This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
These days we know how important it is for young children to feel loved.
Parents are encouraged to sit with their kids, read to them, hug them, make them feel safe.
But believe it or not, this wasn't always the case.
It's so fascinating to look back on that period and think to yourself, how could you get that so wrong?
This is writer Deborah Blum.
She's looked closely at what caused the revolution in psychology around how best to parent children.
The early books told mothers not to hold their children at all if they could avoid it, that it would ruin the moral fiber of the child.
We'll hear more about the effects of loving touch and its absence in a moment.
We turn to one of our colleagues, Alison McAdam, for a personal story about the importance of affection, touch and attachment.
Alison's an editor at NPR, and she has a secret.
I'm just going to come out and say it.
I sleep with my blanket, my baby blanket.
Here's what it looks like.
It's white woven cotton.
It's a little threadbare.
It is the softest thing in the world, and even on the hottest days, it feels cool when I bury my nose in it.
It smells like comfort.
As a baby, apparently, I called it baba, so of course I still call it baba.