Love at Goon Park. Deborah Blum

We begin our lives with love [and] we learn human connection at home. It is the foundation upon which we build our lives — or it should be — and if the... the human doesn’t learn love in infancy, he or she “may never learn to love at all.”

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...being loved matters —and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. It’s not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle; it’s not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child’s tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it. When you are a very small child, love needs to be as tangible as warm arms around you and as audible as the lull of a gentle voice at night.

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All of us, even as babies, are a bundle of feelings and desires... Our positive emotions grow best in an interactive sense, fostered by how we react to others and how they respond to us. A baby, a child, even an adult, needs at least one person interested and responsive. We grow best in soil cultivated by someone who thinks we matter.