Pregnancy & Birth
Article by Jo Watson,
Private Midwife working at UK Birth Centres Ltd.
In a 1994 article in the journal Children's Environments, James McKenna, a Professor of Anthropology explains that when primitive women evolved to stand up on two legs, the shape of the female pelvis became narrower and resulted in human babies being born three to four months earlier, before their heads grew too large to pass safely through the birth canal. So basically your baby even after 40 weeks is not entirely ready for the world, her brain has another 75 per cent more growing to do!
We have the means to separate ourselves from our babies but biologically we were not meant to; we would not have survived as a species if cave women had put their offspring in a separate part of the cave at night! Attachment parenting has been adopted by many new mothers as it incorporates many calming techniques that work so well with new born babies. In his book “The Happiest Baby on the Block" the paediatrician Harvey Karp says “the best way to calm your newborn and get him to sleep is by re-creating the noises, movement, and snug environment of the womb".