Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt
Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
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Why Love Matters
How affection shapes a baby's brain

Author: Sue Gerhardt

Narrator: Phyllida Nash

Unabridged: 10 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 07/07/2026

Synopsis


Why Love Matters explains why loving relationships are essential to brain development in the early years, and how these early interactions can have lasting consequences for future emotional and physical health. This second edition follows on from the success of the first, updating the scientific research, covering recent findings in genetics and the mind/body connection, and including a new chapter highlighting our growing understanding of the part also played by pregnancy in shaping a baby’s future emotional and physical well-being. The author focuses in particular on the wide-ranging effects of early stress on a baby or toddler’s developing nervous system. When things go wrong with relationships in early life, the dependent child has to adapt; what we now know is that his or her brain adapts too. The brain’s emotion and immune systems are particularly affected by early stress and can become less effective. This makes the child more vulnerable to a range of later difficulties such as depression, anti-social behaviour, addictions or anorexia, as well as physical illness.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Cameron on October 15, 2007

This book changed my life. Really. I had never thought about social development in the terms in which Gerhardt proposes. And I've never been so self-aware. Still, sometimes I can't help thinking ignorance is bliss.........more

Goodreads review by Maria on October 14, 2008

Fascinating book giving a solid argument for importance of empathic and responsive care in early infancy. The care we receive as babies sews the seeds for future adult relationships and how feelings are regulated psychologically and physiologically. If a baby is not regulated well by the parent he w......more

Goodreads review by Angeles on September 13, 2011

This book has been an amazing discovery. The way the author has been able to translate recent hard-science evidence into intelligible information is great. I'd like this book to be made compulsory reading at university, when one is mature enough to reflect about what it means to create a new life, a......more

Goodreads review by Artemis D on June 14, 2012

This book blew my mind. Along with Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn it's one of the most important books on parenting I've read. Drawing together compellingly presented, well researched evidence from neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and biochemistry, Sue Gerhart provides an excellent ac......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 07, 2013

A strange book. Easy to read (although it gets rather repetitive) and with some interesting information on the scientific evidence of the impact of relationships on the brain, but the interrelationship between the claims about brain states and the psychotherapeutic insights is rather uncertain. Some......more

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