Exogestation
New mothers often wonder why their puppies open their little eyes and start screaming as soon as they lay them down in the crib so lovingly prepared for them.
Why is it that the only way to lie in bed for a few hours at a time is to hold your baby on your chest, or next to you? Why does it take months, in many cases, for a newborn to start sleeping for long periods on their own?
It's not because you have to "set them up for the night," nor is it because they have to be left exhausted from crying to "learn to relax."
We find the reasons in the history of human evolution: basically, the human baby is born before brain development is complete because the upright position required a compromise between the size of the infant and the size of the pelvis, which cannot be too wide in a bipedal animal.
The complexity of our brain means that it needs many more months, after birth, to mature so as to be minimally autonomous and it is not only a problem of size: the development of the neocortex, the one that really distinguishes humans from all other animals, requires so many stimuli that those perceived in utero (although we know that the fetus is able to perceive and process a large amount of environmental stimuli due to the early development of the sense organs) would not be sufficient.
An autonomy obtained too early, in short, is a forcing: a fictitious autonomy, and not physiological.
Therefore nature, which does not decide anything by chance, has thought well to give birth first to the puppies of women and, to make them sufficiently vital at birth and able at least to feed themselves, has separated the speed of growth of the body than those of the brain and nervous system, so that the body as a whole after nine months has the skills just enough to survive without too many difficulties, i.e., it has the sucking reflex, the grasping reflex in case of a fall or sudden change of position in space, it has a certain muscle tone, it has automatic breathing and a heart activity now well underway, a certain ability to regulate its body temperature and so on. But for all that concerns a further and more complex development of finer and more complex brain functions, not strictly useful for basic survival, it has been given all the time necessary for the complex brain evolution of man, in the end, could reach the levels that make the difference between man and animal.
So, dear moms, who struggle with rules, with fears of spoiling your children and with huge insecurities about how to behave, perpetually obsessed with the fear of making a mistake or spoiling your children, put your minds at ease: after birth, from the moment you hold your little ones in your arms for the first time, your arms and your breasts will take the place of your uterus, containing, warming, nourishing and communicating well-being to your creatures: there is no other situation, no other stratagem to invent to avoid this total dependence, both physical and psychological.