The role of women in the Middle Ages was vilification, veneration, and exclusion. Due to the high rates of maternal and infant mortality bonding shifted from the mother-child dyad to one in which the Church, Holy Family, and king acted as pseudo-parents. In art this is suggested by the virtual absence of eye contact between the Virgin and Christ-child. Frustration of early oral needs consequent to lack of adequate mother-child bonding prompted a reactive emphasis on orality in art and legend. A decrease in infant mortality and a reciprocal improvement in mother-child bonding contributed to cultural shifts in how self-realization would be accomplished during the Renaissance and in the later emergence of secular humanism.