I was looking online for more information on baby dreams but I couldn't find anything specific to what babies dream, only what their mothers dream while pregnant. However, I found something really interesting. With my focus on psychology, I try to connect information from this class to psychological theory. I found an article that discusses a new program called "Bringing Home Baby" that Swedish Medical Center is doing for new parents. Their fear is that new parents do not quite understand how their emotions influence their baby. Think of how many parents become depressed and how this might effect children.
Because the baby is so finely tuned to parental emotions, however, these positive effects on the baby are easily disrupted and distorted. For example, even mild parental depression has a major impact on babies’ belief that what they do and feel can have an effect on their world. A depressed, unresponsive parent teaches an infant to also be unresponsive, emotionally withdrawn, and joyless. Conflicted parents ignore even strong signals from the baby, either by becoming withdrawn or by over-stimulating the infant and not correcting what they do in response to how the infant reacts. The end results in most cases is the tragedy of infants who have lost a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, babies who do not explore, and who experience novel events like soap bubbles slowly rising in a room with profound wariness and withdrawal. Research using infant brain-wave patterns show that the infant of a depressed parent rapidly learns to process experiences in the same depressed, withdrawn pattern that her depressed parents have. This is a tragedy in the making.
The WHO (the World Health Organization) has predicted that within the next ten years (or so), depression will have become the second largest health ailment (first is heart disease). Not only will it be a problem in the mental health field but a problem in the entire medical field. The rest of the article is found at www.kirlinfoundation.org/KFportfolio_bringing_baby_deep.htm
