The intellectual brain, what we think of thinking is embedded in and dependent on development of the earlier sensory motor and emotional brain centers. The ancient emotional brain is where all learning, memory, emotions, the immune system, all relationships take place and this is critically dependent on signals sent from the physical brain. These are the foundations for intellectual social development and upon that all so called higher learning. Early and extended child care undermines the full development of this early foundation.

You mentioned António Damásio, one of our certain more brilliant Neural Scientists today and he speaks of how we got the idea that you could develop the great intellectual brain and ignore the emotional brain.  Well, the emotional brain is where all learning and memory takes place.  The emotional brain is where all the immune systems take place.  The emotional brain is where all relationship; your loves, your hates, your likes, your dislikes, all that comes out of the emotional brain.  That’s an ancient brain system we share with all mammals.  And the emotional brain is critically dependent on the sensory motor brain, the ancient reptilian brain, the foundation of our body.  You must establish the sensory motor brain first, then you must establish the emotional relational brain secondly as the foundation on which the great human intellect can fully flower and unfold.  António Damásio was quite clear about this and so are all the other developmentalists, that you can’t develop a high creative intellectual brain until you’ve established a very firm foundation in the emotional brain.

Now daycare that starts and denies the real nurturing emotional life which the child must have through interacting with permanent caretakers or caregivers and feeling loved, wanted and accepted and begin to try to develop a high intellectual creative brain at the very time when the emotional brain is trying to be developed and how can it be developed?  Only by emotional nurturing.   And so if the emotional nurturing is withdrawn at that critical point, then the emotional brain starves to death you might say.  It doesn’t receive the kind of nurturing environment it must have to develop.  And so then you have a very faulty foundation for developing the high intellectual creative brain which you’re trying to develop by premature educational procedures in daycare itself.

There again, the major job of daycare would be to nurture the sensory motor brain and the emotional brain and doing this through a whole raft of well-established procedures such as storytelling and allowing the child to play and feel unconditionally loved and wanted and protected. If the child is not, if daycare is not as safe a space as mother’s womb you’re breaking the bonding structures, and if you break the bonding structures you’re breaking up the biological system.  It can’t unfold as it should if the bond is broken.  

Daycare could, theoretically, be an extension of the bond.  What is it the child needs at age 2 and 3, a warm accepting nurturing, emotional environment.  Why couldn’t that be given through a daycare situation?  It certainly could be.  It just isn’t at present because we’re not aware of the critical importance of it.  

We speak of a nurturing environment, now what is the environment?  The first environment is the womb and then for the first 9 months of so is what we call baby wearing. It’s the mother in immediate contact with her.  But then why does nature provide, the infant all the sudden rears up on its hind legs and goes charging out on their own to explore the world.  What’s the environment then - the entire surroundings.  There are no longer these neat lines of demarcation.  The mother stops here and what’s out there, no.  The whole world becomes the nurturing mother at that point.

If the child if exploring their world in the toddler period and all, if they’re met with a nurturing environment which means what, a safe space, then they discover the world out there is benevolent, it’s as loving as the nurturing mother was, as benevolent as the womb was.  There’s an unbroken transition again. And the idea that the mother should be the soul source of this is ridiculous because it’s the total environment to which the child must make that adjustment.  So you must have an interaction on some level with a larger environment from the very beginning. This was always handled within preliterate societies by other people coming along and taking over for them, the momma or the granny or the great aunt or the uncle or the grandfather. All of them wanted to play with that infant.  All of them wanted to take over for a while and bounce it around and carry it and so forth.  Older siblings always like to carry the younger siblings.  They really did.

So you have this constant expansion of the bond.  The bond is embracing ever larger universes, ever larger environments.  Right from the very beginning that should be happening.  So to place all own-ness on the mother, to say the whole thing is critical on her, would be unnatural but on the other hand she must play her part in the first critical 9-12 months as the principle model around which the whole thing is.  That doesn’t mean soul, that means principle.  And then the environment itself in the child begins to explore the world and is running out all around the mother. Her environment simply is espanding to include, the nurturing environment is expanded to include the whole village.  There again you get the idea that it takes the whole village to be the nurturing environment for that child.  If their exploration of their world and they rush out there and get clobbered, what’s their response, it’s that the world is a hostile place.  What’s going to be the result?  A retreat to the ancient survival structures of the brain away from the higher intellectual creative processes.