Metodologías aplicadas en la educación en emprendimiento 33

Child

Until recently, it was assumed that the burden of physiologically sustaining pregnancy fell solely on the mother, but new evidence indicates that the child also

plays an important role. According to Dr. Liley, for instance, it is the fetus who guarantees the endocrine success of the pregnancy and who triggers many of the physical, changes his mother's body must undergo to sustain and nourish him prenatally.* So even at this stage the unborn child may have some control over his well-being, and this fact raises some interesting questions. Specifically, it raises the possibility that the unusually high rates of physical and emotional damage in the offspring of rejecting or unhappy mothers might not be due solely to harmful maternal hormones. It seems at least a possibility that if fetus does have partial control over a pregnancy and senses himself in a hostile environment, in some instances he may withdraw his physiological support, thereby harming himself.

Mother

Anxiety- and stress-related hormones are the most obvious form of physiological communication from woman to child. Clearly, those anxieties that touch directly on the child, the pregnancy, the spouse or the woman's insecurities and inadequacies have the greatest impact on the fetus. But only intense or continued maternal anxiety can be hazardous. The woman who sometimes worries about bills or the weight she is gaining is certainly not putting her child at risk. The amount of hormones such minor concerns produce―if they produce any at all―are not going to affect an unborn child. What he cannot take is a continual assault of anxiety hormones. The danger here is not just to intrauterine bonding, either. As we saw in the last chapter, this kind of attack may also set the child's emotional thermostat at a precariously high level. ·

Smoking, excessive drinking, drug taking and overeating or eating improperly also qualify as forms of maternal physiological communication. (Psychologically, as I said. before they represent an indirect expression of anxiety.) The harmful changes these substances can produce in the unborn's environment may make him fearful, like smoking and, I suspect. Also, drinking―but then he has every reason to be worried.

Alcohol is a case in point. It can maim, even kill the child. Knowledge of its dangers in pregnancy goes back to the Greeks and Romans―who noticed that mothers who were heavy drinkers bore a much higher rate of deformed and sickly children. Only in the last decade or so have investigators found the scientific reason

*New studies show that the placenta, which is an organ of the unborn child, produces many hormones, such as estrogen, progesterone, chorionic gonadotropin, and others, which maintain the pregnancy. By producing these substances, the unborn baby actively participates in his own survival

for this: Alcohol passes through the placenta as effortlessly as nearly everything else a mother eats or drinks. Exactly how it affects her child once it reaches him depends on the amount of alcohol he is exposed to and his stage of development.

I think the wisest policy is not to drink at all during pregnancy. If a woman does decide to, however, she should limit her daily consumption to, at the very most, two ounces of liquor or its equivalent. Anything above that puts her child in danger of falling victim to fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS). Investigators still do not under- stand all the mechanisms involved in this serious disorder, but they are quite sure of one thing: The more a woman drinks, the greater her child's chances of being born mentally retarded, hyperactive, with a heart murmur, or with a facial deformity such as a small head or low-set ears.

According to experts at the U. S. National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, three or four beers or glasses of wine daily can cause one or more of these defects and six or more drinks a day can produce the whole horrendous gamut of deformities associated with FAS. A woman who drinks ten ounces of alcohol daily―or the equivalent of about six strong drinks―is playing Russian roulette with her child's life and health. At that level of consumption, his chances of being born seriously deformed are an even fifty-fifty.

Almost as critical as how much a woman drinks is when. Those same experts warn that there are two periods of pregnancy when drinking is particularly perilous to the child. The first is from the twelfth to the eighteenth week, when his brain is in a critical stage of development; the second is from the twenty-fourth to the thirty-sixth week.

Cigarettes are another major hazard to the unborn. Smoking cuts the supply of oxygen available in the maternal blood and, without an adequate flow of oxygen, fetal tissue growth may slow. A woman who smokes one or two cigarettes a day is probably not seriously endangering her child (though, like alcohol, the best policy is abstinence), but the woman who smokes two packs a day probably is. According to recent studies, babies born to mothers who smoke forty or more cigarettes a day are smaller and in poorer physical condition than those of nonsmoking mothers. At age seven, children of smoking mothers tend to have more problems learning to read and a higher rate of psychological disorders than other youngsters. There is also growing evidence that a father's smoking may affect fetal development. West German investigators recently discovered that the unborn children of smoking men had a markedly higher rate of prenatal mortality than the babies of nonsmoking males. Why this is so is not quite clear. But toxicologist Helmut Griem believes smoking may produce subtle but potentially disastrous changes in male sperm.

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Reports of the effects of caffeine on the fetus are less persuasive than those of alcohol or cigarettes. The hand-full of studies that have been done on caffeine in pregnancy have been inconclusive. The one partial exception is a recent report from the University of Washington, here Investigators found a firm correlation between caffeine (whether in the form of coffee, cola, tea or cocoa) and certain birth disorders. The highest caffeine consumers in the study had the highest rate of babies with poor muscle tone and low activity levels. Are these effects short-term or are they harbingers of some serious and permanent health disorder? Dr. Ann Stressiguth, head of the team, says that vital question cannot be answered without further research.

Under the circumstances I think it would be wise for a pregnant woman to switch to a decaffeinated coffee and to cut down on cola or cocoa consumption. At the very least, the lack of caffeine will do her good (caffeine has already been implicated in high blood pressure, and re- cent evidence indicates it mav also be a factor in breast cancer). But if a woman is so dependent on coffee or cigarettes that going without them would produce excessive tension, it is better to try to cut down rather than totally abstain from these substances.

The risks of drug taking in pregnancy have been so widely publicized that there is no need to dwell on them. Suffice it to say that the unborn is most vulnerable to their toxic effects early in pregnancy and that even small amount of any drug, including common over-the-counter one such as aspirin can be harmful to him.

It may seen by now that everything a pregnant women does, from taking a simple aspirins for a headache to having as occasional negative thought or tense moment, is going to affect her relationship with her child. This is not so. The material in this chapter has to be kept in perspective. Occasional negative emotions or stressful events are not going to affect intrauterine bonding adversely. The unborn child is far too resilient to be put off by a few setbacks. The danger arises when he feels shut off from his mother or when his physical and psychological needs are consistently ignored. His demands are not unreasonable: All he wants is some love and attention and, when he gets them, everything else, including bonding, follows naturally.