Pollitical Corectness

[Ishmael]

I would just add...there are a lot of very healthy and successful people that come from single parent homes also. There is much more risk in a single family home though (crime statistics, etc.).

I think I handled that under the 'exceptions' clause.

Ishmael

 

[crysede]

Holy crap! Could you post slightly more for me to respond to? LOL I've split this admittedly rather unwieldy reply up, in order to (hopefully) make it easier to read.

I'm saying that the "social pressure" that you refer to (for women to have children and to be the primary caregiver for young children) may not be some sort of 'invented social pressure'.

I agree, it may not be - but so far the most reasonable explanation for the unequal division of childcare between men and women is that it is largely due to social pressure.

I believe that it's largely a natural phenomena that women take a primary role in childbearing and early child caregiving. I don't need to further define "natural phenomena" even though you insist that I should.

No need for you to define 'natural phenomena', I know what it means - the term is self-explanatory. What I insist that you should explain is the reasoning behind your argument, because from what you've said about it so far, it makes no sense to me

And I don't just mean that I disagree with it, I mean it literally doesn't make sense - I've gone over my position in some detail, and recapped yours as I understand it, in the hopes that you can either see why your claim doesn't make sense and modify it, or see what part of it I am misunderstanding and explain it more clearly.

What does working with no pay have to do with anything? Who wants to work without pay?

That was just a different example using the same logical form as your objection to my argument, pointing out why your objection requires proof.

Well, I still don't see many men providing breastfeeding services, there seems to be some sort of biological reason against it. I don't see many families where men are the primary caregiver (even amongst families with working mothers). Yes, fathers like spending time with their children and nurturing them, but that doesn't prove or support the point that mothers aren't usually the primary caregivers. It seems the onus is on you to prove that this isn't a natural phenomena.

There is proof it isn't natural: if it was biological it would be stable over geologically short periods of time rather than varying with social pressure, and the women's emancipation movement of the last century would have had no effect whatsoever.

What does priveledge have to do with this situation? The discussion of women, pregnancy and early child caregiving isn't a class discussion.

This a discussion involving the question of unfair treatment, therefore the issue of privilege is inherently part of discussion (even the issue of class privilege plays some role).

You claim that 50-50 sharing between men and women for early childcare would be "fair".

I say that you could scream from the mountaintop all you want, and you'd just get blue in the face..or maybe red.

I can just see a government agent outside the hospital giving out cards..a pink card and the mother gets to go home with the baby and the father goes back to work..get a blue card and the father goes home with the baby and the mother goes back to work. There's nothing but "social pressures" causing the difference right? Why wouldn't this work?

First of all I have never once claimed that it was nothing but social pressure, second of all, now you're just being silly - holding men and women equally responsible does not equate to enforcing every man and woman to share the responsibility 50/50 - it equates to not suggesting that the of them 'ought' to do it any more than the other, therefore it leaves couples complete freedom of choice as to how to divide up the responsibility.

I'm still laughing. I can get pregnant?

No you can't get pregnant - sheesh, lol - you can bond with a child before it's been born - just because it's not inside you doesn't mean you don't know that it's yours.

I've seen evidence that the world is round. It fits into a knowledge structure that makes for common sense also (moon phases, tides, eclipse prediction etc). However, I've seen nothing in your position that includes any evidence or that makes sense in light of common experience.

Provide some evidence. Even if you could provide some results based on some qualititative study, I'd have to question the methodology and how they measured "bonding" with a woman and a fetus. My experience, (I'd venture to say a fairly common experience) is watching women come home from the hospital hugging their babies tight. Do they hug their babies tight because of "societal pressure" tells them to since, you argue, they haven't "bonded" with the baby yet?

The studies are based on women's descriptions of their experiences before and after child birth, and one a few of the most comprehensive ones did follow up interviews at later times, as well as looking at the incidents of things like neglect, loss of custody, and the like. There have been some really good ones published in Sci Am, I think they've got a web page that allows searches by topic, so I should be able to locate some for you.

And, as far as the flat/round thing, I can see for myself that pregnant women are round.

