Mother-Baby Relationship: A basic life-style and Life-line: Universal Form of Child Rearing beyond Cultural Difference ?

Shin’ichi Suzuki, Ph D
Professor Emeritus
Wasaeda University, Tokyo

ABSTRACT

Mother-Baby Relationship and Cultural Background

The dichotomous categories of nature and nurture are from the West. Other cultures than the Western may have different frames of reference regarding child-rearing. Whatever the basic categories of child developments can be, it is common to say or to observe that Mother-Baby Relationship is the basement upon which all children normally grow up. Developmental differentiation of child’s bodily, psychological and mental capabilities, including language acquisition and internalization of ethos within which the child has been born, are also first based on that relationship although it can be multifariously different from each other for all indigenous cultures to have and to retain the traditional or conventional conceptions of child-birth and ways of baby-rearing.

Shifting Child-Rearing in a Culture: Japanese Case

It is interesting for anyone to observe in Japan for example that more and more younger parents may use so-called baby-cart when they move from home to any places: going shopping, going on hiking, visiting their parents’ homes and others. To my generation born in 1930s it was natural for most mothers to obuu, to take a baby on one’s back, when they moved from one place to another and when they nursed their babies. During the periods from 1970s to 1980s, some of young parents preferred to carrying their babies not on their backs but on their fronts. It is clear that the new generation may have different views on child-rearing from the older generation’s. This is a difference within a given culture. Cultures being different, child-rearing may differ in its details from culture to culture.�

Breast-Feeding: A Natural Order ?

However, so far as new born child-rearing is concerned, there is an interesting common phenomenon among human mothers crossing boarders of countries, cultural bounds and ethnic groups. That is the way of breast- feeding. Both mammillae are necessary organs for feeding but more often mothers may hold their babies in their arms laying the heads of babies on their left arms. As the result, most babies can hear and feel the sound and rhythm of the beat of their mothers’ hearts. It is the sound and rhythm all babies could hear and feel when they were in the uteri. Such body-body postures and relatedness as human relationship between mothers and babies are the fundamentals upon which all of human growth start and develop. What are the implications of such physiological and social schemas for innovative , physio-mental developmental education for babies and infants ? Are they universal, or indigenously different ?

Summing up: Upon the awakening of five senses of babies from within in such contexts as mentioned above, each baby-child may acquire something fundamental as human beings. Tentatively listing capabilities and possibilities all baby-children may acquire, they may be as follows:�

(1)    discovery of one’s voice: babies’ a-functional voices: not crying

(2)    discovery of one’s skillfulness: babies’ grasping

(3)    discovery of one’s postures: creeping, sitting and standing

(4)    discovery of one’s mind: from motor-skill, symbols, environment and language