If anyone may be in immediate danger, call 911 or your local emergency number.
Birth
Birth involves a rapid series of physical transitions.
A baby moves from the prenatal environment into direct contact with air, light, sound, temperature, gravity, touch, and movement.
Breathing and circulation change.
The body must begin maintaining temperature differently while remaining profoundly dependent on care.
This rapid change can place stress on the body as the newborn adjusts. **
Crying may communicate discomfort, need, activation, or distress. It is one of the newborn’s earliest ways of signalling.
At the same time, some familiarity may remain.
Newborns can respond to voices and rhythms heard before birth.
Warmth, responsive contact, and—when available and medically appropriate—skin-to-skin care can support temperature, settling, and early connection.
Not every birth or immediate period unfolds in the same way.
Medical needs, separation, prematurity, and other circumstances may affect what contact is possible.
Birth introduces intense change alongside the possibility of support and regulation through other human beings.
What Early Experience May Begin to Shape
These first moments are unlikely to become autobiographical memories.
They are still part of early physiological and sensory experience.
Repeated experiences of discomfort, settling, separation, responsiveness, and contact may participate in emerging regulation.
No single moment determines how someone will later respond to intensity, separation, closeness, or relief.
Early experience is one influence among ongoing caregiving, health, relationships, material conditions, culture, and everything that follows.
This is early development—not dysfunction, and not a finished pattern.
What These Figures Represent
These figures form a symbolic map of development.
They are not intended to show that every person has the same experience or that a particular event produces a particular later pattern.
The Translucent Figures
These represent conditions and experiences that may exist before conscious memory, including:
- early physiological activation and strain;
- experiences of warmth, contact, and settling;
- and dependence on other people for care and regulation.
They are translucent because these experiences may not be available to autobiographical memory.
They may participate in later capacity, but they do not determine it.
The Golden Figure
This represents the living person today—the one continuing through the world.
It stands in front because a person carries a developmental history without being reducible to it.
Earlier experience may still participate, alongside present conditions, relationships, capacity, learning, and choice.