I hope you realize that pointing out, to a very pregnant woman, how round she is, could be hazardous to your future reproductive health

 

[crysede]

You seem to think this "invented" pressure is similar to a prefered fashion in clothing (albeit a longstanding fashion LOL) than some sort of a natural phenomena and that somehow it's "unfair" to women. You believe it's artificial, that is not necessarily "natural".

Our justice system is also a social invention (indeed society itself is a social invention): there is no law of nature stating that torturing people for fun is wrong (and I don't 'torture' in the BSDM sense - I mean it in the Vlad the Impaler sense), this is not a "natural" fact it is a moral fact - and if you wish to claim that values are facts of nature, then I challenge you to show me a single one was discovered by natural science, or a single one that has been proven by natural science. Point to the empirical data that proves that torturing people for fun is wrong. Does the fact that you cannot demonstrate this empirically render it similar to fashion choice in your mind - This year's hottest trend is not torturing people for fun, but next year who knows?

The fact is, values are social inventions, not natural phenomena. For proof of this, consider debate over capital punishment or abortion - if it were a fact of nature then it would be a simple matter to design experiments to determine which of the two sides was correct. Can you think of any scientific experiments that would demonstrate to the Pro-Choice side that abortion is not morally wrong? Can you think of any scientific experiments that would demonstrate to the Pro-Choice side that abortion is morally wrong? If you can then for God's sake please go tell them about it so they'll stop fighting.

Does that fact that values are social inventions make them "artificial" rather than facts of nature? Yes. Does this mean that they are not real? No!

I believe that it's largely a natural phenomena that women take a primary role in childbearing and early child caregiving. I don't need to further define "natural phenomena" even though you insist that I should.

No need for you to define 'natural phenomena', I know what it means - the term is self-explanatory. What I insist that you should explain is the reasoning behind your argument, because from what you've said about it so far, it makes no sense to me

And I don't just mean that I disagree with you, I mean you stance literally makes no sense whatsoever to me. To solve this I've gone over my position in some detail, and recapped yours as I understand it, in the hopes that you can either see why your claim doesn't make sense and fix it, see that you have misunderstood some part of my argument, or see that I am misunderstanding part of yours and explain this part more clearly.

I'm not making the premise or conclusion you are, all I need to do is refute your point. All I have to do to discredit your point is to show that a preponderance of women (not all) choose to become mothers and primary caregivers for young children (whether they choose a career outside of work or not).

No, what you have to do to challenge my argument is to show that this choice of theirs is not influenced by social pressure, ie, that they would make the exact same choice if the current social pressures did not exist.

And you are 'showing' something: this means you are claiming that something is the case. What you are claiming is that women are not being influenced by social pressure to assume the majority of responsibility for child care. We have agreed that there has always been social pressure in our society, and you have previously agreed that there is still social pressure on women to be the primary caregivers - so unless you have changed your mind, we both know that you have no empirical evidence and thus cannot assert you claim as an empirical fact.

Therefore, since you cannot assert it as an empirically demonstrated fact, you must provide an argument as to why your claim should be accepted.

My position has common sense on it's side, yours doesn't.

Unless I have misinterpreted some part of your argument (in which case please explain the part I am misunderstanding more thoroughly), your position contradicts modern science, contradicts observed social trends, and is based on a claim that you cannot prove empirically and have not provided any argument for - I cannot see how common sense supports this.

I give evidence that: 1) most women choose that role even though they have other choices (a natural phenomena)

Women had other choices 200 years ago too - society just really, really frowned upon them. It has never been impossible for a woman to not get married and to not raise a family, social ideals of womanhood have just made other choices more or less difficult (and before you respond by pointing out that women have more different choices now, I agree, they had less choices before - but there were still choices.)[

2) most women retain that role even if they are also working outside the home.

These women also generally express displeasure with the fact that their husbands do not share more equal in the task of child rearing - if their husbands were to suddenly wish to take on more of the domestic responsibilities of family life, like taking time off work when a child is sick, doing laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, etc., I doubt you'd find too many working women complaining.

The "bonding" argument, that women "bond" while they're pregnant is in support of #1 above.

This prenatal mother-love theory that suggests that only women bond with an unborn child or that they at least bond more strongly than men, and that this bonding is something biologically determined so all normal, emotionally well adjusted, women will experience it, has been scientifically established to be false.

