Cultivating Mindfulness to Raise Children Who Thrive

Why Human Connection from Before Birth Matters

Antonella Sansone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138598232
• eBook ISBN: 9780429943041
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Cultivating Mindfulness to Raise Children Who Thrive introduces an expanded view of human development and health, which begins before conception and moves through pregnancy, early childhood and adulthood.

This book is a call for all prenatal and perinatal professionals and policy makers to appreciate indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and integrate them with scientific evidence in the care of expectant parents and their babies. It explains how this could also tackle pressing social issues facing the modern world and favour social innovations through a revaluation of preconception, pregnancy, birth and childcare practices. Sansone presents the reader with scientific discoveries of epigenetics, interpersonal neuroscience, quantum physics, attachment, anthropology, prenatal and perinatal psychology and mindfulness, which interestingly resonate with the intuitions of primal wisdom.

The book will be of interest to clinicians, policy makers, researchers, parents, and those interested in the prenatal and perinatal roots of human development and well-being.

1 Wisdom

The path to unleashing human nature and well-being

The first time my husband drove me across the South African countryside, I was deeply impressed by the closeness of community life, by people’s direct face-to-face contact and the large variety of facial and body cues while interacting with each other and by their warmth and resilience towards difficult times. They manifested an embodied feeling of being alive that is being increasingly curtailed by our modern societies. Traumatic stress, mental suffering – including anxiety, depression and all psychological disturbances – and physical illnesses are some manifestations of this biosocial process. Seeing an African mother carrying her baby on her back while washing clothes in the river and smilingly and joyfully waving at us was an ordinary scene. The traditional African mother is far closer to her child and much more aware of what is going on before birth; after birth, she will still be carrying the baby everywhere with her on her back, thus meeting the baby’s need for continuous close contact. The benefits for the baby as well as the mother of a period of close physical affectionate contact are supported by research from all over the world.

In his book Touching, Ashley Montagu includes some anthropological observations of Balinese children, the Arapesh in New Guinea, the Netsilik Eskimos, the bushmen of the Kalahari and the Ganda children of East Africa (1986). These studies on the babies born in these cultures who are cradled, sung to, stroked, caressed and carried by their mothers and other family members show that their socio-emotional and cognitive development appears well advanced. Jean Liedloff spent two years living with the Yequana Indians in South America (1986). She observed that they worked hard but always with enjoyment and good humour, while intuitively knowing the right thing to do. They lived in close contact with nature, as part of the jungle’s system. They enjoyed whatever they did, and work was part of their life. Pregnancy and childbirth were natural and enjoyable, and parents really shared their babies’ babyhood and children’s childhood.

In India, there are traditions of caring for the embryonic soul of the developing child. We can see another example of openness towards unborn and infant human life in the Mbuti, an African tribe (Turnbull, 1983). Conceiving a baby is considered by the Mbuti a sacred creative act generating life. The baby is conceived in the woman’s mind and spiritual practices in Nature, such as dancing, talking and singing to the soul of the baby, surround the period of conception. The same practices accompany pregnancy and the postpartum period to provide the unborn baby with a sense of familiarity and continuum and reassure him or her.

The Himba, the indigenous people of Northern Namibia I spent a few weeks with (Sansone, 2018b), offered a wonderful window to understand some adversities in our modern society. Seeing my young daughters freely playing and connecting with the tribal children – despite the linguistic and cultural barriers – and our human essence revitalised by their unbroken social engagement, was evidence of how mental distress and pathology are mainly a consequence of our modern materialistic, isolating and soul-sucking culture. In an African indigenous village, there is a strong social connection, acceptance and warm welcoming in the community, even if you are a stranger. And if you have children, that is a primary reason for sharing, since childhood is very much cherished. The community is always with you and you are never isolated. There is always space for the individual’s needs and expression.

Our society cuts us off from our uniqueness by idealising individualism and devaluing social contact and ignoring our emotional needs. This society tends to generate unhappiness and dysfunction. Therefore, mental illness is not an isolated phenomenon but a culturally constructed paradigm. This has to do with the nature of the economic system, where what matters is not your being but how you are valued by others, usually on the basis of materialistic productivity. The people who are not productive are devalued and shut down, which causes disconnection from ourselves – our emotions, body and soul. This system does not favour young people raising children, who are subject to huge pressures – working, rushing around, moving very fast and not having the necessary time to “connect” and respond to their children’s basic emotional and social needs.

