He 80% of people cradle our children on the left side of our body, that is, with the head on our left arm and the rest of the body going to the right, or if we take it in arms, with the head resting on our left shoulder.
This gesture, this custom, which does not seem to have a clear logic, has long been a doubt that scientists have tried to answer, so as we find it just as curious that they will try to explain the different responses to why we usually cradle babies on the left side.
Because on that side is the heart
The first answer that science offered came from the American psychologist Lee Salk, who explained that we put them on that side, instinctively, because so babies could be close to the heartbeat of the parents, and especially of the mothers, being a sound they already knew since pregnancy.
However, although this theory was taken as valid for a long time, later studies showed that the preferred sound of babies was not the mother's heartbeat, but his voice, and that in fact the heartbeat did not seem to have greater significance. Come on, babies didn't care if they heard mom's heart or not.
Because it coincides with the right hemisphere of the mother
The following answer came a few years ago and we were offered by Victoria Bourne and Brenda Todd, from the British University of Sussex, who explained that what happens on the left side of our body stimulates and puts into operation the right hemisphere of our brain. Thus, their cries, their laughter, their yawns, their moans and groans and their cries of happiness arrive directly the right hemisphere of the mother's brain, which is the hemisphere in charge of recognizing emotional gestures and facial expressions. Something like using the most direct and logical way to understand our baby, putting it on the side of the body that activates the right hemisphere, that of emotions.
Because most people are right handed
I give the third answer, although I don't know if it can be taken into account because left-handed people also prefer to cradle their children in the left hand. If someone asked me why I always take my children on the left I would answer without hesitation that "because I am right-handed". You do not know the things that I have come to do with a baby in my left hand, which I imagine as every father or mother: pick up dishes, clean the table, eat, type on the keyboard and a long etcetera, all to leave free The most skillful hand of the two.
Now, if it is a question of sleeping the children, it is true, I always put my head on the left, but it could also be because of the habit of putting them there to do things (or perhaps it is because of the issue of my brain ...).
