Our work that led to the understanding of hidden regulators within the mother-infant interaction has its roots in the mid-1950s, when the customary childbirth practices were to anesthetize the mother fully as soon as labor pains began, and to continue throughout birth. Then, mothers and babies were kept (separately) in the hospital for a week with daily short visits between the two, while the mother became accustomed to the strange "bag of reflexes" that newborns were thought to be, and learned to manage the sterilization procedures for the bottle feedings when finally the time came to go home. But "natural childbirth" was beginning to be imported from Britain and T. Berry Brazelton and a very few developmental psychologists around the country were beginning to discover what newborns (and mothers) could do if studied under natural conditions rather than in the laboratory or a clinical setting. However, natural childbirth was actually part of a more general "enlightenment" making slow progress throughout medicine and embodied in the new field of psychosomatic medicine. Related work on animal models in the 1960s, including the extraordinary impact of Harry Harlow's maternal deprivation studies in monkeys, led to an interest in learning more about the behavior and biology of the early mother-infant relationship.
From Relationship to Interaction
In the early 1970s the parent-infant relationship field was in one of its periods of intense controversy and confusion, with new findings that appeared to call for major changes in medical practice during birth and in the newborn period. Marshall Klaus and John Kennell were convinced from their data that a sensitive period existed in the seconds and minutes after birth