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Debra's avatar

I worked at home and hired a woman to come in 15-30 hours per week, mostly when I had one child who took long afternoon naps. When she woke, the babysitter was there. Yes, I paid her to do "whatever" for the long afternoon nap my daughter regularly took, but I was guaranteed a large block of time in which to work. It was comforting to me that if my daughter really needed me i was right there.

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Tracy Giesz-Ramsay's avatar

You’ve underrepresented the reasons some mothers choose to stay at home. Many base this decision on science.

In neuroscience, the 0-3 years are understood as “infancy”. This isn’t just about benign “aggression.” What we now know from over 50 years of quality, cutting-edge neuroscience research and rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, alongside hefty meta-analysis—and from technological advances in neuroimaging—is that parental responsiveness to an infant significantly underwrites mental health, well into adulthood.

Consistent mother-infant co-regulation is critical for building proper brain architecture during the first three years: a time when 1 million neural connections are being built per second. The academic literature illustrates how the warm, prompt, and reliable response of a mother to her baby’s cries builds stress resiliency by activating (and therefore building/strengthening when repeated) the oxytocin system. (This system—a “cascade” of oxytocin followed by dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and GABA—is critical for mental wellness and recovery from external stressors. It's essential to bring babies back down to physiological homeostasis, where mitochondria and telomeres are no longer being damaged.) The above type of maternal presence wires neurons toward an adaptive response to stress for life. We don’t have the brain parts to “self-soothe” during these 0-3 years: Babies need the voice, eye contact, smell, skin, etc of a loving mother (or parent) to wire the oxytocin system. Not having their mothers around for these vulnerable first months and years, in effect, stunts healthy brain and limbic system development. We know babies breathe better, pump blood better, and sleep better when held and soothed by their mothers once stressed.

There is also ample research literature showing how the opposite of this—a negative or delayed response to cries—wires neurons toward stress reactivity into adulthood. This is rife in *most* daycare centers where one person is responsible for soothing 4 (or more!) crying infants: it's not possible to the degree developing brains need, as shown in the research. A baby whose stress response is activated (say, because they don't know where their mom is) and then prolonged, due to a lack of presence to their cries, releases a “cortisol cascade” of adrenaline, noradrenaline, and glutamate. When left unsoothed by the mother, the developing brain builds toward hyper-reactivity to stressors. The cortisol cascade in the infant’s brain and body becomes overwhelming for the infant when they’re not physically close to their mothers. This can lead to poor development of our nervous system (ie. the channels between the limbic system and neocortex under-communicate) and the aforementioned stress reactivity, which is intrinsically harder to soothe back to baseline. This type of poor brain development is rife in our culture of separating babies from their mothers—through daycare in the 0-3 years—obviously way too early.

We know that an over-reactive stress response leads millions of people to reach for both prescription and illicit opioids to soothe their nervous systems down to baseline, or activate that highly sought after oxytocin “reward”. Addiction is rampant in individuals who had neglectful early environments—for all the reasons I listed above.

Mental wellness (i.e. physiological wellness!) is concentrated in the individuals who had a parent present for their 0-3 years. These individuals are less of a burden on both our healthcare and mental healthcare systems. The field of epigenetics confirms all the above: our early experiences can switch on or off gene expression for mental illnesses.

You write a lot about alloparenting, but that’s not what modern childcare is. There is a significant difference between today’s day care and historical communal care where the mother is still moderately present or otherwise reachable. When young children choose to wander away from their mother to explore or be lured away by other kids on their own volition, that is *very* different from a mother dropping off a crying child in the hands of strangers for a full work day, every week day.

Moms who stay at home for the first 3 years don’t just find it undervalued, “but rewarding”, they find it undervalued but utterly important for their child’s future mental health.

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