“Oh Jenny, you can’t pick her up every time she cries,” my mom chided as I scooped my three-day-old out of her bassinette and into my arms. My newborn quieted immediately but I seethed inside. Why didn’t my mother understand that I had a physical, primal, urgent need to hold my daughter as much as my daughter needed to be held?

My daughter’s birth had been difficult. Breastfeeding had not come easily to either of us. In the days after she was born I was sore and tired and overwhelmed. My breasts ached. It was summer in Atlanta and we did not have air conditioning so the temperature in our rental was about 1000 degrees. I had to go back to work in six weeks and I was already devastated by the thought of leaving my newborn. Even worse, my husband and I really didn’t know how to ask for or accept help back then. We had no family in the area (my mom was visiting from Massachusetts), knew almost no one with babies, and we had very little support. But even though we were both exhausted and I was awash in postpartum hormones, we were so happy to be caring for our infant. I loved holding her—breathing in the scent of her scalp and caressing her impossibly soft skin. And here my mother was, acting like cuddling and loving the baby was wrong.

“You don’t want to spoil her,” she said. “You don’t want her to think that you’ll pick her up every time she cries.”

We want to raise our babies to blossom into graceful children and responsible adults. We want to nurture them. We want, as Christine Gross-Loh explains in her book, Parenting Without Borders, our babies and our children to thrive. My mother’s words gave me pause. When a well meaning relative tells you with a disapproving look to let your baby ‘cry it out’ or ‘fuss it out,’ it’s hard not to wonder if by responding to your infant right away you are somehow spoiling her.

Can you spoil a baby?

Meredith Small, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of “Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent” says the answer is unequivocally no.

“Human babies are biologically designed to be physically and emotionally attached to somebody and if they don’t have that attachment all the time, 24 hours a day, they are unhappy,” Small told me a few years ago when I interviewed her for an article. “It’s sort of like we’re designed to eat … it’s that fundamental.”

Perhaps it was painful for my mom to see me and my husband respond so lovingly to our newborn because her parents had not responded to her so affectionately when she was a tiny baby. Or perhaps she was secretely harboring her own regrets about how she had treated me and my three older brothers when we were infants. Not to psychoanalyze it too much, but I also suspect my mom was a little jealous. She had a big personality and she liked to be taken care of. She was used to getting a lot of attention from me. And here I was, ignoring her to care for my infant.

But the bottom line is you can’t spoil a baby. So don’t be afraid to kiss your baby’s little head at least a hundred times a day, to carry him close to you, and to nurse him when he’s hungry even if he just nursed ten minutes ago.

“All the research has shown that children whose parents respond to their needs have better self-esteem and self-assurance than children who have not had their needs met,” Small told me.

Babies love and need to be held, they need to be fed when they are hungry, changed when they are wet, and showered with affection. Talking to them teaches them language, smiling at them helps them learn to smile back, and keeping them close helps them develop a strong sense of security. This isn’t spoiling them, it’s helping them learn that they are loved and cherished, that the world is a safe place, that grown-ups care about them, that problems can be fixed.

It turns out I did want my newborn to know that every time she cried someone would respond. Don’t we all want to know that if something is not right the people we love the most in the world will listen to us, try to figure out what is wrong, and help us make it right?

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute of Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Her new book, The Business of Baby, has been called a “must-read for new moms.”

Photo credit: Arun Kumar N.K.