Many women bond, but many men do too, and many perfectly normal women do not (and yes, they do go on to develop health relationships with their children - the rate of attachment disorders is no higher than for women who do report significant bonding during pregnancy).

I don't think that it's ceased to so do at all [edited to add: remark re. my question of why social pressure was no longer influencing women]. I think that women are taking on more responsibility now.

So, your position is that men actually becoming less involved in childcare now?

Your only real supporting point is that some women don't cotton to being the primary caregivers for young children and that there doesn't seem to be any evidence against men taking this role. This is so weak a premise as to be laughable.

No, my supporting points are:

1. Historically when every societies have reduced the social pressure on women to take full responsibility for the care of children, women and men have responded by starting to share the responsibility somewhat more equally.
2. The degree to which the responsibility was shared varied directly with the degree to which social pressure on women was reduced.
3. Scientific evidence supports the claim that women and men are equally capable of bonding with children, and derive equal amounts of satisfaction from said bonding, and are equally good at nurturing, loving and raising children.
4. Social evidence supports the claim that children do best when both parents play equally important roles in their lives, and suffer if either parent it absent, or emotionally distant. It also supports the claim that in single-parent families, single-fathers and single-mothers do an equally good job of raising the children themselves.

(1) and (2) provide direct support for my claim that social attitudes play a large role in determining women's 'choice' to stay home.

(3) provides scientific evidence for my claim that women are not biologically engineered to raise children while men aren't: in point of fact both sexes are biologically geared toward nurturing children.

(4) provides real-world support for the scientific claim (3) that women are not inherently better at caring for children then men.

My argument following from these points is that:

• Since the degree to which women have been disproportionately responsible for childcare has always varied directly with the degree of social pressure on women to be so responsible; the most reasonable explanation for this consistent relationship is that social pressure has played a significant role in determining women's level of responsibly.
• Since social pressure has always played a role in determining how much of the responsibility for childcare was placed on women up to the present day, it makes sense to conclude that it continues to do so.

You countered (a) by pointing out that women have nearly always been disproportionately responsible for childcare.

"No problem," I said, "my argument actually supports this fact since women have nearly always been under social pressure to be disproportionately responsible."

"Aha!" you say, "But my claim supports the further claim that the fact that it has nearly always been the case means that the inequality is just as likely to be a biological phenomena as a social one."

"Whoa there, cowboy," I say, "all the biological evidence (b) we have suggests men and women are equally disposed toward childcare, and thus biology itself refutes the claim that this is a biological phenomena. And furthermore, if this was a biological phenomena how the hell would you explain the direct relationship in (a)?"

 

[crysede]

There was no 'egalitarianism' to it. They were property, slaves. The educated ones were selected for special treatment. Further, the Roman slave holder did educate the children born to his/her slaves. For them it made perfect business sense to do so.

Sure, they educated the civilized ones, but the barbarians that were enslaved had rather less rosy prospects.

Classic closed loop system. While you're certainly entitled to your position, I'm not that jaded and a hell of a lot more aware of what I consume. I think you may be surprised at how many truly are. The more urbanized are the least aware of the nature of what they consume.

I think what passes for news in mass media is crap, in fact I think what passes for entertainment in the mass media is mostly crap too lol, and yet people have thus far entirely failed to surprise me by refusing to gobble it up. However, if at some point the consuming public rises up in favour of substance over flash, I will be thrilled to admit I was excessively jaded.


OK, that's it - I don't care if there are anypoints left to address, I'm outta here: time to do some watering in the garden

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

The one that lasts the longest isn't the winner.

Your dismissal of the fact that women always have been and always will be the primary agents in procreation and early childhood caregiving as some sort of "social pressure" rather than a "natural phenomena" and preference of women is amusing, but not convincing. There are varying degrees of participation in early infant childrearing, but women have always been primary. I'll even agree with you that some women aren't good mothers, but the overwhelming majority embrace motherhood and do reasonable well at it.

