Читать книгу Mother of All Myths - Aminatta Forna - Страница 13

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.

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.