Insight into the Development of the Prenatal Child
Christl Ruth Vonholdt
From conception onward, the unborn child is designed for and dependent upon relationships, connectedness, and learning. As soon as cells are formed, they are alive, perceive, react to the environment, and perform functions. Without learning, there is no development and no survival. Only in relationships does the child develop. A child’s development is far less fixed than one might assume.
For many years it was believed that prenatal development was primarily genetically controlled. Today we know that genes only provide options. Which of these options materialize depends heavily on the unborn child’s environment. “The developing prenatal child is a living, interactive being, influenced by its maternal environment from conception onward.” (Krens) The unborn child learns through what it is exposed to from its prenatal environment; likewise, individual cells learn from their immediate surroundings; this learning influences the structural and functional development of the brain; and this, in turn, has an impact on the child’s further development. The prenatal child experiences connection with its environment in numerous ways: via the sensory organs, through the umbilical cord (placenta), and also through other, less well-researched pathways.
Sense of touch, smell and taste
At about eight weeks of age, the embryo (2.5 cm in size) reacts when its sensitive lips touch something. From around this time onward, targeted, intentional movements can be observed. When a mother or father lovingly places their hand on the mother’s belly, the child senses this touch and reliably moves to the side where the hand is resting.
Beginning at around eight weeks, the unborn child can also smell and taste the amniotic fluid. After birth, the child recognizes his mother by the scent of her breast milk. Her nipples also smell of certain pheromones that are already present in the amniotic fluid. If the mother eats a lot of aniseed during pregnancy, the child will also prefer the taste of aniseed after birth. If you present a newborn with two nursing pads, one with a few drops of milk from his own mother and the other with milk from a different mother, the newborn will reliably turn to the nursing pad containing his own mother’s milk. He knows what his mother “tastes like.” The child’s sensory perceptions are geared towards a prenatal and postnatal bond. This strengthens his trust in the still unknown postnatal world: Everything is fine, I know my way around. I know where there is food and, therefore, I can live. The child can relax, and his little brain comes to rest – an important prerequisite for good brain development.
Hearing and the sensation of pain
The unborn child reacts to numerous sounds; he seems to enjoy quiet sounds, while loud ones make him shrink in fear or kick wildly. He can distinguish friendly from aggressive voices. Prenatal researcher Thomas Verny showed ultrasound images of a fetus in his fifth month of life: One could clearly see how he suddenly flinched and shrank inward when the parents argued, a glass broke, and the mother screamed loudly. (Alberti)
The unborn child intensively perceives the mother’s heartbeat: if her heart beats fast, his will also beat fast, if she calms down, the child can also relax. Newborn babies cry less and sleep better if you play them an audio recording of their mother’s heartbeat. Before birth, children not only hear the mother’s voice from the outside but also through the mother’s spine and pelvis. This acts like a resonating body; it vibrates at exactly the same frequency as a woman’s voice.
Human voices are unthinkable without the resonance of moods and emotions. The child perceives these, processes them in his brain, and “trains” himself in human emotional life. When the mother laughs, seconds later the unborn child moves in her womb. Newborns show joy and relax when they hear melodies that they already know from the prenatal period.
They are also already familiar with their father’s voice because, with its lower frequency, it is readily perceived prenatally as something coming from outside. The father is also present in the mother’s thoughts and feelings – positive or negative – and both are transmitted to the child. When couples include their unborn child in their shared world of ideas and relationships during pregnancy, the child will fare better later on: In early childhood, he can resolve conflicts more effectively and flexibly, and exhibits less aggressive behavior.
