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THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE BRAIN AND HOLDING A BABY
Why does Mom (and Dad, of course) hold baby with baby’s head on Mom’s left side? It’s not because of a connection the baby feels with Mom’s heartbeat. And it also has nothing to do with right-handedness versus left-handedness. Left-handed mothers also tend to hold their babies on the left.
It has to do with brain specialization for emotional processing. As you know, the brain’s right hemisphere connects to left body functions, and vice-versa. The right hemisphere is active in negative-emotion processing (fear, sadness). So the right hemisphere of Mom’s brain (and Dad’s brain, too), wired to her left field of vision and hearing, can more sensitively attune to her infant’s negative emotional signals, enabling Mom to take action accordingly. Baby can’t talk yet, so mother-child communication is necessarily completely emotional.
By the way, this is why, when you’re talking to someone, you look at their right eye (your left field of vision), not their left eye.