Yes, men can take a greater role in childrearing, this is consistent with recent trends. I'm glad that they do, those who don't are missing something wonderful. But it still is not the role of the primary caregiver in any but a very few cases. You keep bringing up the point that there's no proof that men wouldn't be good primary caregivers. If this is the case, then why isn't it happening? There's no proof that men aren't the primary caregivers on the planet Jupiter either. It's a silly point and "out of context". Maybe there's an "inner man" we ought to be releasing. Are there drugs for that?

Tell me, if this is just a value or a social pressure, then were are the societies where women aren't primary caregivers?

You write well. Your style and words are very convincing. If you had cited any credible evidence to your points, I might start to believe you. This evidence doesn't exist. Saying that there's no reason why something shouldn't be so, doesn't make it so, especially when it flies in the face of every day experience in our society and virtually every other society on Earth.

I think specious is the right term. Your primary position, that it's "unfair" that women have babies and choose to take care of them because of "social pressure" rather than because of a choice that they make isn't convincing without evidence. Show me a study that says 5 out of 10 women would prefer that their husband stay home with the kids for the first three months of an infants life. If you can find that evidence, I'll support a new law in congress to support it.

Go have a baby and have your husband stay home with it directly after the birth while you go to work. If you do that, then I'll start to listen to you again. In fact, find me 10 cases out of the millions and millions of families in North America and I might even respond again.

 

[crysede]

The one that lasts the longest isn't the winner.

lol The one who doesn't address a single point in the other one's argument isn't the winner either - I explained why I don't understand your position, if you don't want to explain it fare enough, but that doesn't make my questions invalid, or unsound.

Your dismissal of the fact that women always have been and always will be the primary agents in procreation and early childhood caregiving as some sort of "social pressure" rather than a "natural phenomena" and preference of women is amusing, but not convincing.

I laid out my argument very clearly - it did not contain a dismissal of any facts. And how do you know for a fact that they always will be? Assertions based on predicting the future aren't all that convincing - the future has a nasty habit of laughing hysterically at us when we make claims about it.

There are varying degrees of participation in early infant childrearing, but women have always been primary. I'll even agree with you that some women aren't good mothers, but the overwhelming majority embrace motherhood and do reasonable well at it.

When did this become a discussion of early infant rearing? Let me guess, when you realized that nursing provided a shred of evidence to support the biological case, but that it only held for early infancy when the child was actually nursing?

Yes, men can take a greater role in childrearing, this is consistent with recent trends. I'm glad that they do, those who don't are missing something wonderful. But it still is not the role of the primary caregiver in any but a very few cases.

It is the case for every single father, and while they make up only 1.5% of the population, their numbers are in the millions - a little large to be dismissed out of hand as biological aberrations don't you think? And what about the even greater number of men who sue for custody and are denied it? Do you feel that justice has been done since the vast majority of them are biologically incapable of providing the care a woman could? Before you go leaping to biological explanations, think about what your claim implies for men - it means that courts are justified, and should be praised, for automatically granting custody to women.

You keep bringing up the point that there's no proof that men wouldn't be good primary caregivers. If this is the case, then why isn't it happening?

But that's just the point, it is happening - there are men who are primary caregivers now - lots of them, and an even greater number that want to be.

Tell me, if this is just a value or a social pressure, then were are the societies where women aren't primary caregivers?

Why should there be? Have I even once made the claim that men are better caregivers than women?

You write well. Your style and words are very convincing. If you had cited any credible evidence to your points, I might start to believe you. This evidence doesn't exist. Saying that there's no reason why something shouldn't be so, doesn't make it so, especially when it flies in the face of every day experience in our society and virtually every other society on Earth.

What evidence exactly?

Proof that society has allowed women more freedom not? You agreed to this fact.

Proof that women face unequal pressure with respect to child rearing? You agreed to this fact.

Proof that women are now engaging in other, none-domestic activities, and men are engaging in a greater share of domestic ones? You agreed to this fact too.

Proof that there is no maternal instinct and that mothering is a combination of socially acquired skills and natural human urge to nurture infants? No problem, see below.

Proof that fathers are capable of being as nurturing as mothers? No problem, see below.

Your primary position, that it's "unfair" that women have babies and choose to take care of them because of "social pressure" rather than because of a choice that they make isn't convincing without evidence.

