---
title: "Best Beginnings Episode 22: Professor Linda Mayes on why parents are developing too"
description: Babyzone speaks to Professor Linda Mayes of Yale about parenting, the brain, addiction and why steady relationships are the most powerful intervention of all.
image: https://babyzone.org.uk/hubfs/LINDA%20THUMBNAIL.png
---
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# Best Beginnings Episode 22: Professor Linda Mayes on why parents are developing too
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> "The absolute power of relationships is most important for both children and for parents."
>
> **Professor Linda Mayes, Director of the Yale Child Study Center**
Somewhere in New Haven, Connecticut, a pregnant woman is climbing several flights of stairs in the heat of August. She is uncomfortable, exhausted, and not particularly interested, in this moment, in thinking about her unborn baby. A home visitor sits with her. And the way that visitor responds to the next thing the woman says will determine, in some small but real way, what kind of mother she becomes.
This is not a story about the woman. It is a story about the visitor, and about the choice that sits inside every single interaction between a practitioner and a parent in the earliest months and years of a child's life. Professor Linda Mayes, Director of the Yale Child Study Center, tells it to illustrate something she has spent decades trying to put into practice: that the way we talk to parents is as important as what we tell them. And that what we tell them, far too often, misses the point entirely.
**The parent who is also developing**
Linda trained as a neonatologist before becoming a psychoanalyst, and it was the neonatal ward that first opened her eyes to the thing that would anchor her career. Parents would return when their children were teenagers, asking whether the lung disease of prematurity could still come back. She began to realise she was looking at a two-person psychology. The baby and the parent were both changed by what happened between them. Both were developing. Both could be helped.
This is still, she says, an underappreciated truth. We talk constantly about what babies need. We talk far less about what is happening to the parent at the same time. Her research at the Yale Child Study Center has spent decades trying to address that imbalance, through neuroscience, through longitudinal study, and through an intervention programme built on the premise that you cannot help a baby without also paying attention to the adult doing the caring.
**When stress overwhelms reward**
The neuroscience of parenting is, in one sense, straightforwardly hopeful. Babies are rewarding. Human brains are wired to find caring for an infant activating, pleasurable, worth pausing for on a street corner even when the baby is a stranger. That reward is not incidental. It is biological, and it is the engine of parenting.
But caring for a baby is also stressful. And when the stress becomes too great, whether through economic pressure, trauma, isolation or a history that makes the role of parent feel impossibly loaded, the reward gets drowned out. The parent is not failing. Their brain is doing something entirely predictable. Understanding that, Linda says, is where real support has to start.
This insight runs directly into her work on addiction, and into what she sees as one of the most damaging biases in how society thinks about parents who are struggling. Addiction is commonly framed as weakness. The neuroscience offers a different account. Addiction co-opts the brain's reward system. The drug becomes more rewarding, in that neurological moment, than the baby. Not because the parent does not love their child, but because the brain has been overridden.
The intervention that follows from this framing is not what most people would expect. When Linda's colleagues focused not on the addiction itself but on increasing the salience of the parent-baby relationship, drug use decreased alongside improvements in the relationship. The relationship was the most powerful piece.
**What a bath can teach**
Linda's approach to supporting parents is perhaps best illustrated through an example she gives about something as ordinary as bathtime. There are two ways to teach a parent how to bathe a baby. The first tells the parent what to do: hold the head, check the water temperature, keep the soap out of the eyes. The second talks to the baby through the parent, narrating back what the parent is doing and why. "Look how your mum is holding your head. She's thinking about how the water feels. She tested it on her arm to be sure it was right for you."
The information is identical. But the second approach does something the first cannot. It says to the parent, through the words spoken to their child, that they are already someone who thinks about what their baby needs. It affirms rather than instructs. It positions the parent not as someone who needs correcting but as someone whose care is being witnessed and named.
This is what Minding the Baby, the intervention programme Linda helped develop, is built on. It is a home-visiting programme for young families in high-risk circumstances, and it is now federally recognised as evidence-based in the United States. The outcomes across multiple studies and communities include lower rates of childhood obesity, better dental health and reduced oppositional behaviour in children. But Linda is careful about what those outcomes mean. No intervention, she says, is a lifetime immunisation. It is a better start. It reduces risk. It does not make life stop happening.
**The one bet worth making**
What she would stake a fortune on, after decades of longitudinal research across families and communities and continents, is not a programme or a policy. It is a relationship. Steady, consistent, caring relationships for children, wherever those relationships come from. A parent when they are able. A neighbour, a teacher, a relative when they are not. The source matters less than the constancy.
The woman on the stairs in August did not need to be told what her baby would need. She needed to be heard. The home visitor who heard her, who turned her exhausted complaining into a conversation with her unborn child, gave her something that turned out to matter: the sense that her own emotional life was real, and that her baby had one too, and that the two things were connected.
That is what Professor Linda Mayes's research returns to, again and again, across neuroscience and psychoanalysis and longitudinal study and everything in between. Not what we tell parents, but what we help them see.
Watch or listen on [YouTube,](https://youtu.be/aeUP1WYMAe8)[Spotify,](https://open.spotify.com/show/2JtvsUqYfNDBoV5vqM5nzo)[Amazon Music,](https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e1eb6dec-97cc-46c0-8094-0cda8c67d73c/best-beginnings)[Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/best-beginnings/id1891251139)and more.
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