Born for Love
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
The groundbreaking exploration of the power of empathy by renowned child-psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry, co-author, with Oprah Winfrey, of What Happened to You? Born for Love reveals how and why the brain learns to bond with others—and is a stirring call to protect our children from new threats to their capacity to love. “Empathy, and the ties that bind people into relationships, are key elements of happiness. Born for Love is truly fascinating.” — Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project From birth, when babies' fingers instinctively cling to those of adults, their bodies and brains seek an intimate connection, a bond made possible by empathy—the ability to love and to share the feelings of others. In this provocative book, psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry and award-winning science journalist Maia Szalavitz interweave research and stories from Perry's practice with cutting-edge scientific studies and historical examples to explain how empathy develops, why it is essential for our development into healthy adults, and how to raise kids with empathy while navigating threats from technological change and other forces in the modern world. Perry and Szalavitz show that compassion underlies the qualities that make society work—trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity—and how difficulties related to empathy are key factors in social problems such as war, crime, racism, and mental illness. Even physical health, from infectious diseases to heart attacks, is deeply affected by our human connections to one another. As Born for Love reveals, recent changes in technology, child-rearing practices, education, and lifestyles are starting to rob children of necessary human contact and deep relationships—the essential foundation for empathy and a caring, healthy society. Sounding an important warning bell, Born for Love offers practical ideas for combating the negative influences of modern life and fostering positive social change to benefit us all.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is such an important topic and the research is fascinating. I would like to see more rigor in the thinking and clarity of definition around the huge areas of “empathy” and “love.” While the authors made a convincing case that humans need closeness and connection to grow healthy and lead stable, productive lives, there is also such a thing as unhealthy closeness (enmeshment) and real problems that result from it. The “codependency movement” is briefly criticized at the end of the book as aiming to push people towards independence at the expense of relationship, but I think really it's all about establishing healthy boundaries and a balance between self and other.
Anyway, there is no shortage of research to do in this field ,and I hope we'll be hearing much more about it. The main challenge we seem to face today is to expand the ways we evolved for surviving together in small, close-knit groups, into seeing ourselves as members of a global family, humanity as a whole. Many people are distressed by the hugeness of this and close themselves off in narrowly defined groups, going with the old way of feeling secure as “us” by battling a “them.” Other forces are working strongly to splinter us even further, isolating and distancing us from one another and waling us off behind non-human, mechanical barriers. But the stories of healing in this book - and also the warning images of people damaged beyond repair - can inspire us to learn from the wisdom in the very structure of our brains and bodies, to recover the human bonds of love and caring that made us strong, and to evolve further into a species that uniquely is able to love out of freedom and knowledge, rather than merely by instinct.