Oh come on, other than sharing some of the same vocabulary, that bears absolutely no resemblance to my argument

Show me a study that says 5 out of 10 women would prefer that their husband stay home with the kids for the first three months of an infants life. If you can find that evidence, I'll support a new law in congress to support it.

Why do you insist that either the woman or the man must give up on playing a significant role as a parent? Why would you assume either would want to go back to work right away? Why is it so impossible for you to imagine that both mothers and fathers might want to be with their children?

Such a study would actually disprove my argument, so the fact that I cannot find such evidence is reassuring to me - my argument would be supported by a study that found the majority of men and women wanted to stay home with their new baby.

Go have a baby and have your husband stay home with it directly after the birth while you go to work. If you do that, then I'll start to listen to you again. In fact, find me 10 cases out of the millions and millions of families in North America and I might even respond again.

If you had been listening to me, you'd know that I have never argued that men should take primary responsibility instead of women, nor have I argued that women don't care about children and don't want to nurture them are only forced to do these things by society.



Most studies are not available on-line, of course, since the majority of academics publish in journals rather than the internet - and although some of these journals are on-line, one has to pay for a subscription to access them on the web. But it will be very easy to locate the articles in question - any university library should have the journals - if not they will be able to get the required journals in through inter-university loan in a matter of days. The articles and books I've references here have extensive bibliographies of the relevant journal articles - I won't bother wasting space reprinting them separately. However, if you read all of them and would like more, I can provide several hundred more references to published studies.

There are some good studies online (good as in back up their claims with research that has been published in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals):

This is a rather long article (43 pgs), but it provides an excellent, thoroughgoing analysis of current research (and solidly backs up all claims with extensive bibliographic references) showing that men are not at a biological disadvantage when it comes to raising children: A CASE FOR FATHERS AND CO-PARENTING



Well explained, and thuroughly backed up by extensive bibliographies, overviews of cognitive-psychology's current position regarding gender and parenting can be found in basic texts intended for upper-level psychology students (these will be readily available in university libraries, and quite possibly in public libraries too):

Kimmel, M. S. and Aronson, A.. The Gendered Society Reader. New York: Oxford University Press (2000). See chapter 9 (Emotions), section III. I'm not going to type out the entire chapter for you, that would be insane (and take days) - but here's the relevant sections you should look into:
III. The Myth of Maternal Instinct
A. Introduction
B. Maternal Deprivation and Its Consequences for Nurturing
------ 1. Harlow experiments (1950s) on Affection and Attachment
------------------ a. General Effects of Isolation/Effect of Isolation on Maternal Behavior
------------------ b. Physical Contact and Mothering
------------------ c. Additional Research (Harlow and Harlow)
C. Attachment: Bonding and Critical Periods
D. Gender and Caring for Children: Perspectives on Why Women Remain the Primary Caregivers for Children
------ 1. The Issue of Claims that Women are more Responsive to Children
------ 2. The Issue of Claims that Women Derive more Pleasure from Caring for Children
------ 3. Forces that Operate to Prevent Fathers from Becoming more Involved

Brannon, Allyn & Bacon. Based on Gender: Psychological Perspectives. 3rd Ed
2002. Overview of relevant contents:
Myth of Maternal Instinct
1. Although instinct no longer used to explain human behavior, belief in maternal instinct persists. The myth states that nurturing behaviors of mothers toward their children are determined by biological factors and are insensitive to environmental or experiential effects
2. The reality is that maternal behaviors are learned through social experience
Attachment
Infants develop attachment to primary caregiver(s)
- Strong emotional relationship develops with consistent, responsive care
- Attachment is reciprocal
Human infants do not bond like animals, they form attachment
- Bonding is based on imprinting in animals, esp birds
- Bonding occurs during a critical 'bonding period', humans do not have critical period for forming attachement
Research has not supported the bonding hypothesis
Gender & Child Care
Gender differences increase over childhood
- Boys become less responsive, girls more due to socialization to adopt gender roles
Few men are as involved in childcare as women, but no biological basis can be found
- Research findings: Fathers enjoy playing a greater role in childcare; Fathers feel same satisfactions & frustrations when as involved in childcare as women

 

[crysede]

Sara Blaffer Hrdy. Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. 1999. A massive and exhaustive book on motherhood - compile the results from history and modern times in the fields of psychology, sociology, social anthropology, developmental biology, evolutionary genetics, etc & etc, by anthropologist Sara Blaffer Hrdy. Her final conclusion: her research shows that the so called "maternal instinct", which supposedly elevates women above men as parents, simply does not exist. An overview of her findings (this book should be available in any library, so it should be quite simply for you to go examine mountains of supporting research she cites - there is far, far too much to quote here - the book is incredibly through):

Human mothers kill their own children.

