Q: Recently I heard about a woman who killed her own children. I was shocked. How can a mother who is supposed to be a symbol of love kill her own children? This is completely against what I heard and experienced about a mother. How the times have changed? These women should be punished severely. Do you agree?
Krishna: I am neither surprised nor shocked by these behaviours of some mothers.
Got another shock?
Right. If you understand things the way I do, you too won't!
Now I am going to make you comprehend things correctly.
Most of the time your behaviour depends on your biochemistry.
At the heart of the mother-infant bond lies biology, and hormones are at the center of it. Our body produces hormones, which are chemical substances that regulate how our bodies function (physiology), our moods, and our behaviour. The moment a baby is born, a mother’s body is flooded with hormones that promote bonding. Oxytocin, prolactin, and vasopressin are all released, and they help to create a strong emotional connection between mother and child. Oxytocin, often referred to as the “love hormone” or “bonding hormone,” is a key player in this intricate process. It surges during labour and breastfeeding, helping to foster feelings of trust, emotional attachment, and maternal instincts.
Hormones bond a mother to her new born child.
Oxytocin, often called the "love hormone" or "cuddle hormone" , is the primary chemical driver that bonds a mother to her new born child.
Key Bonding Hormones
Oxytocin: Surges during labour, skin-to-skin contact, and breastfeeding to trigger deep emotional attachment, trust, and maternal care instincts.
Prolactin: Drives the production of milk and promotes maternal behaviour and nurturing responses.
Beta-Endorphins: Released during labour and skin-to-skin contact to create a sense of calm, relieve stress, and reinforce the pleasure of interacting with the baby.
Dopamine: Activates the brain's reward centres, making caring for the infant feel satisfying and deeply motivating.
How the Bonding Process Works
Skin-to-Skin Contact: Holding the baby directly against the chest immediately after birth causes a massive surge of oxytocin in the mother.
Eye Contact and Touch: Looking into the baby's eyes and gentle stroking or massage cause mutual oxytocin spikes in both parent and child.
Breastfeeding: The physical act of nursing stimulates the release of more oxytocin, strengthening the affectionate loop between mother and infant.
These bonding hormones dictate the love and attachment of a mother and her children at every step.
Mother-infant bonding is the process by which a mother and her baby develop a close emotional connection. It forms a vital part of early child development, and it has been linked to a number of positive outcomes for both mothers and babies. For the mother, bonding helps to reduce stress and anxiety, and it can also boost her self-esteem as a mom. For the baby, bonding helps to regulate their emotions and behaviour, and it can also promote their cognitive development. There are several factors that affect bonding with one’s baby.
It is, however, crucial to recognize that while oxytocin is undoubtedly influential, an immediate emotional connection isn’t guaranteed. There are several other factors that could impact bonding, such as the mother’s physical and emotional state, past experiences (trauma), and the health of the baby.
Other factors
There are a number of reasons why a mother might not bond with her baby immediately or sometimes not at all. These include:
Perinatal Moods and Anxiety Disorders: PMADs are a spectrum of mental health conditions that can affect a mother’s ability to bond with her baby.
Perinatal: The entire time frame from pregnancy through two years postpartum
Mood: Depression, Bipolar 1, Bipolar 2, Psychosis
Anxiety: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Panic Disorder
Disorder: affects everyday living and gets in the way of daily functioning
Difficult or unexpected birth experience: A difficult birth experience, such as a traumatic or prolonged labour, can also make it difficult for a mother to bond with her baby.
Baby’s Health: When the baby requires medical attention due to premature birth, ill health, or an extended stay in the NICU, the separation act can delay bonding.
Adoption: Adoptive mothers may also experience some difficulty bonding with their babies, as they may not have the same physical connection that biological mothers have.
Expectations and Pressure: The societal spotlight on instant maternal love can make a mom feel alone and odd, creating stress that overshadows the bonding process itself.
Fatigue and Stress: Extreme fatigue and high stress levels hinder an immediate emotional connection.
postpartum depression can severely strain and disrupt the emotional bond between a mother and her child, but it rarely destroys it permanently and improves with proper treatment.
How Postpartum Depression Affects Bonding
Postpartum depression (PPD) changes how a mother feels and acts. It can make a parent feel emotionally distant or numb.
Emotional Detachment: A mother might feel empty or unable to love her baby right away.
Misreading Signals: Depression makes it hard to notice or understand what the baby needs when crying or fussing.
Negative Thoughts: Some mothers feel angry, frustrated, or anxious around their infant.
Withdrawal: A mother might avoid holding, talking to, or playing with the baby.
Can the Bond Be Restored?
Yes, most of the time. A weak bond caused by depression is not permanent. The connection grows stronger as the mother heals. But treatment should be taken.
Severe cases involving harm to a child are typically linked to postpartum psychosis, a very different and much more severe condition than standard postpartum depression.
