Finch Giannetta is a squirmy, vivacious 10-month old. His mother, Kate, is constantly wrapping him in tight little hugs – if only to save him from falling on his diaper-padded bum or bonking his faux hawk-coiffed head.
She also holds him tenderly, most often when she's breastfeeding – one of the only times he's calm and quiet.
“Right now, cuddle time is 12 hours a day,” says the Toronto stay-at-home mom.
She learned the importance of physical bonding in prenatal classes before her five-year-old daughter Emilia was born, she says. “That's a definite reason why I wanted to stay home, because they would have more of me.”
To her surprise, an Australian study has found the babies of working mothers are getting the same amount of cuddle time as infants of stay-at-home mothers – an average of 138 minutes a day. Also equal was the amount of time babies were talked to, read to and sung to.
We're saying perhaps there is no need to feel guilty because the children are getting good input from others in that time they're in the care of others.— Co-author Jennifer Baxter
Research on infant attachment and bonding finds it critical to proper child development, maintaining that bonding helps build important neural pathways in the brain. It also gives infants a sense of security and trust.
While the study, published last month by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, focused on how infants who were and were not breastfed spent their time, the researchers were amazed to see the time spent hugging and holding was equal among working and stay-at-home moms.
It challenges the notion that infants of working moms aren't getting the physical attention they need while she's away at the office, says study co-author Jennifer Baxter, a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies in Melbourne.
The finding may also help alleviate some of that “mother's guilt.”
“We're saying perhaps there is no need to feel guilty because the children are getting good input from others in that time they're in the care of others,” she says.
The fact that other caregivers or fathers are the ones physically bonding with the infant while mom's away is of little consequence, says Chaya Kulkarni, director of Infant Mental Health Promotion at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.
“Attachment is not exclusive,” she says. “Quite often for that working mom, that baby, we hope, is also in a good place where he or she is forming good attachments.”
Working moms were also found to be more efficient with their cuddle time, Dr. Baxter notes, citing research that finds working women tend to sacrifice sleep and other personal time to cuddle and interact with their children. As expected, infants who are breastfed get more cuddle time, but also they get more time with activities that are not necessarily related to breastfeeding, such as being read to, talked to and sung to.
The data comes from the first wave of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, a snapshot of 3,000 Australian infants between the ages of three and 14 months from 2004. In a series of interviews and diary reports documenting a full week day and a weekend day, the researchers explored how much time infants spend being held or cuddled, read or talked to or crying while looking at whether the babies were still breastfeeding. The study will continue to follow these children up to age five.
Researchers found working mothers who work full-time spend 83 minutes less per day with their infants than stay-at-home moms but in their absence the cuddle duty is often taken over by the dad or the grandparents.