Men murder much more often than women. But when a woman causes the death of another, that person is most likely to be her own newborn baby. It happens a lot, it has happened throughout history and it sometimes happens in epidemic proportions, with thousands of babies quietly being killed or abandoned.

Any sentient adult with a subscription to a newspaper knows that Susan Smith drowned her toddlers in 1994 by strapping them into their car seats and letting the car roll into a lake. Three years later, a high school girl in New Jersey went to the prom, gave birth in a bathroom, left the baby to die in a garbage can and returned to the dance. In October, authorities in Kansas City, Mo., charged a 31-year-old mother with murder after two of her 8-year-old triplets were found to have been starved and scalded to death.

We think of these events as aberrations. We want to believe that they are rare, unaccountable occasions when drugs or psychosis or abject terror overwhelm the steadfast ramparts of maternal instinct.

But what about the village in Bolivia where researchers found that nearly every woman had killed a newborn of her own during a period of war and economic stress in the 1930s, when the prospects of raising a child with a suitable father were extremely poor? Nearly 38 percent of the babies born in that village during a three-year period were killed by their mothers. Many of those women went on to become devoted mothers.

And in Europe, during the middle centuries of this millennium, babies -- millions of them -- were abandoned to near-certain death in foundling homes by mothers who would have known their newborns would not be adequately fed by wet-nurses. At some of these homes, death rates reached 80 percent or higher.

In one village in Papua New Guinea, 41 percent of all live infants born between 1974 and 1978 were killed by their parents just after birth. Of 20 infants killed, five were boys, the rest girls.

These stark images of mass maternal abandonment and killing come from a new book on motherhood by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in which she proposes that in humans -- more than in any other species -- mother love is a sometime thing, a compulsion dependent on circumstances, not just hormones.

In fact, she says, there is no such thing as "the maternal instinct."

"Mothers do not automatically and unconditionally respond to giving birth in a nurturing way," says Hrdy (there is no vowel in the last name, which is the Czech word for "proud").

"A woman who is committed to being a mother will learn to love any baby, whether it's her own or not; a woman not committed to or prepared for being a mother may well not be prepared to love any baby, not even her own."

In her just-published book, "Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection," Hrdy says that women, like other primates, make a choice about mothering. They consider the availability of food, shelter, a father -- and the costs of those things -- in deciding whether to do the job. As coldly modern as this assessment process may seem, it is as old as the species, as deeply ingrained in our psyches and in our biological histories as any of our other basic urges, says Hrdy.

By cracking the divine mysteries of mothering with such a dry-eyed and rational code, Hrdy takes on a powerful coalition of folks for whom the idea of maternal instinct is sacrosanct. Groups like the Family Research Council, Promise Keepers, Marriage Savers, the Heritage Council and attachment parents everywhere use the biological certainty of maternal instinct to anchor conservative political arguments and traditional approaches to parenting. Theirs is a brand of motherly love that psychologist Erich Fromm described in his 1956 book "The Art of Loving." "Mother's love is unconditional," he rhapsodized, "it is all protective, all enveloping."

Stalwartly scientific and openly feminist, Hrdy rejects what she views as a pie-in-the- sky construct that conveniently reduces women to one essential feature: the ability to give birth and nurture offspring. She claims, from high atop an enormous mound of research, that her motives are strictly scientific, not political.

"I'm trying to get away from the pop, pat answers that people throw around," Hrdy says in an interview, frequently cautioning against what she calls the unsophisticated use of the word "instinct."

Yes, she says, "maternal responses that are biologically based are surely going on in the human species." Women bond with their babies, prompted, to some extent, by a flood of chemicals and hormones that build before, during and after pregnancy. The bonds grow tighter the longer the baby is close.

