You Learn to Love During Infancy

Experts at the University of Minnesota say that children learn how to love during infancy, when they are between 12 and 18 months old. This period is absolutely critical for their later development, the team behind the new study says.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Current Directions in Psychological Science, the team says that it was able to derive an interesting connection between a mother's relationship with her child and the child's ability to love more than 20 years later.

One of the most interesting aspects of the new study is that it suggests love is not something we're born with. We do have the inclination and the predisposition to love, that is true, but the behavior itself is something we learn from others – mostly our parents – just like any other thing.

The U-M team that conducted the investigation was led by study author and psychologist Dr. Jeffry A. Simpson, and coauthors Dr. W. Andrew Collins and Dr, Jessica E. Salvatore, PsychCentral reports.

“Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren’t aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind,” Simpson explains. These expectations refer to how each person expects to be treated by others in a romantic relationship.

One of the things researchers noticed about these patterns is that they always come back in times of stress or excessive worrying. Getting involved in a new relationship, practicing introspection, and attending therapy are ways to curb these patterns, but keeping them away remains an active process.

For example, a baby who is treated badly during the first year and a half of their life will become a defensive arguer, always leaving the initiative to the other person, and avoiding direct confrontation wherever possible.

On the other hand, babies raised by attentive mothers become capable of working out their problems as they come along, handling each of them individually, and preventing things from stacking up. Their downfall is usually the fact that they place a lot of faith in the fact that the other person has good intentions as well, which is obviously not always the case.

“People find a coherent, adaptive way, as best as they can, to respond to their current environments based on what’s happened to them in the past,” Simpson explains. The data used in this study were collected from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation.