Baby Doll

Investigations into the reaction of girls in Australia who were handed a doll-baby to look after, the doll-baby was programmed to respond to feeding and other human responses such as nappy changing, it also stimulated mood swings which required the girl to comfort the doll. I'm not sure why, other than an examination of the psychology of young girls towards baby's, which we all assumed we know through observation of kids around us but as is the scientific mind, it needed a controlled experiment. Therefore out of a controlled group some girls were given these doll-baby's, others not.
What has startled the people undertaking the work is that whilst the girls who did not have a doll-baby to care for, fitted the profile within Australian society of 11 % going on to have a real baby by the age of 20, in the group who had mothered the doll-baby, 17%.had babies before reaching 20.
One could make the easy assumption that having had the experience of looking after an infant, even an artificial one had stirred some sort of maternal  need in the girls and not withstanding the chore of being forced to attend to its needs when under normal circumstances the girls would have preferred to be doing something else, never the less it didn't put them off and I fact seems to have encouraged them to go on into having the real thing.
It has to be said that having a child before you are 20 is not the norm in Australia. It also assumes the pregnancies were wanted. But that apart it has to be acknowledged that this urge to be a mother and raise an infant is yet another major difference between men and women.
Obviously only women can give birth to a baby but there is something extra special  in the make up of girls/women that fit them for the role of motherhood. Apart from the anatomical imperative  they seem emotionally suited, in fact one could suggest their emotional needs encourage it.
It's not just the inherent role play of proving, to your peers you can bear a child, although that can play a part even when the economics are against you. It seems that the attraction of cuddling your own new born baby is for most people, if they were honest, one of the highest privileges in the pathonon of human privilege known to mankind. To hold a baby is to feel the importance of being a protector, some sort of deep support mechanism we carry around in us and the ability to project that sense of security into the baby when, for what ever reason it is unhappy, is one of the fundamental pleasures, and if like a switch, the baby stops crying as you chunter  some sort of baby language to it, or rock it about in a rhythmic way you feel deeply rewarded.
I developed a strange gentle rhythmic stamping movement as I patted my two as they struggled with wind, it usually did the trick and I always remember the look of relief on my cousins daughters face , in South Africa, being happily flabbergasted and greatly relieved since she was having great difficulty settling the baby and was at her wits end as I took her baby, which had been crying on and off for hours and with my Chaplinesque walk, gently bobbing her up and down until she stopped crying and went to sleep. I was never more pleased with myself, chuffed would be the word when I handed the baby back, job done.
It's their vulnerability and our our ability to make the elemental connection which is important.
Perhaps that is what we try to do throughout our lives, often failing but always trying, to make the connection and the very act of accelerating the process, to establish what it feels like from an early age, in the experiment, is sufficient to reveal one of the wonders of the world, an emotion, on which rests our continuation as a species.