Postpartum Depression vs. Postpartum Psychosis
Postpartum Depression (PPD): This involves deep sadness, anxiety, and exhaustion. It can make caring for a baby very hard, and some mothers have intrusive, unwanted thoughts of harm. However, mothers with PPD do not lose touch with reality. Untreated PPD carries rare and tragic risks, but it is distinct from psychotic breaks.
Postpartum Psychosis (PPP): This is a rare, urgent medical emergency affecting about 1 to 2 in 1,000 women after childbirth. It involves a complete break from reality, including hallucinations, extreme confusion, paranoia, and delusions.
How Psychosis Leads to Harm
Mothers experiencing postpartum psychosis may suffer from dangerous delusions, such as believing their child is possessed, profoundly suffering, or that an alternate reality requires them to act.
Research shows that command hallucinations or severe delusions tied to depression-related psychosis dramatically increase the risk of self-harm or harm to a child.
High-profile cases, such as the Lindsay Clancy Trial highlight how severe, unrecognized psychiatric emergencies can lead to tragic outcomes.
Getting Help
Postpartum psychosis and severe depression are medical emergencies that require immediate professional care, but they are very treatable with proper intervention like medication and support.
Animals sometimes kill and eat their own young (known as
filial cannibalism or
infanticide) as a harsh evolutionary survival strategy to manage scarce resources, recover lost energy, and maximize future reproductive success.
Resource Management and Food Scarcity
Conserving energy: When food is extremely rare, parents cannot find enough calories to feed an entire litter or clutch.
Recycling nutrients: Eating some or all of the offspring gives the mother or father a vital nutritional boost.
Brood reduction: Species like burying beetles or hamsters lay more young than a small food supply can support; culling the brood ensures the surviving babies get enough food to grow strong
Environmental Stress and Danger
Sensing doom: Stressed animals—such as rabbits or hamsters—may kill and eat their new-borns if they feel overwhelmed, sick, or sense persistent predator threats.
Restarting reproduction: If an environment becomes too dangerous or a clutch is too small to justify the energy cost, consuming the current brood allows the parent to wipe the slate clean and reproduce again when conditions improve.
Weakness and Health
Eliminating the sick: If a new-born is born with severe deformities, illness, or weakness, parents often abandon or consume it rather than waste finite resources on an offspring unlikely to survive.
How external stress triggers these hormonal changes
When an animal experiences external stress—such as a lack of food, overcrowding, or persistent predator threats—their brain perceives a threat to survival. This triggers a profound hormonal shift that overrides the natural instinct to nurture and replaces it with the drive to survive, sometimes resulting in filial cannibalism.
The primary hormonal mechanisms driving this transition include:
1. The Glucocorticoid Spike (The Stress Response)
When a parent animal is exposed to environmental stress, the brain signals the adrenal glands to release high amounts of glucocorticoid stress hormones (like cortisol or corticosterone).
Energy Diversion: These hormones aggressively redirect the body's energy away from "low-priority" tasks—like lactation, nursing, and parental care—and channel it entirely into immediate self-preservation.
The Brain Flip: Under chronic stress, high cortisol levels physically alter brain chemistry. In small mammals like hamsters or mice, this sudden chemical shift can scramble the brain's ability to recognize its own offspring. Instead of seeing babies, the stressed, nutrient-depleted parent perceives a threat or a vital source of calories.
2. Prolactin Suppression (The Crash of Maternal Instinct)
In mammals and birds, prolactin is the primary hormone responsible for triggering maternal behaviour, milk production, and the instinct to bond with and protect the young.
High levels of stress hormones (glucocorticoids) directly suppress the release of prolactin.
When prolactin levels plummet, the chemical bond holding the maternal instinct together breaks. Without the hormonal drive to protect the babies, the parent becomes indifferent to their survival, leading to abandonment or infanticide.
3. The Drop in Reproductive Hormones (Resetting the Cycle)
In some species, external stress causes a sharp drop in progesterone and other fertility hormones, signalling to the body that the current reproductive cycle is a failure.
For example, in certain fish species like the barred chin blenny, a drop in reproductive androgens occurs when guarding a sub-optimal or stressed nest.
By consuming the small or threatened clutch, the animal rapidly resets its hormone levels, allowing it to quickly return to a fertile state and mate again when conditions improve.
4. Oxytocin Blockage (Loss of Bonding)
Often called the "bonding hormone," oxytocin is crucial for maternal attachment and social recognition. High stress and anxiety trigger the release of chemicals that block oxytocin receptors in the brain. When oxytocin is blocked, a mother animal may view her vocal, demanding new-borns not as her offspring, but as frustrating external stressors or environmental noise, triggering an aggressive, predatory response.
Now after reading all this and understanding it fully, can you still blame the mother or a child or any human/living being for anything that involves their unusual behaviour?
If you want to punish, you have to punish or correct their biochemistry, not the human/living being who has no control whatsoever on these things!
These things occur in Nature all the time. Some of the evolutionary aberrations or biochemistry gone awry are responsible for these things.
Your culturally conditioned mind might have had a problem accepting these things without perceiving the full picture but now you are a changed person.
Aren't you?
