Mother of All Myths

Perhaps the main and most constant criticism is that while Bowlby claimed to be making a study of the effects of ‘maternal deprivation’ on children, what he was really looking at were the results of institutionalization. The children whose case histories make up the bulk of his work were deprived of everything, including ordinary human contact and any kind of affection. They were placed in huge orphanages and had dozens of carers who often provided poor care. Many had suffered some kind of distress in the form of family conflict, or wartime loss, others had been abused. Simply put, these were deeply unhappy children.

The British psychiatrist Michael Rutter has significantly revised and rethought many of Bowlby’s ideas. In his 1972 book Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, he shows that some of the symptoms of ‘maternal deprivation’ which Bowlby described, in particular stunted growth and poor speech development, had far more mundane roots. The children did not grow properly because of their meagre, vitamin-depleted orphanage diet, not because they lacked a mother’s love. Similarly, they had poor vocabularies because of their environment, not their parenting. Indeed, children in large families often display the same problem. As for maternal deprivation creating ‘affectionless psychopaths’, Rutter showed that children whose mothers had died did not become delinquents. The root causes of criminal behaviour in children lay elsewhere.

The popular appeal of Bowlby’s theory of uninterrupted mothering lay in the fact that it seemed to explain something mothers already recognized – that children can be clingy. Bowlby took that premise several stages further and insisted that separating mother and child was actually wrong because it was damaging. Many psychologists now agree, however, that separation per se does not equal damage, even if the child cries when the mother leaves and even if the mother misses her child when she is apart from her. A child is not harmed by his mother working or by being left with other carers.

In his assessment of all the research since Bowlby, Rutter argued that attachment was neither exclusive nor irreversible, but rather a child could be attached to more people than just the mother and attachments could strengthen or weaken during the child’s life. As far as the mother was concerned, it was not the quantity of time but rather the intensity of interaction during the time she spent with her child: ‘mothers who play with their child and give him a great deal of attention have a more strongly attached child than those who interact with the child only when giving him routine care.’9 Rutter still talked in terms of the duties of mothers as opposed to fathers and so did little to shift the weight of responsibility, although he did lessen the load slightly. One unanticipated result was to start the 1980s vogue for ‘quality time’ with which modern working mothers tried to assuage their feelings of guilt towards their children.

Neither Bowlby nor his supporters paused to consider the individual characteristics or needs of mothers. It was as though they regarded women as coming from some kind of mould like Stepford Wives, willing and able to accept all the many requirements of their role. Perhaps they believed that ‘instinct’ would somehow subsume every other personality trait and mothers would express towards their children only a bland, ideal type of love. But it seems evident that an aggressive, competitive woman will make a very different kind of mother from a bookish, withdrawn one; an exuberant, cheerful woman will approach her role unlike an anxious woman; a woman whose interests consist solely of classical music and intellectual discourse will doubtless find less pleasure in the company of a three-year-old than someone who prefers board games and walking in the park. When it comes to ideas about motherhood, common sense can sometimes appear to go out of the window. Women have their share of all mankind’s imperfections, and yet to this day we expect to create perfect mothers out of imperfect humans.

Nancy Chodorow, a powerful psychoanalytical thinker, has taken the debate about attachment one stage further by saying that forcing mothers to spend all their time with their children, and to carry the entire emotional burden, guarantees the failure of the very relationship which Bowlby was trying to promote. Ann Dally, a psychiatrist, also points out that although mothers staying at home with their children remains a popular ideal, ‘there is no scientific evidence to justify it on psychological grounds and…if one wanted to look for evidence one might even come up with the suspicion that the era of unbroken and exclusive maternal care has produced the most neurotic, disjointed, alienated and drug-addicted generation ever known.’10

What’s more, the ideology of motherhood which Bowlby helped to create is almost entirely middle class in its aspirations, as well as being culturally specific. Although exclusive maternal care is often deemed to be natural – proponents of the idea usually point to baby monkeys clinging to their mothers’ backs in the animal world – it seems as though, among humans at least, this way of raising children is not actually standard. A study carried out in the late 1970s of 186 non-industrial cultures by two anthropologists. Weisner and Gallimore, found only five societies where the mother did not share the care of her children with other people.11 Similar conclusions were noted in the seminal study Mothers of Six Cultures by a team of American anthropologists carried out over almost two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. They observed that the American mother was unique among the cultures they studied in having sole responsibility for her children.

