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editorial
Love. Historically it has been the exclusive
domain of musicians, poets, lovers
and philosophers. Love was associated
within the context of sentimentality and
romanticism, certainly not within the
verifiable realm of hard science or social
research. But in the latter decades of
the twentieth century science began
forging into the depths of the heart and
emerged with material that is sure to
cause a quantum shift in how we interpret
ourselves as human beings.
The research evidence is far from
obscure or soft. There are many perspectives
from which evidence about
love has been scientifically examined,
all well documented and published.
Many pioneers have contributed to
the understanding that love is a brain
gestalt, created, nurtured, developed
and supported by close intimate physical
and emotional contact, especially in
the baby and toddler stages of life. It
develops through a process called bonding
and attachment. Children’s earliest
experiences of birth, affection, touch,
movement, breastfeeding and physical
closeness all profoundly influence
their ability throughout life to manage
emotion, experience pleasure and
empathy and to appreciate beauty. How
we are cared for and loved affects the
early ‘wiring’ of our brain in infancy
because it translates into neurological
patterns that set the patterns of our
behaviour and how we relate to others
and ourselves — for the rest of our lives.
Although this information is widely
understood and unquestioned in some
academic and professional circles, it is
filtering all too slowly down into a high-
byronchild 4
Love
The Politicisation of
ly defensive and
sceptical public.
Why does such
filtering creep so
slowly, given that
the public sector
represents those
who have most
to gain by such
research? After nearly three years of
disseminating the science of love, its
various forms and perspectives, in
byronchild, and immersing myself in
the resulting responses to that material,
I have been alarmed to see the political
agendas that wedge themselves
between us and our potential to change
our societies for the better. Love has
been politicised. From the political right
to left, from feminism to fathers’ rights,
wealthy to poor, Green to conservative,
the cultural polarities claim their rights,
their choices and their power on the
battlefield of early childhood by passionately
dismissing a whole world of
information that could radically change
our future.
As we warm up to the Australian
election, both political parties have
recently released their Early Years policy
approaches. Sadly they both reveal the
state of our collective ignorance and
denial of emotional aspects of early
childhood, and the desire to skip vital
information to win votes, more than
these documents. In reading a transcript
of Labor Leader Mark Latham’s
recent speech to the 2004 World
Organisation for Early Childhood
Education Conference (www.alp.oprg.
au/media/0704/20008066.html), I was
Kali Wendorf, Editor
both heartened and
deeply disturbed.
While he brings a
progressive, inclusive
and intelligent
approach to the
need for an effective
Early Years campaign
by asserting
the economic advantage of investing in
the early years and need for a familyfriendly
society, he completely misses
the mark in just how those early years
are to be treated. He correctly states
that 75% of a child’s brain develops in
the first five years, yet he falls into the
tragic blunder of confusing development
with education, asserting the need
for preschool and childcare ‘learning
programs’, while he never mentions, or
includes in his agenda, the importance
of such ingredients as the support of
birthing experiences which are as natural
as possible, good mothering, fullterm
breastfeeding, close skin-to-skin
contact, intimate touch and holding,
co-sleeping — the very foundations of
optimal early development. And why
should he be expected to? He never
hears about these facts from his constituents
— us.
He campaigns hard for reading to
our children but fails to recognise that
children from zero to five are benefiting
more from the loving physical contact
of sitting in the lap of their mother or
father during the reading than from
the reading itself. He says, ‘The key to
a creative, ideas-based society is education,’
but he is speaking of this with
regard to infants and children under five.