The Neurobiology of Infant-Parent Interaction in the Newborn: an Introduction1

In November 1991, we invited two groups of scientists to a symposium: a group of experimentally active biologists studying the interaction between mother and offspring and its biological foundation in animals, and a group of clinically active neonatologists and obstetricians. Our intention was to encourage dialogue between these two groups, who have common interests but rarely meet. During the three-day symposium, there were 35 presentations. For financial reasons, it was not possible to publish all of these. We have therefore chosen to present 13 papers, all updated to 1993, reviewing different aspects of mother-infant interaction, and written by scientists who rarely publish in clinical journals but whose work we judge to be of great interest to physicians involved in perinatal care.

Careful, tenacious and critical research is the basis of today's high standards in the management of the complicated birth process, and of respiratory, circulatory and metabolic disturbances of perinatal adaptation. But what are the scientific foundations upon which we base the nursing care routines for the uncomplicated delivery and the healthy newborn in the delivery room, maternal wards and nurseries? The honest answer is that the theoretical background for our present care routines is sparse. Advice and regulations appear to be based more on tradition than insight. But does this matter as long as these routines do not have any immediately observable harmful effects?

Alberts, in his report, comments that sequential post-delivery adaptations of the human mother and child were selected by evolution to meet environmental conditions very different from ours. He concludes that “exposure to contexts and contingencies that are evolutionary unexpected may … create pathology”. This problem is highlighted in the care of immature babies and severely ill full-term infants. Hofer, in summarizing his lengthy studies in rats, concludes that the interaction of parent and offspring contains “sensorim