But there is intelligence or wisdom in nature and creation and if we ignore it, we create suffering in ourselves and other people. This intelligence manifests in cosmic connection, social coherence and harmonious alignment of relationships that allows for the efficient flow of energy and communication – in our compassion, love, wisdom. This is what we are meant to be. The recognition of this is what we call spirituality. There is a spiritual nature inside us that needs to be acknowledged and cultivated to prevent adverse consequences on our well-being.

Ignorance and disregard for the essential relatedness of all life has created serious ecological problems on our planet, which have undermined our health. The dirty air and toxic chemicals contained in processed food and other pollutants have poisoned our body-mind. Excessive stress adds to the corrosive effects. Many babies come into this world with developmental problems resulting from micro-traumas (toxic substances and high stress) experienced in their mother’s body. We are governed by a culture that erroneously views each of us as an isolated entity, separated from others and from our environment, not part of the whole with which we are connected. By practising wisdom, we can develop a self as well as a collective consciousness of each of us as part of an interconnected social and ecosystem as the route to restoring human essence and well-being.

Love, compassion, kindness and cooperation have been represented in our collective social consciousness for millions of years. We need to prioritise this transformative wisdom or heart-related qualities so as to co-create the best future for our humanity. There needs to be a shift in awareness towards a new collective intelligence based on care, cooperation and acceptance.

I believe that thinking only of our own comfort and peace to the neglect of other troubles in the world is immoral. The time has come for us to consider seriously how to change our way of life, not through prayer or religious teaching, but through education. Since moral education is sometimes only superficial, we need to devise a systematic approach to exploring inner values and ways to create a more peaceful world.

Dalai Lama (April 16, 2016)

The sense of knowing-how

Wisdom has long been considered a matter of philosophy, just as psychology was until the nineteenth century. Likewise, mindfulness may be still considered a mystical experience. Recently, wisdom and related mindfulness, and their power in inducing bodily experiences and awareness, have become a topic studied by social and neuroscientists (Goldberg, 2005; Stenberg & Jordan, 2005; Kabat-Zinn, 1990; Gilbert, 2010; Goleman & Davidson, 2017). A new understanding of “heart”-related qualities that goes beyond just the philosophical is advancing into a realisation of the heart as a dynamic, connecting and creative intelligence. Coherently connecting the physical, emotional, intuitive and spiritual aspects of the heart can lead to a new way of perceiving, thinking, acting and relating – which we call heart-based or wisdom.

Wisdom includes a great deal of know-how regarding how to live (Kupperman, 2005). In contrast with the “clumsy cousin” of intellectual formulas, “what is needed is a deeply internalised kind of knowing-how that normally does not require pauses and time to think … responsive to the moods, needs, and responses of the person with whom one interacts”, with “some experiential sense of how various kinds of interaction play out in the long run” (Kupperman, 2005, p. 266). The intellectual brain may think but the heart and related wisdom know.

Throughout this book, I will be discussing how aspects of wisdom, such as empathic affectivity, relational engagement, intersubjectivity, compassion and communal mindfulness, have an impact on early human development and are passed down to successive generations. I will look at how parenting, relationships and behaviours are guided by mindsets, and how these affect development and well-being. The mindsets that dominate many societies today are based on safety, control and ruthless and detached imagination; they are ego-centred and intellectual. By influencing our culture, such attitudes and practice have led to a health and ecological crisis. We live in a society that encourages competition, achievement and success over attachment, compassion and love. Parents’ experiences of pregnancy, birth and childcare practices have been dramatically affected by this culture, with adverse consequences on their well-being, and on the foetus and the child’s development. But what matters most in pregnancy and caregiving is the art of the journey, the know-how, an intuitive wisdom leading to the creation of a trusting relationship with the baby day by day.

From early life in the womb, even if the baby does not know the world outside, she can sense whether she is loved, rejected or neglected and learns trust and empathy, or distrust, indifference or hatred. These early perceptions form an embodied memory or neurological blueprint, which will not only affect the child’s and adult’s physical, emotional and mental well-being but also the way in which she relates to the social and natural world (Emerson, 1996). The science of epigenetics teaches us that the genetic imprinting (DNA) passed on by the parents during reproduction is already influenced by the baby’s experiences in the mother’s body, through which her external environment and culture is transmitted. We now know that traumatic experiences change DNA over generations, unless the trauma is healed or overcome (Yehuda, 2016). Therefore, behavioural patterns, values and wisdom are also learnt through our parents’ being and way of treating us, and these are transmitted to our children across generations. The practice of mindfulness and fostered capacities for wisdom can change or mitigate the transmission of the effects of trauma to next generations.