Prenatal pain sensation has been little researched so far. What has been verified with certainty is that when fetuses at 19 weeks are exposed to a painful procedure, such as the insertion of a needle for a blood transfusion, they produce stress hormones. If children are aborted between the 21st and 23rd week of pregnancy, they can scream audibly. (Hüther)
Placenta and the umbilical cord
The umbilical cord connection between mother and child already exists on the 13th or 14th day after conception. Initially this connection transpires directly through the maternal tissue, and later occurs via the umbilical cord. The mother transmits her well-being to the child. (e.g., through the hormone oxytocin), but also, inadvertently, her stress. “The fetus is also connected to the mother’s emotional experience via the umbilical cord. Emotional states also have a physiological basis: They manifest themselves, for example, in hormonal changes in the blood, in the quality of oxygen supply, and through changes in heart rate. When the mother feels anxious, increased levels of stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol are released. (…) All stress hormones easily cross the placental barrier and stimulate the physiological response in the fetus to precisely this feeling of anxiety and fear. We do not know whether the child ‘experiences’ fear as a result. However, when observing his reaction on the ultrasound, one gets the impression that his small body is reacting in a certain logical way to this ‘fear stimulus’. – The unborn child is always ‘around’. He is part of the emotional life of his mother.” (Hüther)
Prenatal stress and depressions
Stress is not only caused by external living conditions (hectic pace, chronic noise, external overload) but also by “psychosocial stimuli as well as internal thought and emotional processes” (Krens); for example, when financial or relationship problems or other factors burden the mother. Stress normally causes the child to activate his “stress axis,” a biological sequence of various proteins in the brain and body. If stress gets out of hand or becomes chronic, it can lead to dysregulation or a breakdown of the stress axis. This usually leads to chronic hyperarousal and possibly even rigidity in the child. Excessive prenatal stress forces the developing brain to undergo functional and structural adaptations, which can increase the child’s sensitivity to stress later in life and impair learning and curiosity. The stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline also cause blood vessel constriction, which impairs the child’s oxygen supply and further increases fetal stress.
The ways in which the mother communicates are not only hormonal, to which the following example speaks: If a smoking mother simply thinks about the next cigarette without smoking it, the mother’s reaction leads to an immediate stress response in the child: his heart rate accelerates. (Geuter) “Despite the methodological problems that prenatal stress research has to overcome, there is an overwhelming amount of data that consistently indicates that stressors during pregnancy have consequences for the child’s further development.” (Krens) Studies cite the following possible consequences: increased excitability in the child, increased restlessness, learning difficulties, reduced ability to adapt to external circumstances, psychological problems, delayed psychological and motor development, increased anxiety, and self-regulation disorders.
Newborns of mothers who were depressed in the last trimester of pregnancy show, just like their mothers, physiological changes in the blood that are typical of depression: increased cortisol, and decreased dopamine. The unborn child is therefore already familiar with the reaction pattern of depression. This “threatens to become part of their physical and emotional world and influences how the child later reacts to both positive and negative environmental stimuli.” (Hüther)
Further connections with the mother
“In every conscious contact with the child in her womb, the mother’s state of mind and feelings towards him are always expressed: in the way she adjusts herself and her movements and activities to the presence of the child, whether and how she speaks to him or about him … whether and how she makes contact with the child – directly by touching the abdominal wall or emotionally by focusing her attention inwardly on his presence and his state of mind.” (Hüther) If the mother does not want to establish a relationship, for whatever reason, this puts a strain on the bond with the child.
Even more than conscious contact, unconscious elements play a role in the relationship between mother and child – elements in which sensations, emotional states and perhaps even images and ideas are communicated. Thomas Verny, like other prenatal researchers, assumes that there is an “intuitive communication” between mother and child: “Through an intuitive channel, the mother communicates her thoughts, intentions, and many of her feelings to the child and, conversely, receives messages from the child via the same channel, often in the form of dreams.” (Krens) These communication channels have been little researched to date.
Mirror hormones may play a role. They “represent the neurobiological correlate for the intuitive perception of other people and for intersubjective relatedness and bonding. They are already in function immediately after birth.” If “organismic perception and bonding processes” are already active prenatally, the information that reaches the child through these channels can potentially have a formative influence on his development – both positively and negatively. (Krens)
Prenatal brain development
Today we know how strongly a child’s brain development depends on prenatal experiences. “The diverse stimuli that arise from the relationship between mother and child provide a constant stream of learning experiences that the child engages with by attempting to link the excitation patterns generated in the brain with already established patterns and seeking to anchor them as new experiences.” (Hüther) The nerve cells in the brain divide, multiply, learn from one another, and form increasingly complex networks with ever-expanding connections. Structural and functional development go hand in hand.
The fundamental principle of human development is the increase in complexity. The human organism does not develop from the lower to the higher, but is only ever in a state of further development: The new can only build on the old. New experiences can only be anchored in the brain if they can connect with previous information. From a structural perspective: external signals trigger a pattern of excitation in the brain, a “restlessness” that only calms down once the new information has been processed, i.e., once it is connected to and embedded into older structures. On a functional level it means for the child the feeling of: This is good. I have learned something new. I have grown and matured as a result. This gives me confidence and security and makes me want to continue learning. The desire to have new experiences and to learn is an essential prerequisite for development. This ability can be impaired if the unborn child is flooded with stressful signals. The perceptions that invade the brain can then be “so alien and overwhelming, that the child’s brain is unable to connect them in any way to the existing knowledge and to integrate them into the already developed wiring patterns.” (Hüther) This applies in particular to severe anxiety and stress reactions, but also to numerous other stressors such as major psychological strain on the mother, which affects the child, or malnutrition or alcohol, nicotine, and drug consumption on the part of the mother.