Many of the greatest minds of child development and mothering, including Michael Rutter, Nancy Chodorow, Ann Dally and the eminent British psychologist Barbara Tizard, have all surmised that shared parenting or shared mothering is just as good for children. Some even consider it to be preferable.

Dally provides a closing thought on the theory of attachment and how it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Over the last forty years we…have been trying to condition babies to become attached to their mothers exclusively and, having done that, we…proceed to do research which reveals the undoubted distress caused when an infant who has been conditioned in this way is suddenly separated from his mother…This research is then used by academics and politicians to ‘prove’ that young children should be tied even more totally and exclusively to their mothers.12

Psychology has succeeded in creating what it originally set out to describe.

Towards a child-centred philosophy of childcare

Since Bowlby published his theories, childcare has become increasingly focused on the child whose needs now take centre-stage. Throughout the 1950s, the man who defined ‘motherhood’ was the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who elaborated and built on Bowlby’s themes of attachment and interdependence. Winnicott’s influence gave way in the 1960s to America’s Dr Benjamin Spock, who was regarded at the time as outrageously permissive in his ‘let the child decide’ approach to raising children. If greatness were measured in book sales and popular appeal alone, then Spock would stand head and shoulders above the rest of the gurus. Sales of his original volume Baby and Child Care reached 40 million and Spock continued to write until he died aged ninety-four in 1998.

Freudian ideas influenced both theorists. Spock and Winnicott emphasized the mother’s unique and (as far as Winnicott was concerned) irreplaceable role in the emotional growth of the child.

Donald Winnicott made his name at a time when mothers were still reeling from the extremes required by Truby King in the name of discipline and training. Mothers neither trusted their own judgement nor did they have any faith in the advice of their own mothers who still believed in the value of four-hour feeds. Indeed, the ‘gurus’ of the twentieth century have been almost solely responsible for breaking down the time-honoured passing of wisdom and knowledge about childcare from mothers to daughters. Winnicott won women over with his sympathetic approach which stressed maternal warmth and love instead of rules, rations and timetables.

Most people in the 1950s came to know of Winnicott through his immensely successful BBC radio lectures on childcare. For Winnicott, just like Bowlby, a woman could not be with her baby enough and anything less than total devotion to the role of mother was an absolute dereliction of a duty bestowed by nature. Perhaps his most famous contribution to twentieth-century ideas about motherhood was to say that there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother-baby unit.

Winnicott praised women’s efforts and their contribution repeatedly and self-consciously: ‘I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother…makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.’13 And he set himself apart from other professionals who sought to tell mothers what to do and interfered with the natural process of mothering which, according to him, women knew best. Women warmed to him. At last it seemed, here was someone who thought about mothers and not just children.

Winnicott was just as frequently patronizing, though, and the accolades came mixed with condescension. In his essay ‘A Man Looks at Motherhood’ he remarks: ‘you do not even have to be clever, and you don’t even have to think if you do not want to. You may have been hopeless at arithmetic at school, or perhaps all your friends got scholarships, but you didn’t like the sight of a history book and so failed and left school early.’14 The man who invented the notion of the ‘good enough mother’ concludes the paragraph with this observation intended to reassure his readers: ‘Isn’t it strange that such a tremendously important thing should depend so little on exceptional intelligence.’

Being a ‘good enough mother’ on Winnicott’s terms wasn’t so easy. A woman needed a saint-like capacity for patience, devotion, self-sacrifice and the ability to find fulfilment in even the most mundane tasks of motherhood. She had to delight in every filled nappy, every burp or fart or night-time wakening. ‘All you need is love’ might have been Winnicott’s refrain, and that wasn’t asking much because, according to him, women were like that anyway, it was simply part of female nature. The role of fathers, who were otherwise never mentioned, was simply to make baby love his mother all the more by being ‘hard and strict and unrelenting, intransigent, indestructible’.15 Trying to help the mother out would just interfere with his proper function.

