The Art & Science of Parenting from Conception through Infancy
by Thomas R. Verny, M.D.

Dr. Thomas Verny is one of the world's leading experts on the effects of the prenatal and early postnatal environment on personality development.  He is a psychiatrist, founder of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), and author of the international bestseller The Secret Life of the Unborn Child.  Verny has participated in more than 250 newspaper, radio and TV interviews, including appearances with Donahue, Merv Griffin, Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphael, Barbara Walters, and Unsolved Mysteries.   

• Today we know that birth is not just about fear and anxiety.  It is a transformative psychological event, a psychic pacemaker that unconsciously motivates our subsequent life.  How we enter this world play a crucial role in how we live in it.

• Where do we first experience the nascent emotions of love, rejection, anxiety, and joy?  In the first school we ever attend -- in our mother's womb.

• The realization that genetics is not destiny, that environment is paramount to development,  places new responsibility on parents but carries new opportunity as well.  The lessons of neuroscience, birth psychology and early development, still largely unknown to the general public and even most experts, will transform the art of parenting.

• In short, the last revolution in neuroscience suggests that true intelligence and memory -- the very essence of self -- are located not just in the brain but throughout the body.  This discovery rings true in a new age of body-brain-mind unity.  They constitute a single, interactive network.  They are one.  What are the implications of these discoveries for early human development?  The youngest of our children, including the unborn, do not need fully developed central nervous systems or brains to receive store and process information...Before our children have even rudimentary brains, they are gathering within the cells of their bodies their first memories.

• Although developmental psychologists and scientists are gradually revising their assumptions about the newborn's sensory and mental functioning, many professionals remain resistant.   Some psychotherapists, particularly those with a strong psychoanalytic orientation, for instance, see young children as primitive, aggressive animals motivated only by satisfaction of their basic needs...Shockingly, and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such notions are common still.  

• My experience is that nine out of ten medical doctors regard the newborn and, needless to say, the unborn child as essentially mindless and insensate.  And...most of them even doubt that babies can feel pain. Obstetricians in particular often vehemently oppose and deride the findings emerging about unborn and newborn babies from the world's leading labs.  I suspect that on some level of consciousness these practitioners realize that if they truly came to regard the unborn and newborn as being endowed with human sensitivity and sensibility, they would have to change the way the treat pregnant women and newborn babies.  They would have to abandon their view of women as imperfect birthing machines and of themselves as white knights riding to the rescue.  It would involve a seismic shift from an interventionist, action-oriented mentality  to a patient, caring, wait-and-see, baby-catching mentality.  Change is coming despite their resistance.  Science has finally marshaled the research that supports what mothers have always known -- that newborns have sensation, feelings, and minds and that the treatment they receive will have long-term consequences for their lives.