The restlessness spreading through the brain in such a case may no longer be able to calm down. Depending on the severity of the oncoming stressors and also on the child’s genetic makeup, the child either becomes accustomed to the disturbance or repeatedly struggles with the excessive mental overload. The child’s brain then becomes somewhat differently structured as a result, and the neural circuits are consequently arranged in a different way than they would have been without the stress. It may be that such children later in life “have difficulty establishing the highly complex excitation patterns in their brains required for difficult perception and learning processes and stabilizing them as neuronal and synaptic connections. They [the children] are insecure, anxious, or angry and rarely experience the feeling that they are capable of overcoming problems and rising above themselves.” (Hüther)
Affected children may withdraw more quickly later in life, may have more anxiety, and be less open to new experiences. If their brain arousal patterns are severely altered, they may attract attention due to “difficult behavior” and may then have to cope with rejection from their environment, adding on to their prenatal burdens. It’s also important to note that every child not only reacts, but is also active himself and participates in prenatal interactions in his own way. There is never a simple cause-and-effect principle. Human development is too complex for that, and many factors are still unknown. Therefore, it’s impossible to predict in individual cases how certain prenatal stressors will affect a child. The good news is that the brain can continue to learn throughout life. Key structures in the forebrain aren’t fully developed until around the age of 25, and functional development continues throughout life.
Experiences from therapy
Prenatal researcher Ludwig Janus presented the following case at a conference: An eight-year-old boy had suffered from vomiting his entire life, without any organic cause being found. He was therefore referred to a psychotherapist. He repeatedly painted pictures of himself sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. Through conversations with the mother and working with his painted pictures, it emerged that the mother had attempted to abort him using a toxic fluid when she was five months pregnant. She then decided to have the child and lovingly established a relationship with him – but the traumatic experience was stored in the boy and had not yet been processed. After he was able to process the experience in therapy, the vomiting stopped. (Alberti)
Psychotherapist Natascha Unfried described this case: A seven-year-old boy came to therapy because he was suffering from severe social isolation. He was unable to establish a relationship with either his adoptive parents or his peers; he suffered from panic attacks, a feeling of being dead, and, as therapy later revealed, an endless inner sense of abandonment. It emerged from the case history that the biological mother had decided early on in the pregnancy not to keep the boy with her. This resulted in a difficult and prolonged birth, after which the child was immediately separated from the mother. Natascha Unfried assumes that the boy was already exposed to attachment problems before birth and that several traumatic experiences followed: “prenatal emotional neglect, birth trauma, and postnatal separation trauma.” As a result of the early experiences, the unborn child’s brain developed an internal image of his surrounding world, how it is made, how to interact with it, and how to relate to it. Prenatal trauma leads to changes in the developing brain, and neural networks become wired in such a way that “
Primary focus on the well-being of the child
Humans do not become human but are human from the very beginning. Physical, mental, and social aspects of their development cannot be separated from each other, but form a complex unit from the moment of conception. Does it make a difference whether a child was conceived in a loving relationship or a cold laboratory dish, separated from mother and father from the outset? Does it make a difference if a child is implanted in the womb of a strange woman who cannot afford to form a bond with the child? Does it make a difference if a child experiences further separation after birth? According to Peter Fedor-Freybergh, every interruption and separation in early life is a negative stress marker for the developing brain, which can negatively influence all developmental processes.
The dissolution of the natural concept of marriage, family, and parenthood leads to disconnectedness, lack of attachment, insecurity, or even non-identity. Prenatal empirical research confirms what we know from early childhood attachment research: A child needs, first and foremost, connection, protection and security, continuity, and attachment. These are crucial foundations for the child’s ability to develop trust later in life.
Source references:
Well-being of the Child: The United Nations, through the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), prioritizes the well-being of children, ensuring their rights to health, education, and a safe environment. This includes protection from violence, exploitation, and neglect, as well as access to essential services like healthcare, clean water, and nutritious food. The CRC also emphasizes the child’s right to play, recreation, and a healthy, sustainable environment.
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