Environmental and genetic influences are absolutely inextricable. The genotype (the design according to which you are built) is open to a wide range of manipulations, as it expresses itself in a particular environmental context, which in turn shapes the phenotype (“you” yourself).

(Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 238)

Even in the womb, human predispositions are being influenced by stimuli from the internal environment – maternal psychobiology, emotions and behaviours, wisdom, morality, love – in turn influenced by her external environment and culture in which she lives. From the viewpoint of neurophysiology, all “life events” are ultimately mediated (registered and translated) by bodily events (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 233). Therefore, because the baby dwells in the mother’s body, she can affect her unborn baby’s development and orientations with her wisdom practice, encouraging a child’s self-knowledge and communal wisdom, and a more nurturing and sociable nature. Children who are, for example innately more nurturing and sociable, as opposed to aggressive and reactive, will literally create different environments for themselves and others.

The nine months spent in the womb and the period following birth are the most formative part of a human being’s life. What the baby encounters influences her perception of the nature of life. The challenges of the new world outside the womb are huge, but the baby’s prenatal experiences prepare her for a continuum provided by the mother’s closeness from the moment of birth. “The violent tearing apart of the mother-child continuum, so strongly established during the phases that took place in the womb, may understandably result in depression for the mother as well as agony for the infant” (Liedloff, 1986). This can be observed today in perinatal mental illness and child development problems. We need to acknowledge that experiences in the womb and around birth play a crucial role in a child’s development as well as in parents’ mental health and well-being.

It follows that there is nothing more important and profound than the bond between the mother and her developing child. This bond begins in the womb and flourishes, and as we grow older, through our relationships and well-being. It will shape our capacity to trust others, for intimacy, to nurture others – humans as well as every creature of the cosmos – and our capacity to foster family, community and the world. Our capacity to deal with challenging life events and recover from traumatic experiences depends to a large extent on the wisdom resources instilled in early life through our relationship with caregivers. Therefore, the intricate relationship between a mother and her developing child must be of concern to everyone – parents, siblings, grandparents, neighbours, practitioners and policy makers – so as to optimise children’s development and full potential. Every practitioner with a concern for the pregnant couple and developing child has to embody a compassionate relationship-focused approach.

I envisage that a revolutionary change could be achieved by revising the ways we think about parenting, child development and health based on the components and insights offered by wisdom traditions and prenatal and perinatal sciences, which reveal an unborn baby/infant who is a conscious sentient being. This is, to me, the only way to profoundly have an impact on our next generations and save our humanity. As Albert Einstein pointed out, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.

Primal wisdom

From the Eskimos of Northern Canada to the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and other African regions, the survival of hunter-gatherer societies all around the world may have depended on wisdom capacities. These indigenous societies, whose sociocultural lives represented the norm for 99 per cent of human history, developed strikingly similar practices and world views (Ingold, 1999). Their perinatal, childcare and social practices appear to foster survival and well-being at both the individual and the community levels. These communities are known for their social harmony, social cohesion, peace and attunement to each member of the group and other entities of the cosmos. In a world affected by a major individual, social and ecological crisis threatening our fundamental human virtues, we can be inspired by our ancestors’ and cousins’ wise lifestyles and the way in which they value and organise child-rearing, so as to integrate their wisdom with our modern sensibility (Fry, 2006; Ingold, 1999). Although universal until about 10,000 years ago, such societies have continued to coexist to the present day (Fry, 2014).

These societies also teach us about the epigenetic inheritance of responsive parenting, prenatal/perinatal and childcare practices and their effects on attachment and child development. They can offer us a baseline model, resonating with scie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface and acknowledgement
• Towards a new paradigm of human development and health
• 1 Wisdom: the path to unleashing human nature and well-being
• 2 The human work of art
• 3 Integrating primal wisdom with the modern Western worldview: from preconception to parenting and beyond
• 4 Raising children towards wisdom
• 5 The art and science of mindfulness
• 6 Transformation of human traits and being
• 7 Connection and empathy: enhancing prenatal and perinatal healthcare practitioners’ interpersonal skills
• 8 Why maternal and paternal mental health and well-being matter
• 9 Acknowledging the intersubjective reality
• 10 A mindfulness relationship-based model to support maternal mental health and the mother-baby relationship in pregnancy and beyond birth
• 11 Visioning the future
• Afterword
• References
• Index