Mother of All Myths

The legacy of the first gurus lives on both in ideas about what constitutes good mothering as well as in the continued reliance of Western societies on the words of experts and their personal philosophies. Winnicott’s lectures broadcast on the BBC were replaced by Dr Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare with which generations of babyboomers were reared. When they became parents, they turned to Penelope Leach’s Baby and Child. It’s a rare woman today who embarks upon motherhood without a manual in her hand, like an instruction leaflet for a new computer. Despite the fact that every mother knows that the theory and practice of raising children frequently do not coincide, there are few who dare to go it alone. The experts create and feed their own market by issuing dire and prophetic warnings of the untold damage inflicted upon children by uninformed parents who may think they know what is good for their own child. Of all the many ways guilt has been induced and exploited in mothers, the childcare gurus must rank high on the list.

A famous author, who is the mother of several children, once told me that she had each of her children in a different decade and raised each on the popular method of the moment, with a different and conflicting set of rules every time. If after every birth, as she embarked on motherhood anew, she had believed the words of the fashionable, new expert she would only have been able to conclude that she had utterly ruined her preceding child. Truby King, who influenced many generations of mothers up until the Second World War, warned mothers against touching, petting or ‘spoiling’ their children and decreed a four-hour feeding schedule. A Truby King baby would have had a very different infancy from that of his younger sibling born in 1950 and brought up with Spock’s enthusiasm for displays of maternal affection and feeding on demand. From early on, experts emerged from various and often competing fields whose disciplines placed the emphasis on different aspects of the child’s well-being. Some were doctors whose main concern was with exercise and nutrition; others were ethologists keen to apply their observations on animal behaviour to human subjects; still others were psychologists and psychoanalysts who were far more interested in the dynamics of the relationship between mother and child.

Early in the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud was expanding his theories of human behaviour and the development of personality. The resulting discipline of psychoanalysis has, at its core, the belief that early experiences in childhood set in place events and behaviour in later life. It is this idea, which was built upon and developed by Freud’s disciples, that is central to the tendency, which later became endemic, to blame mothers for their children’s misfortunes and to scrutinize the relationship between mothers and their children.

Freud, however, was actually far more interested in the relationship between boys and their fathers and the resolution of the Oedipal conflict which was the foundation stone of all his theories. He did not actually delve deeply into the personality or behaviour of the mother, nor was he concerned with specific childrearing practices, believing instead that babies are driven by powerful instincts and love their mothers who are the people who feed, warm and comfort them. But he did explicitly point to the direction in which psychoanalysis was to progress by describing the mother-child relationship as ‘unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and the prototype of all later love-relations – for both sexes’.

Freud’s sexism is notorious and has been the subject of criticism both from within psychoanalysis as well as outside. He saw women as castrated men and wrote of their ‘sense of inferiority’ and of the blame young girls place on their mothers for their lack of a penis which has left them for ever ‘insufficiently equipped’.1 Motherhood was women’s salvation and compensation for being without a penis, particularly if they bore a male child equipped with the prized piece of anatomy.

Only in relatively recent times, with the advent of feminist thinking in all disciplines including psychoanalysis, have Freud’s theories about women been properly addressed. In the 1970s Kate Millett, the American feminist, accused Freud and his followers of overlooking in their entirety existing social structures and notions of femininity which, rather than biology, might account for women’s social status. In other words, Millet argued that nurture rather than nature might account for gender differences.

From within the therapy movement, psychologists Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow have both powerfully reinterpreted Freud’s theories on motherhood. In The Mermaid and the Minotaur, published in 1977, Dinnerstein presents the idea that small children develop a rage against their mothers (which is never properly overcome) as the person who alone has the power to grant or withhold what the child desires. Chodorow says it is the girl’s unconscious identification with her mother, while boys see themselves as different and separate, that endlessly reproduces gendered divisions of labour and women’s exclusive responsibility for nurturing children: girls copy their mothers mothering. Both women argue that society and the position of women and mothers will improve only when men take on their share of responsibility for their children.

So, in the first three decades of the century, while Freud was producing his theories, the essential elements which would eventually produce our modern maternal ideology were coming together. The medicalization of motherhood – the result of an increased scientific understanding – removed childcare from the hands of women and placed it in the hands of experts. Soon most babies in Britain would be born in hospital and this, added to the creation of the welfare state in the post-war period, dramatically decreased the infant mortality rate. For the first time in history, parents did not need to fear the death of their children.

Concern for the physical health of children was immediately replaced by new considerations for their mental health and psychological well-being. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby highlighted this concern with his theory of ‘attachment’; in other words, the biological bonds between mother and child urgently required that, in the post-war period, women should return en masse from the world of work to their rightful place, as he saw it, in the home. Between them these men – and with very few exceptions they were all men – created the ideal of the 1950s stay-at-home, full-time mother.