But these responses cannot be threaded together into a single strand of behavior and labeled "maternal instinct," and they don't guarantee that an infant will be loved or cared for. In other words, we are subject to maternal impulses, but we are not controlled or defined by them. Even behaviors that can be traced to physiological factors -- genes or hormones or neural pathways that form after a female gives birth -- may be more complex than they seem.

What about prolactin, the hormone with the general reputation of promoting nurturing behavior? A "land mine," says Hrdy. "It's implicated" in nurturing, defensive and protective behavior (even in males), she says, but its presence in the body is also correlated with other emotional tendencies, including aggression and postpartum depression.

In other words, do not expect any simple descriptions of the influence of prolactin -- or any other gene or hormone -- on maternal behavior from Hrdy. She sidesteps the sound bite at every turn.

"Everyone warned me not to touch the topic," she says. "I pushed the boundaries as far as I could, but my words were chosen very, very carefully."

Hrdy relies on decades of research -- her own and others' -- to propose a sort of Darwinian-feminist theory of motherhood: Women are influenced by certain physical factors to form families, have children and nurture them, but the decision to raise children also is shaped by ambition and ambivalence (which may also be influenced by evolved traits -- it's a bit of a vicious circle).

Babies, on the other hand, are genetically programmed to form an attachment to a trusted caretaker. The bond is essential to their emotional development, which creates the classic dilemma for modern (and postmodern) mothers -- how to balance work and parenthood.

Primate mothers, says Hrdy, from apes to Pleistocene-era foragers to women today, have had to weigh motherhood against their need to work and maintain status in their communities. Female animals -- including humans -- assess their "economic" situation, the politics of the times, their community stature and the probability of raising offspring to maturity in deciding whether to "invest" in raising a child.

Like women in recent decades, other animals have some ability to forestall fertility or conception if the times aren't right for child-rearing. Some even end their pregnancies, if the outlook for success changes, by absorbing the fetus into their bodies.

Only human mothers, says Hrdy, carry the results of their assessments to the most brutal end. In other primates, infanticide is either carried out by males killing the offspring of their rivals or dominant females killing the babies of potential competitors. And humans are the only primates to assess the viability of their infants and then choose whether to keep them based on their health or gender.

In other words, Hrdy says, maternal love -- and particularly human maternal love -- is conditional. It has been so since at least the Pleistocene era, she says, despite cries from conservatives and fundamentalist Christians who say that we must return to the family values of a nebulous bygone era -- with men in their rightful places at the head of households and women birthing and nurturing -- to put an end to school shootings and Susan Smith tragedies.

Hrdy, of course, offers an evolutionary biologist's assessment of the Smith killings, an assessment based on Canadian studies that show younger women are more likely to commit infanticide than older women, particularly when a male other than the child's father is present in a relationship. This is presumably because younger women see the opportunity of forming new families, while older women realize their child-bearing years are dwindling.

"Susan Smith was looking to better her life and the kids were in the way," Hrdy says. "She could look forward to having other children. If Susan Smith had been 40, I wouldn't have expected her to kill her children."

Infanticide is one way women throughout history -- those without access to birth control or abortion -- have terminated their investment in offspring when conditions weren't right for motherhood. Hrdy doesn't offer it as an excuse, just an explanation.

"Along the way," she says. "I have come to understand just how flexible parental emotions in humans can be."

Hrdy, 53, is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, with a lengthy résumé that begins at Radcliffe and Harvard and wends its way through membership in the National Academy of Sciences. She's been studying maternal behavior for three decades, with research encompassing everything from field studies of langur monkeys in India to a thorough combing of centuries worth of birth records and even telephone directories in Europe, documenting the epidemics of infant abandonment.

She has a disarming and amusing way of describing herself in anthropological terms, fully cognizant of the elastic application of evolutionary dogma: "What does it mean," she asks in the book's introduction, "to be born a mammal, with an emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of a primate, possessing the mind of a human being. To be a semi-continuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, filled with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?"

Hrdy came of age as a scholar in the late '60s and early '70s, essentially the height of the women's movement. The field of anthropology was opening both to women researchers and to topics that focused on female roles. Hrdy seized the opportunity to observe monkey communities in India, to determine why females would mate with marauding males who often killed the females' existing infants.

