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Origins
Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives | Annie Murphy Paul
6 posts | 3 read | 2 to read
Paul presents an in-depth examination of how personalities are formed by biological, social, and emotional factors.
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sakkineni

Money that improves schooling is always well spent, of course. But perhaps it would be better spent long before anyone reaches school age - before birth, when his brain and body are still forming.

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sakkineni

“The cumulative advantages of a healthy prenatal environment and a stimulating postnatal environment is enormous.” But just how, how much intelligence is affected by prenatal conditions is hotly contested, as is almost every assertion in the field of intelligence research.

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sakkineni

But there‘s something else going on here, too: the rise of an invincible icon I think of as the Pregnant Superwoman. This imaginary superhero never needs to sit down and take the weight of her feet, or catch her breath at the top of the stairs. She runs a marathon in her third trimester and works twelve hour days until her water breaks. ... and she has become the unattainable standard against which women measure themselves during pregnancy.

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sakkineni

Today, attitudes have undergone an almost complete reversal. The notion that women should restrict their activities during pregnancy is regarded as old-fashioned at best, and patronizing at worst. How well a women handles pregnancy not on how gracefully she submits to a new regimen of rest, but on how determinedly she adheres to her prepregnancy schedule.

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sakkineni

Like Sandman a number of scientists have found that severe stress is related with a higher risk of early delivery, or having a baby of low birth weight.

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sakkineni

In the words of the commentator, the children of the holocuat victims bore “the scar without the wound.” Yehuda too subscribed to this notion. “I was really convinced that the early experiences of the child, being bombarded by the years of psychiatric symptoms of the parents, accounted for the transgenerational effect we observed.”