions few hold (does anyone actually see "babies as objects to be managed" rather than "as human beings"?). Hazy scientific explanations drag this down.