The gurus rose fast in their respective fields, amassing tremendous fame and influence, but one by one their theories have been reconsidered by subsequent generations and either debunked or rethought. Today, no one would dream of leaving a young baby to sleep outside on a cold night, as Truby King once advised. Bowlby’s ideas have been revisited and watered down. In modern times, Marshall Klaus and John Kennell, two Bowlby followers, presented their theory of bonding to a receptive public, only to have their methods criticized and their findings overturned by their peers. Few were unmasked as spectacularly as Bruno Bettelheim, a world-famous psychoanalyst and expert on autism. Bettelheim’s theory that autism, now recognized to have an organic genesis, was caused by extremely brutal treatment at the hands of the children’s mothers gained wide acceptance, despite the protests of the accused women. Bettelheim’s solution was to separate mother and child and allow no contact between them. Only after his death by his own hand in 1990, when an American investigative journalist Richard Pollack (whose own mother had been blamed for his brother’s autism by the doctor) delved into Bettelheim’s background, did the truth emerge.2 Bettelheim had fabricated his credentials including his training as a psychoanalyst, faked research and claimed to have cured children he never even treated. In all, he was a fraud who tormented and vilified mothers, and influenced the way emotionally disturbed children were treated for decades.

Frederick Truby King

Most of the childcare gurus make one unequivocally positive contribution to childcare and with Truby King it was the revival of breastfeeding, which at that time had become thoroughly unfashionable. ‘Breast is best’ was his saying and his achievements, including halving the infant mortality rate in New Zealand, are undoubtedly due to that single premise. Otherwise posterity has not judged Truby King kindly. His approach to childrearing was strict, forceful and unyielding. He bullied, cajoled and threatened mothers whom he appeared to regard as the weak link in the entire process (he once commented in exasperation that if men had the capacity to breastfeed they would have the sense to do what he said) and he advocated for the care of small babies a regime of almost military harshness.

Babies were to be fed only every four hours and at no other time, regardless of how much they cried or however apparent their distress. He also forbade mothers to feed at night at all, urging them to let their babies ‘cry it out’ rather than give in. To do so would have been to spoil the child. The Truby King method also discouraged physical contact between mother and child, including kissing or cuddling which was considered unnecessary as well as unhealthy and highly likely to pass on germs. Playing with babies would only overexcite them and for that reason was frowned upon. Of course, many women broke the rules and hugged or played with their babies only to berate themselves about it afterwards.

A flick through his most famous book, Care and Feeding of Baby, reveals what has become the standard style for babycare books even today: the only two characters are Mother and Baby (fathers have no role except to earn money); baby is always a boy; the family arrangements are nuclear. The prose is classic ‘carrot and stick’. The author uses his professional status to back up his mixture of inducements and warnings. Mothers would achieve peace and perfection if they followed his advice.

Breaking the rules resulted in indiscipline, a ruined child or even death as the eminent paediatrician remarked in speeches which were sometimes little more than rants against the failings of mothers: ‘much wastage of infant life in our midst is due to self-indulgence and shirking of duties.’3 Mothers frustrated Sir Frederick who would have much preferred that the care of infants was entirely taken over by specially trained nurses.

Despite a firm belief in gender roles and the place of women, Truby King did not appear to believe in the idea of maternal instinct. He considered motherhood a calling for which women had to be trained, because left to their own devices they would ruin the lives of their children. The closest he ever came to recognizing any kind of natural emotions was a reference to the additional advantage of promoting bonds between mother and child when breastfeeding. In general he regarded mothers as inadequate, ignorant and lacking in discipline. A mother was all that stood between him and the creation of the perfect child.

When Truby King died in 1938 in New Zealand, his long and distinguished career had earned him international recognition. His ideas lived on until the war years and just beyond; many of today’s fifty-, sixty- and seventy-year-olds were Truby King babies, and many grandmothers still regard silence, solitude and timed feeds as the definition of a good baby.

The aftermath of the Second World War produced a new set of circumstances and a different agenda. Women, too, were ready to give up this gruelling and often heartbreaking regime. By the 1950s, Truby King’s ideas were swept aside as a new era of motherhood rolled in.

John Bowlby

No other theorist had as powerful and as radical an effect on thinking about motherhood as Edward John Mostyn Bowlby who died in 1990 and whose ideas on ‘attachment’ and the effects of maternal deprivation form the cornerstone of modern maternal ideology. Unlike the other great ‘gurus’, Bowlby was not so much a popular writer as an academic and theorist. Nevertheless, his first book. Child Care and the Growth of Love, sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. It was a seminal work.

