What is it about?
This paper explains how we have used our understanding of the biological and behavioural relationship between mothers and babies to better understand their needs in the first six months postpartum.
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Why is it important?
We demonstrate how evolutionary perspectives and thinking can be used to question clinical practices and improve public health messages around mother-baby separation, infant feeding, and parent-infant sleep.
Perspectives
It was a pleasure to be invited to write this article based on my keynote talk at the Evolutionary Medicine & Public Health Conference in Durham, North Carolina 2016.
Professor Helen L. Ball
Durham University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evolution-informed maternal–infant health, Nature Ecology & Evolution, February 2017, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0073.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Durham Infancy & Sleep Centre
The Durham Infancy & Sleep Centre (DISC--formerly the Parent-Infant Sleep Lab) is a research centre of the Department of Anthropology, the Faculty of Social Sciences and Health and the Wolfson Institute for Health & Well-being at Durham University, UK. DISC provides opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students to become involved in our research, and we welcome enquiries.
Baby Sleep Info Source -- Basis
The Basis website presents research evidence about biologically normal sleep for human babies, in forms that are accessible to parents and health practitioners, supported by references to research relevant to families in the UK. Basis does not address clinical sleep problems or provide individual sleep advice and parents should contact a health practitioner with any concerns about their baby's health.
Contributors
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