I make no bones about it, I stand in awe of women who decide to have a baby!  I think it must be one of the most difficult, rewarding, challenging and responsible jobs anyone can ever do! 

Let me just clarify that, I don’t just mean the whole pregnancy and giving birth bit, but also, the raising of children.  The whole idea of bringing another human being into this world and beginning the task of installing excellent values in them, good health and helping them grow into responsible and contributing citizens is an absolutely tremendous job.

There was a time when scientists and doctors just thought that in the womb, as long as the baby was getting good nutrition, that’s all that mattered, the real job began when the baby left the womb.  Well, we now know that is definitely not the case!

Everything that happens to the mother, be it physically or emotionally will affect her baby.  How she perceives her world is hugely important. If she generally believes it to be a safe, good world, then so will her baby.

Dr Bruce Lipton is an internationally known and respected molecular biologist and author (The Biology of Beliefs) amongst other books and is someone whose work I have followed for about 10 years. For many years he has studied and researched quantum physics and cell biology and has studied Epigenetics which  is “The study of reversible heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the sequence of nuclear DNA.”

He makes the point that in the womb, the baby is aware of everything the mother experiences, be it negative or positive.  It has already learned most emotions in the womb because of the mother’s blood crossing into the foetus and carrying various messages of emotions, chemistry and nutrition.  When it’s born it can already express, rage, jealousy, love.

So if a pregnant woman perceives her environment in anyway threatening or unsafe then these messages  are emotionally transmitted via the placenta to the foetus.  The mother's blood is connected to the placenta and the foetus is sensing what she senses as it is very intelligent and it begins to know what world it is going to come into.

Basically, the more blood an organ gets in the foetus, according to Dr Bruce Lipton, the more it develops.  If a mother is perceiving her environment as threatening she will be creating a baby with a bigger body but a smaller fore brain as blood will be inhibited to that area and instead will go to the muscles that are needed for survival, arms and legs, etc, just as it does in adults when we are threated.  So there is a very good chance she will produce a baby, who, essentially, will be built like a streetfighter, with less intelligence than average, in order to survive in this kind of environment.

Stress, as we know, really affects our physiology so it follows it affects the unborn baby too.  I have found that teaching mothers to be self hypnosis and calming strategies is extremely beneficial.

Now once your baby is born you are programming your child by your responses to him/her and the environment because you are shaping its perceptions.

When babies are born they know who their parents are within hours and learn through observation by looking at their face for signs of love, fear, support, etc this is attachment bonding. A baby focuses on faces of parents in first couple of years and takes cues from there.

For example, when a child falls over, etc, s/he will immediately look around for it’s mother or father’s face to find out how it should react ie if a mother is all concerned and protected over her child when it falls, it may learn ‘it’s a dangerous place out there’, however, if she should laugh and caringly tell it to ‘get up and try again’, the child will learn that nothing bad happened and you just carry on!

Now should a child look back to seek guidance from one of its parents and none are present and, if this happens to be the case often, then that child has a good chance to grow up unfocused, with attachment disorder.  You may know lots of children now are given Ritalin, for Attention Deficit Disorder, well attachment disorder is a little bit like that.

As an aside, unfortunately, many children are prescribed Ritalin when in fact they don’t really need it, it’s just pharmaceutical companies making a new ‘disease’ instead of us as human beings trying to resolve it for ourselves, it’s disempowering and makes us reliant on things outside of ourselves all too often.

A little bit of information you may find useful:

• 0-1 - Learn from facial gestures from parents
• 1 – 2 yrs they are in Delta, which is a sort of deep comatose state (in an adult it would be as if they were in a very deep sleep which would be difficult to be woken from.)  A child is able to take information in but cannot respond as yet as its brain is still developing.
• From 2 – 6 yrs they are in Theta, a sort of twilight zone, living in their imaginary world mixing reality with their dream or play world.
• From 6 yrs they are now in Alpha, more aware.  By now core beliefs will be installed.
• From 12 yrs this is Beta which is a more focused, alert state.
• From ages 0-6 children they are in a super learning mode and can and have to, for survival reasons, learn many, many things. For instance, they can learn 3 languages simultaneously without much conscious processing going on.

In hypnosis, which is just an altered alert state of awareness, where the activity of the brain goes into the lower frequency of Alpha or Theta then we can begin to programme or re-programme the brain for something that is more useful to a person.

So it’s important to realise, as a parent and/or teacher that from the ages of 0 – 6yrs everything is being downloaded into the sub conscious mind.  Think of the implications of this.

Remember all those things our parents used to tell us when we were growing up such as, "you are naughty ", "you don’t deserve that  x", or "money doesn’t grow on trees", " you are so lazy", etc.  Now all parents say these things, it’s natural, but truly, we should really think of ourselves (parents) as a set of belief systems that our child will model as they grow up, through observations of our behaviours and through what it is told.

Do you know that a young child hears over 1000 negatives a day, ‘don’t do that’, ‘stop’, ‘you’ll be in trouble when your father gets home’, etc.  Not to mention such statements as “you’ll never amount to anything, you are so lazy”,  “if only you were more like your sister,” etc. No wonder there are so many adults walking around with disempowering belief systems/values and feelings of unworthiness.

These feelings and limiting beliefs are not serving them at all, in fact, they are actually holding them back in many areas of their lives!  I see adults like this in my office everyday.

We also model our parents as we are growing up in terms of how to interact with the opposite sex.

So a boy would notice, albeit unconsciously, how his father talks and interacts with his mother. So very often when boys grow up they will look for a mate that responds very similarly to his mother, the same goes for a daughter observing her parents. They may, (the children) of course, decide to change that behaviour when they are older.

So remember our sub conscious mind is habitual it has no reasoning faculty it just believes whatever is in there and plays it over and over.

Our conscious mind is the creative one, but it doesn’t run the show like we think it does, oh no, it is the sub conscious that does that.

I learned, whilst studying Clinical Hypnosis, that the sub conscious mind is a million more times more powerful than the conscious mind as an information processor so if there is a conflict of desire with the conscious and sub conscious mind, the sub conscious will always win!

Choose your beliefs carefully and if you don’t like them, change them!

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