Bowlby came from somewhat elevated beginnings. He was distinctly upper class, the heir to a baronet who was raised by a nanny, followed by boarding-school and Cambridge. As with Freud, there has been speculation over whether it was Bowlby’s early experience of being raised by a somewhat distant mother, who preferred to leave the children’s care to a hired nanny, that established Bowlby’s later fascination with mother-child relationships.

The 1940s were a critical period for Europe and for Bowlby, and most of his ideas were the fruit of this thoroughly atypical period. The Second World War bore witness to the large-scale evacuation of children from the cities to the relative safety of the countryside and sometimes abroad to other countries, such as Canada. Children were separated from their families for months, even years, often boarded with strangers and lived unfamiliar lives.

War changed the lives of women. In the previous decades women’s work outside the home had been declining steadily, but conscription and the call to arms reversed the trend sharply. Women staffed the munitions factories, went to the countryside to work the fields and bring in the harvests, volunteered as nurses, raised funds for the war effort and joined the Wrens. For the first (and last) time in the history of the country, the government both condoned women working outside the home and provided extensive, state-funded nursery and daycare so that they could do so.

Britain and the world had undergone massive social shifts, the long-term effects of which remained unclear. Six years of fighting a war had resulted in population shifts and decimated communities in the countryside and the city. Eventually, terraced homes, with their narrow streets and facing backyards, would be pulled down and replaced by modern tower blocks and prefabs. While that was still to come, the social effects were already felt, particularly by mothers who lost their support networks of kin and neighbours in one fell swoop. Women from the upper classes no longer had servants to administer to their children’s needs and for the first time became wholly responsible for their own offspring.

This is the context within which Bowlby produced his studies of institutionalized childcare and his twin theories of the instinctual bond between mother and child which should never be broken, and the effect upon children if the bond is broken.

Bowlby had been following with interest the work of Rene Spitz who had made a study of institutionalized babies. Spitz’s findings then mirror the situation documented in state orphanages in China in the 1990s: children deprived of human contact and isolated for long periods will fail to thrive, rocking themselves back and forth, hitting their heads repeatedly against the sides of their cot, or staring in dull passivity for hours on end. Bowlby carried out his own study of forty-four child thieves, noting that seventeen of them had been separated from their mothers for a period as infants. Struck by this fact he ascribed their later problems to this single event, famously writing: ‘changes of mother-figure can have very destructive effects in producing the development of an affectionless psychopathic character given to persistent juvenile conduct.’4

In 1950 the World Health Organization commissioned a study from Bowlby on children orphaned or separated from their parents as a result of the war in France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. The report, which was published in 1951, immediately caused an international sensation. In its pages Bowlby condemned the cruelty of all institutional care, arguing that children needed and were entitled to the love and care of a mother. Anything less amounted to ‘maternal deprivation’, the effects of which would be seared on the child’s psyche eternally and irrevocably.

Bowlby desperately wanted to close down or at least reform the system of large orphanages which were incapable of meeting the needs of individual children. In this he succeeded and he can be thanked for current social welfare policies which try to place a child with foster parents or in a family environment instead of in children’s homes. But for women, for mothers, Bowlby’s views, his high ideals and exacting standards as well as the way his work has since been interpreted, spelled disaster.

In Child Care and the Growth of Love, Bowlby declares that the mental health of a child absolutely requires ‘a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother…in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment’.5 No small order by anyone’s standards, but that is the very least of it. He continues: ‘we must recognise that leaving any child of under three years of age is a major operation only to be undertaken for sufficient and good reason.’6

In Bowlby’s terms, not only should a mother be her child’s constant companion, but she should find her fulfilment in the role, too. If she fails to do so, the whole exercise is useless. ‘The mother needs to feel an expansion of her own personality in the personality of the child’ – note needs to feel. ‘The provision of mothering’, he argued, ‘cannot be considered in terms of hours per day, but only in terms of the enjoyment of each other’s company which mother and child obtain.’ Any woman who hesitated received admonishment in the very next paragraph. ‘The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 days in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood, through the many phases of childhood, to become an independent man or woman, and knows it is her care which has made this possible.’7 Of course, there weren’t, and aren’t, many women who would have dared to declare themselves anything less than absolutely committed to the healthy progress of their children.

Bowlby elaborated all kinds of emotional, psychological and character disorders which could result from maternal deprivation, from the creation of full-blown psychopaths to adults unable to function properly in their own relationships. Deprivation had many causes, including a child’s stay in hospital. Ignoring a crying child counted as partial deprivation, this last much to the consternation of a generation of women who had followed the diktats of Truby King with their own children.

