Womb: The First School

The Womb: A Child's First School

By Thomas R. Verny with Pamela Weintraub 

Issue 132, September/October 2005

From Tomorrow's Baby by Thomas R. Verny, MD, with Pamela Weintraub. Copyright 2002 by Thomas R. Verny and Pamela Weintraub. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York.

Where do we first experience the nascent emotions of love, rejection, anxiety, and joy? In the first school we ever attend—in our mother's womb. Naturally, the student brings into this situation certain genetic endowments: intelligence, talents, and preferences. However, the teacher's personality exerts a powerful influence on the result. Is she interested, patient, and knowledgeable? Does she spend time with the student? Does she like him, love him? Does she enjoy teaching? Is she happy, sad, or distracted? Is the classroom quiet or noisy, too hot or too cold, a place of calm and tranquility or a cauldron of stress?

Numerous lines of evidence and hundreds of research studies have convinced me that it makes a difference whether we are conceived in love or in hate, anxiety or violence. It makes a difference whether the mother desires to be pregnant and wants to have a child or whether that child is unwanted. It makes a difference whether or not the mother feels supported by family and friends, is free of addictions, lives in a stable, stress-free environment, and receives good prenatal care.

All these things matter enormously, not so much by themselves but as part of the ongoing education of the unborn child.

Nurturers and Managers
Having a baby is, for most people, an act of faith. It represents a belief in a better tomorrow, not just for themselves but for the world. But unless we actively improve our understanding and treatment of the unborn baby and the young child, that faith will go unrewarded because we may blindly pass on to our children the neurotic parenting we ourselves may have received. One key to parenting is flexibility. Those who can adapt to their baby's wants and needs will be nurturing and responsive. Those who cannot change their lives to accommodate the child—who expect the baby to adapt to them instead of the other way around—may be too rigid and uninvolved to parent well.

These days that task is harder than ever, given the frequent necessity for both parents in a family to work. As parents who work, we delegate responsibilities—including the care of our children and our homes. To keep our lives afloat, to juggle all the elements, we tend to become as managerial in our private lives as we are in our jobs.

It is during pregnancy that parents—those who work as well as those who don't—must create a balance for living. I urge both partners to examine their commitments and to create a plan for increasing their time away from work so they can spend more time at home with the baby.

Cleaning Out the Cobwebs
Will a child's psychological and physical development be affected by the emotional makeup of the parents? To those in touch with modern research (not to mention personal history), the question seems rhetorical, the answer as clear as day. Still, it bears repeating: Findings in the peer-reviewed literature over the course of decades establish, beyond any doubt, that parents have overwhelming influence on the mental and physical attributes of the children they raise.

Given that fact, it is the responsibility of every expectant parent to clean out the cobwebs of the psyche by airing differences with partners and resolving inner conflicts before the new baby arrives. This "psychic cleansing" has been used to therapeutic advantage by Candace Fields Whitridge, a certified nurse-midwife who cofounded the Mountain Clinic, an innovative women's health center in the rural mountains of Trinity County, California. "With our growing knowledge of the consciousness of the unborn child, we have an unprecedented opportunity and responsibility to improve the way we deliver prenatal care and support women and families at birth," she says. "To enhance the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of birth, we need to expand our attitudes and the art of our care, as well as fine-tune our technical and intuitive skills."

One of the most powerful techniques for improving the outcome of delivery, Whitridge found, was a formal "cobweb-cleaning session" at 36 weeks gestation with the woman and her mate, or the person who would be providing primary support to her at the birth:

"This came about as the result of an auspicious occurrence in my examination room one day. A very loving couple were nearing their delivery date. They had been married many years before deciding to have a child and were excited about being parents. However, the husband was acting in a peculiar manner that day and in the course of the conversation I jokingly asked him, 'Is there anything Joan might do in labor that would bother you?' He didn't answer for a minute and then in a soft but serious voice said, —Yes . . . if she was a wimp.'