Scent of a Baby

From TLC Magazine in Cape Town, South Africa, by Marina Green.  (I'm in the last paragraph!!)

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We talk about that sweet “baby smell” when nuzzling our baby’s neck or holding one of her garments close up. But not all babies smell the same and not all of us are similarly affected by their smell. The “baby smell” may play an important role in the bonding process, but what affects our sensitivity to it and do our own children smell ‘better’ than other people’s?

 

Wired for smell

 

Non-parents may argue that babies have no specific smell unless it’s time for a nappy change. Parents who have snuggled into the warm folds of a baby’s neck and deeply inhaled “baby smell” may tell you otherwise.

Research has shown that we are most likely programmed to emotionally respond to the cuteness of babies round eyes, disproportionately large heads and chubby cheeks. It seems possible that we are similarly “wired” to respond to the way that they smell and that our own child’s smell is more apparent and more attractive to us.

 

Professor Bill Hansson and his team at Lund University in Sweden investigated whether babies really have a special scent and if this scent affects adults’ behaviour. They wanted to find out if only parents could detect this scent and how long babies “would smell like babies for”.

 

The results of their experiments showed that men were better at distinguishing T-shirts that had been worn by newborns, and fathers were more likely than non- fathers to speculate correctly. The women had trouble distinguishing the scent of a newborn child from an older child but they all agreed that clean, unworn shirts smelt “most pleasant”.

 

This conclusion may seem surprising because women typically exhibit a superior sense of smell to men. Karin Bengston who headed a study at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that showed that mothers were able to successfully distinguish their own child from the other children by smell alone a short time after they gave birth, explained:  "Women have always had to be more concerned with the job of looking after their children than men and display protective motherly instincts in their presence. These feelings toward the child were never as natural coming from the father because he was primarily concerned with the hunt for food. A successful hunter was better off adopting an aggressive stance. Back at the homely campfire this peculiarity could prove dangerous for the youngest and most defenceless members of the clan, especially under less than ideal conditions." She suggests that a smell that is more obvious to men may provide a powerful defence mechanism that has “a stronger effect than visual stimuli because it heads straight for the emotional points of the brain.” According to this theory, men sniff out the information on baby aroma that is common to all small children but women focus more on the factors that distinguish their own child from other children.

 

Apocrine glands and pheromones

 

The apocrine glands secrete pheromones. A newborn baby’s skin is covered with apocrine scent glands, which give off an identifiable "baby smell" but it is only in puberty that these are replaced by mature scent glands.

 

The word "pheromone" first appeared in the 1950s from the Greek words "pherein" and "hormone," meaning "excitement carrier". Pheromones are used as means of communication by many animals and insects. They elicit a specific and unlearned response in another member of the same species- possibly a pre-coded genetic programme. It was generally believed that the importance of pheromones are dramatically less important in humans because we have more complicated and advanced ways to communicate including facial expressions and language. However several studies have show evidence to the contrary.

 

Researcher A.J. MacFarlane examined whether infants can detect the odours of their mothers’ breasts and concluded that an infant could distinguish between the smell of a clean breast pad and a breast pad that had been used by his mother. Another researcher, Michael J. Russel, author of Human Olfactory Communication, showed that most infants were obviously attracted to their mothers’ scents and often repulsed by strangers’. He concluded; "the existence of olfactory maternal attraction suggests that humans have a pheromonal system and that it operates at a very early age".

 

It has even been suggested that kissing, which is an almost universal human activity, may be an unconscious method of transferring protein pheromones. When a mother kisses her baby she passes on identification pheromones that increase mother-child bonding.

 

The newborn’s unique scent

 

During childbirth the mother’s body passes certain substances onto her baby through the placenta that act as a temporary stimulus for skin secretion. For this reason, newborn babies have active sebaceous glands like adults but in older children this process decreases and only recommences at puberty.

 

Using a special instrument, Swedish scientists attempted to find the aromas that account for the particular “baby smell.”

They discovered scientific evidence of the existence of a unique newborn baby scent. In T-shirts worn by older children only very small traces of bodily odours were found but in the T-shirts worn by the babies, they found “components that were found neither in the shirts belonging to the older children nor in the clean T-shirts.”

These components are probably not consciously observed and don’t have a noticeable smell but as Hannsson explained, previous tests on animals and humans show that pheromones are often perceived only in our subconscious. This is because they are transmitted to the brain via nerves in the nasal septum rather than through the olfactory (smell) nerve.

Hansson believes that this information could be used to develop an artificial baby aroma that could be used to pacify aggressive men, but intercultural comparative studies will need to be done first.