All the attention mothers were required to lavish upon their children facilitated their proper ‘attachment’ to each other. Bowlby was an early fan of ethology and from his readings on the behaviour of birds and monkeys, specifically ideas about imprinting (the way newborn animals automatically follow their mother), he concluded that an infant’s attachment to its mother was both natural and instinctive.

Fathers, it will be no surprise to hear, once again had no significant role, save as earners. By placing so much emphasis on mothers and arguing that attachment was instinctive and natural, Bowlby left little for fathers who have struggled to find a place in their children’s lives ever since. Bowlby himself was a father of four who, by all accounts, left the care of his children entirely up to his wife Ursula.

Bowlby’s theories were seized upon and his conclusions, based on extreme situations, were glibly applied to the everyday. It is clear, too, that Bowlby himself, in his zeal, overstated his case. An immediate consequence was panic among women terrified they had already damaged children – an anxiety he was obliged to quell by softening his message slightly in later writings.

Another far more serious consequence was Bowlby’s success in achieving the closure of not only the orphanages he loathed, but the vast proportion of nurseries and daycare centres which had opened up, with government approval and funding, during the war. In 1944 there were 1,559 nurseries in Britain catering to tens of thousands of children, but after the war the nurseries became an expensive wartime legacy for the government, which was also under pressure to provide jobs for thousands of returned soldiers. In 1951, in response to Bowlby’s commissioned report, a WHO report claimed that nurseries and daycare ‘cause permanent damage to the emotional health of a generation’.8 Bowlby’s findings swiftly became official policy. By the early 1950s virtually all the wartime nurseries had gone. It became accepted wisdom among health professionals, social workers and teachers that working mothers ran the risk of damaging their children.

It has been suggested by some historians and writers that more than a whiff of conspiracy surrounds what appears to be the remarkably fortuitous timing of mutually expedient concerns. From the point of view of the government, there does appear to be some truth in the suggestion that they had more in mind than the happiness of infants when they embraced Bowlby’s theories so readily. But Bowlby probably also imagined he was elevating the status of mothers by bestowing on their task so much importance, rather than simply driving women back into the home. It is easy to see how his theories could have been a soft sell to plenty of women. Many had witnessed or experienced the wartime shattering of their families. They wanted time to re-establish relationships with their children and their husbands. These were the babyboom years when not only cities and economies were being rebuilt, but families too. Postwar prosperity in Britain, helped by billions of dollars of Marshall Plan aid from America, meant that even blue-collar workers could earn enough to keep a wife and family.

It is illuminating to see how certain of Bowlby’s recommendations were taken up, while others were ignored. Bowlby was opposed to mothers with young children going out to work at all. Previously most nurseries were perfectly prepared to accept two-year-olds, but soon, thanks to Bowlby’s warnings, they would only take children from the age of five. Bowlby, however, did recognize that most women who worked did so because they needed the money. By way of compensation he suggested a wage for housework to be paid by the government to mothers, to encourage and enable them to stay at home – a proposal that never made it to the statute books.

The train Bowlby set on track gathered pace in the years that followed. In time, researchers began to focus not just on the mother’s relationship with her child, but even on her competence. Selma Fraiberg, a Bowlby devotee, invented a method for measuring a child’s attachment to the mother and declared that children whose mothers were not sufficiently skilled or attentive were poorly attached and would grow up insecure. In her immensely popular 1959 book The Magic Years, she argued that nothing less than twenty-four-hour devotion would do, and that being cared for by persons other than their mother was actually harmful to infants. Notably, her calls for financial support for mothers to stay at home also went unheeded.

So the 1950s mother was actually Pygmalion mum, the result of one man’s vision of the perfect mother. For a mixture of social and economic reasons, Bowlby’s ideal of the loving, selfless, stay-at-home supermum became, and still is to this day, the established view of what constitutes ‘normal’ mothering. Motherhood became transformed into a rigid, rule-laden process, governed by dogma produced by so-called experts whose views were always framed in terms of what was best for baby, placing them beyond debate. By being so inflexible and so extreme in the application of ideas which had started as guiding principles, the new professionals put the interests of mothers and their children into conflict.

Typically, far more attention is paid to a controversial or radical new theory than to the subsequent critiques. If Bowlby and his followers were accepted uncritically by the general public, within his profession his views prompted no small degree of controversy. Many other critics came from fields outside psychoanalysis such as ethology, sociology and anthropology. One of his critics was the world-famous anthropologist Margaret Mead who had spent years chronicling childrearing methods in Samoa, Bali and the United States and elsewhere. She dismissed his ideas on the need for exclusive mothering and his ideas about attachment. Others pointed to aspects of Bowlby’s research, in particular the methods he used, which would never meet the standards required of scientific studies today. He rarely, for example, used control groups to measure his findings or looked for other possible causes.