Photo Angelina Jolie as mother of a changeling in Changeling
In folk literature the changeling is a common figure. In most tales it concerns a newborn baby robbed from his crib, with dark intentions, by an elf or goblin and replaced by a child of the robber’s race. In more recent literature and movies changelings can be older and are mostly human (like in the movie Changeling with Angelina Jolie) or near-human (like in the novel Changeling by Morgan Gallagher) In all cases no good is intended. In modern real life cases of changelings it is presumed there was no harm intended, but people made mistakes, were clueless or just plain inattentive. It’s all about hospital-born infants who were taken away from their mothers for medical exams and nursing care and returned to another mother afterwards. The fuss the last changelings case in an Australian hospital created in the media, is a good example of how many people share this kind of happenings among the worst they can imagine. (As an aside: for many people the fact that the babies were breastfed by the wrong mothers was even worse than the fact of changing itself!)
The shock for parents is, of course, immense. Personally I think that for a mother the pure fact that she doesn’t recognize a strangers child as not being her own is the most shocking. Isn’t a mother supposed to be able to blindly recognize her own child? yes, she is, in fact quite literary so. Mothers and their newborn children recognizes each other by smell and discriminate between similar but alien smells. Prerequisite is that mother and child are kept together, undisturbed for quite a while after birth, in order to get to know each other; to imprint on each other’s smells, tastes and features. To keep mother and child undisturbed together after birth has a lot of other positive consequences. Infant skin-to-skin on mom’s chest have more stable temperatures, don’t lose energy on stressing out and have better glucose levels as a result, they search and find and latch onto the breast well and lose less weight. Both mother and child have higher levels of prolactin and oxytocin, which do not only aid breastfeeding, but will help knitting a close mother-child attachment, an overall better well-being and the recovery from respectively giving birth and being born. Mothers and infants who stay together don’t get mixed up by inattentive caretakers, for what isn’t gone doesn’t need bringing back.
In folk literature the changeling is a common figure. In most tales it concerns a newborn baby robbed from his crib, with dark intentions, by an elf or goblin and replaced by a child of the robber’s race. In more recent literature and movies changelings can be older and are mostly human (like in the movie Changeling with Angelina Jolie) or near-human (like in the novel Changeling by Morgan Gallagher) In all cases no good is intended. In modern real life cases of changelings it is presumed there was no harm intended, but people made mistakes, were clueless or just plain inattentive. It’s all about hospital-born infants who were taken away from their mothers for medical exams and nursing care and returned to another mother afterwards. The fuss the last changelings case in an Australian hospital created in the media, is a good example of how many people share this kind of happenings among the worst they can imagine. (As an aside: for many people the fact that the babies were breastfed by the wrong mothers was even worse than the fact of changing itself!)
The shock for parents is, of course, immense. Personally I think that for a mother the pure fact that she doesn’t recognize a strangers child as not being her own is the most shocking. Isn’t a mother supposed to be able to blindly recognize her own child? yes, she is, in fact quite literary so. Mothers and their newborn children recognizes each other by smell and discriminate between similar but alien smells. Prerequisite is that mother and child are kept together, undisturbed for quite a while after birth, in order to get to know each other; to imprint on each other’s smells, tastes and features. To keep mother and child undisturbed together after birth has a lot of other positive consequences. Infant skin-to-skin on mom’s chest have more stable temperatures, don’t lose energy on stressing out and have better glucose levels as a result, they search and find and latch onto the breast well and lose less weight. Both mother and child have higher levels of prolactin and oxytocin, which do not only aid breastfeeding, but will help knitting a close mother-child attachment, an overall better well-being and the recovery from respectively giving birth and being born. Mothers and infants who stay together don’t get mixed up by inattentive caretakers, for what isn’t gone doesn’t need bringing back.
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