Newborn babies have a highly developed nose, it is known that even before birth they learn to recognize the mother's smell to feed. But could this same offensive ability transmit other "teachings" to the baby?
A group of scientists has concluded that Babies could acquire mothers' fears through their body odor, through that special smell that produces stress, fear, in people and that a baby would be able to detect with its developed sense.
This is a study that wanted to deepen the roots of childhood fear whose authors normally work with mothers who had some trauma or phobia and their children.
The research has been conducted by teams from the University of Michigan School of Medicine and the University of New York, who studied mother rats who had learned to fear the smell of peppermint and showed how they "teach" this fear of their babies in their first days of life through the smell of alarm that rodents release during distress.
In conclusion it can be noted that Babies are likely to learn to fear in the first days of life just by smelling the scent emanating from their mothers in the face of difficultiesThat is, if a mother experiences something before pregnancy that makes her fear something specific, her baby will quickly learn to be afraid of her too through the smell she gives off when she feels fear.
The article, published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," could explain an already detected phenomenon related to psychology: the mother's traumatic experience can affect the children deeply, even when it happens before birth. (Although this does not happen to all children of mothers with great traumas, phobias or major depressions).
Then, a baby could learn about certain threats of newborns, but not because they consider, for example, a spider as a threat, but because their mother next to a spider gives off a special smell that affects the baby, altering it. Later, even if the mother is not with the baby, if she saw a spider, she would feel it as a threat.
The team of researchers also identified the specific area of the brain where this transmission of fear takes place in the first days of life (lateral tonsil). And they found that this type of "memories" transmitted through the mother remain for much longer than other occasional learning.
This in the case of people with trauma could be used to intervene in children to whom they were transmitted, there are treatments for people with phobias, so that they learn responses to irrational fear ...
Definitely, the mother could transmit her fears to the baby through the smell, one more reason why the puerperium is a delicate stage in which the mother should be calm with her baby, without major worries and in an optimal state for recovery.