In case any woman found her capacity to give waning, Winnicott backed up his sweet refrain with a few well-placed threats, promising stunted emotional development and psychological malfunction in the child if the mother failed. This is what happens when a mother doesn’t pay attention and picks her child up without supporting the infant’s head: ‘There are very subtle things here,’ listeners to the broadcast were warned:

If you have got a child’s body and head in your hands and do not think of that as unity and reach for a handkerchief or something, then the head has gone back and the child is in two pieces – head and body; the child screams and never forgets it. The awful thing is that nothing is ever forgotten. Then the child goes around with an absence of confidence in things.16

The Winnicott child was a fragile bloom who, without showers of love and constant nurturing, would wither and fail.

Of course, everyone in Winnicott’s world was white, middle class and lived in a nuclear family. With his emphasis on raising children in the correct environment, in his extraordinarily prescriptive world there was no room (and, one presumes, no hope either) for children with different family arrangements.

Winnicott also introduced the idea that, in addition to their mothers’ continual presence, what babies needed most of all was familiarity in their environment. In other words, once a routine had been established it should not be changed, nor should the child be moved from location to location. So the woman who put her faith in Winnicott could expect to spend her time isolated at home with her child, unable and unwilling to do much more than make a trip to the shops for fear of playing havoc with her child’s psyche. One wonders what he would have made of, say, Tuareg children who from the moment of their birth are on the move and do not see the same spot from year to year, whose tented homes are pitched in a different place week by week and who are cared for by several women and not just their mothers. Although Winnicott claimed that most mothers were ‘good enough’ mothers, the tone of his writing and lectures was every bit as rigid and moralistic as Truby King’s.

In contrast, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare was cleverly titled and almost certainly struck a chord with women who were tired of the perfectionism demanded of them by men who had never looked after a child for a day in their lives. Spock’s name became closely associated with 1960s’ ideas of freedom from constraints and tolerance and at one point he was held almost solely responsible for the student riots of that decade, which his critics maintained were provoked by youngsters raised according to his permissive ideas. Right or wrong, the accusation nevertheless shows the extent of his influence.

Spock was himself raised on the standards of Emmett Holt (the American Truby King) but his own approach to childcare was just the opposite: sleep when the baby felt like it; potty training in her own time; feeding on demand and then as much or as little as the baby wanted; he didn’t even insist on breastfeeding. While earlier approaches to childcare insisted babies fit in with adult schedules, Spock had it the other way around, but his relaxed approach meant that mothers had to be on hand twenty-four hours a day while baby did things in his own time.

The quantities of information from every quarter, the sea-changes in expert-led opinion, and most of all the apparently dire consequences of getting it wrong have placed mothers in a state of utter dependency on outside sources of information. Although Spock often urged women to trust their own instincts, as social historian Shari Thurer remarked in her historical account of motherhood: ‘If a mother knew which of her impulses to trust, why would she have cracked the cover of these books in the first place?’17

Spock’s era was a time of changing ideas and Spock, perhaps a little unfairly since he was scarcely the worst offender, took the brunt of feminist ire. Spock’s assumption that parenting was women’s work, backed up with remarks such as, ‘Of course, I don’t mean that the father has to give just as many bottles or change just as many diapers as the mother. But it’s fine for him to do so occasionally’,18 inflamed the emerging ranks of sisterhood.

Like all good Freudian-influence theorists, he was also unhappy about the idea of women leaving their children to work and countered his recognition that some women may need or want to work with the guilt-inducing words: ‘If a mother realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a small child, it may make it easier for her to decide that the extra money she might earn, or the satisfaction she might receive from an outside job, is not so important, after all.’19 That was in 1958, five years before Betty Friedan awakened the consciousness of millions of women with The Feminine Mystique in which she challenged Freudian ideas of gender. Her ‘problem with no name’ was the mind-numbing routine of home and family life in which women were expected to find contentment, but which buried women alive. This state of affairs, she argued, was good for neither women or children: ‘Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping with their homework – an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.’20

Adrienne Rich’s problem had a name and its name was motherhood. She wrote with extraordinary candour about her experience of motherhood and her feelings for her children whom she confessed, from time to time, she had the urge to kill. She made it clear that the problem for her was the ‘institution’ of motherhood, ‘the chaining of women in links of love and guilt’.21

A poet and academic. Rich, for a while, tried to become the archetypal perfect wife and mother. When she wrote of the experience she lit a charge:

I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women, fulfilling even in its sorrows, a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself; a division made more acute by the moments of passionate love, delight in my children’s spirited bodies and minds, amazement at how they went on loving me in spite of my failures to love them wholly and selflessly.22

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