AT A business seminar on human relationships, the speaker told of a hospital ward filled with orphaned babies. In a long row of beds, the babies became ill and some of them died​—except the baby in the last bed. It did well. The doctor was puzzled. All were fed, bathed, kept warm​—no difference in their care. Yet only the baby in the last bed thrived. As months passed and new babies were brought in, the story was always the same: Only the baby in the last bed did well.

Finally the doctor concealed himself to watch. At midnight the cleaning woman came in and on hands and knees scrubbed the floor, from one end to the other. The floor finished, she stood up, stretched, rubbed her back. Then she went to the last bed, picked up the baby, walked around the room with it, cuddling it, talking to it, rocking it in her arms. She put it back in its bed and left. The doctor watched the next night, and the next. Each night the same thing happened. It was always the baby in the last bed that got picked up, cuddled, talked to, and loved. And in all the new groups of babies brought in, it was always the baby in the last bed that thrived, while the others got sick and some died.

Over the years, babies’ need for love has been established by many studies. The Scientific American magazine published this report: “René Spitz of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and his colleague Katherine Wolf, took histories of 91 foundling-home infants in the eastern U.S. and Canada. They found that the infants consistently showed evidence of anxiety and sadness. Their physical development was retarded and they failed to gain weight normally or even lost weight. Periods of protracted insomnia alternated with periods of stupor. Of the 91, Spitz and Wolf reported, 34 died ‘in spite of good food and meticulous medical care.’”

A Florida psychiatrist said: “A child who does not get enough hugging or cuddling may grow up to be withdrawn, detached or aloof. . . . Physical body contact between parent and child is so essential in child rearing that in some cases children who were not hugged or cuddled during the first year of their lives did not survive.”