 

The role of hormones  in mothers responses

 

Professor Alison Fleming and her colleagues at Toronto University studied the role of infant odours on mothers and their behaviour with their new infants, focusing on the role of hormones.

 

Initially, they established; “when compared to non-mothers, new mothers are indeed more attracted to newborn infant odour”. They also found that mothers who have nursed their infants sooner after birth are more attracted to their infants odours and “spent more time touching and closely interacting with their babies”.

Cortisol, an adrenal steroid normally released under stressful circumstances (childbirth may be regarded as one!) was the hormone “most consistently related to responses to both infant odours and infant cries”.

 

They found that mothers who had higher levels of cortisol were more attracted to the infant body odours and more sympathetic to their baby’s hunger cries.

“Experienced mothers with higher levels of cortisol immediately after birth are more responsive to their infants odours. Prior experience interacting with young itself enhances attraction to infants’ odours”.

 

Cortisol is called the “stress” hormone but has a very different meaning in the post-partum period, when it does not necessarily reflect high levels of stress or depression. Women with higher postpartum cortisol may be at a higher level of arousal and attention or perceptual function.

Parents like Nicola Standen, mother to Jake confirm many of these findings. Nicola says that as far as her own baby’s smell is concerned “it's an aroma that was present from the moment of birth. It's a sweet, lovely scent. It triggers broodiness in almost every female who's held my son. They bury their noses in his hair, close their eyes and inhale.  They seem to get so much pleasure from just the smell. Then they all say that they want a baby!”

 

Edit:  Yikes!  My fonts are all screwed up!

 

10.11.04 03:34, Comment

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed

Look at my teeth!

You lookin' at me?

 

16.11.04 22:50, Comment

Update

Life in Canada is being good to us so far.  To me, anyway.  My eldest two stepdaughters have been looking for work, handing out their CVs/resumes, and, so far, having no luck.  Stupidly, employers are looking for "Canadian experience".  Hannah and Sarah obviously have nothing but UK experience, which you wouldn't think was a problem when seeking a cashier position in Wal-mart!  Needless to say, the situation depresses them a bit.

But, on the very bright side, my Mum and stepfather work for a company in Montreal that run a big warehouse.  They are very busy at the moment and Hannah and Sarah have been invited up there to work for the next few days.  Not only will this give them quite a chunk of money, but it will also give their CVs that ever-popular “Canadian experience”. 

Stephen is busy building walls in our new basement to make two new bedrooms for Hannah and Sarah.  The house has three bedrooms on the main level, but they are occupied by myself and Stephen, Jake and Ruth.  There is another bedroom already in the basement but we'd like to keep that for guests.  Stephen's sister and nephew are coming in May and the girls' Mum is coming in June.  Busy, busy!

Jake is sleeping at the moment.  He slept all the way through last night, causing me to wake with a start at 6:30 this morning.  I couldn’t rest again until I went in to check on him.  Seeing that he was sleeping soundly, I went back to bed, but sleep never came.

Jake’s sleep pattern hasn’t been great lately.  Just when you think that you have a schedule all sorted out, it goes all haywire again.  He goes through glorious stages of sleeping from about 8pm through to about 7am.  Then there’s the stage when he wakes at about 5am and then sleeps more in our bed, curled up next to his Mummy.  Then there’s the less popular stage, where he goes to bed later, like at 10pm or so, wakes again at 3am, and finally wakes for good at about 6am.  Mummy and Daddy don’t like this stage, Jake!

But he’s a good boy really.  Big and strong.  He’s got broad, meaty shoulders, like his Daddy.  People stop us in shopping malls to tell me how cute he is.  I tell them that he’s 8 months old (in a few days) and we always hear:  “Wow!  He’s a big boy!”  Is he?  Well, he wears clothes with ’12 months’ on the labels.  My Mum says that she thinks that he’ll be a hockey player…  over my dead body, I say!!

Jake now has 4 teeth, two on top and two on bottom.  He grinds them and drives me nuts.  He can stand while leaning on the furniture and sit unaided.  He likes to say Mum-mum-mum-mum or simply let out a high-pitched shriek.  He bangs his toys around with great force and occasionally whacks himself in the head with one.  That leads to tears and a cuddle, of course.  Crawling, though, is not to be.  He shows no interest in putting his hands down at all.  When he’s on his back, he gets around by kicking with his feet and sliding on his head and bum.  This is leading to thinner hair at the back on his head.  Poor thing!  Anyway, I never crawled so he may just be doing as I did. 

He’s waking up…

 

2 Kommentare 24.11.04 16:11, Comment