Her findings -- that the male monkeys weren't pathological, they were killing the infants as a means of forcing the females into sexual receptivity -- were controversial. The idea that infanticide -- even among monkeys, even committed by males -- could be a purposeful behavior was considered morally unacceptable. Since then, 35 species have been shown to practice similar infanticide.

At the same time, anthropologists were doing more and more field work, rather than studying captive animals in labs. This change meant that females -- up until then, studied with their young in isolation from larger communities -- were suddenly seen in social and even "political" contexts. Female rats behave differently in the wild; kept in cages with only their babies for company, Hrdy points out, they behave a lot like suburban housewives did in the 1950s.

Despite her feminist credentials, or perhaps because of them, she weaves a careful path between those who insist that maternal behaviors are genetically programmed and those who argue equally forcefully that mothering consists of a set of learned skills. She seeks to break free of both the Darwinians and the feminists, then meld the best from both.

Her own history as a mother -- she has three children -- is a mix, she says, of ambivalence, devotion and ambition. She gave birth to her first child in a euphoric flush (no doubt under the influence of oxytocin, a naturally occurring opiate that also plays a role in birth contractions), and was then stunned both by the lusciousness of her daughter and the magnitude of her own parental responsibility. Knowing what she already knew about an infant's need to attach to a caretaker, what could she do, she asks, "but turn my life over to her?"

Instead, she and her husband adjusted their work patterns, put their faith in the resilience of children, and relied on the support of alloparents -- anyone, male or female, who helps care for a child -- so that each could pursue careers in anthropology. (She lives in Northern California "as a hermit, scratching in my garden.")

"As I would learn, mothers have worked for as long as our species has existed, and they have depended on others to help them rear their children," she says.

Hrdy's book is an exhaustive -- and sometimes exhausting -- weaving of the scientific literature on innate and learned maternal behaviors, liberally spiked with explorations into the social history of human motherhood. It is about using whatever tools are at hand to probe a deeply unfathomable mystery, one both universal and deeply personal. Her use of Darwinism with a twist of feminism will no doubt raise the hackles of critics who believe that Hrdy has chosen flat and overly convenient tools for her probe. But even her detractors will have a hard time denying the volume of her research.

Hrdy has outlined a vast mosaic of mothering behaviors, a mosaic that she acknowledges has large areas that aren't yet completed. Of course, it's not that easy to study human parenting patterns, so the picture is built in large measure on animal studies. As the science of these studies gets more complex, so do the potential interpretations. (And the potential for disastrous misinterpretations: The pre-Dr. Spock philosophy that children should be breast-fed on a schedule, rather than on demand, was based on research on pigeons, which had no relevance to humans -- a revelation that hasn't discouraged followers of the fundamentalist "Babywise" parenting gurus, who advocate a return to scheduled feedings.)

"Mother Nature" offers hundreds of scientific examples and plenty of Hrdy's opinion (backed by studies), such as: "Wherever women have both control over their reproductive opportunities and a chance to better themselves, women opt for well-being and economic security over having more children."

Such sweeping and controversial conclusions are likely to provoke new storms of apoplexy among the fans of the Victorian "good mother" stereotype, people like Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who became so emotional in his arguments against late-term abortion -- his face turning crimson and his voice rising to a high pitch -- that colleagues intervened to keep him from blowing a gasket.

(Santorum was, Hrdy offers slyly, acting as a "high-status male primate intent on controlling where, when and how females belonging to his group reproduce.")

Hrdy acknowledges the hot-button nature of her topic, calling the issue of motherhood a mine field: "The topic was safe only so long as people took the centuries-old view of self-sacrificing motherhood for granted," she writes. Why, she asks, would a society with the sophistication and technology to explore the solar system display "such primitive behavior when it comes to the female reproductive system?"

 

[crysede]

Diane E. Eyer, "MOTHER-INFANT BONDING: A Scientific Fiction," Human Nature, Vol.5, No.1, pp. 69-94

A study of the research on postpartum mother-infant bonding shows that results from poorly constructed research programs were published in major journals and became a part of hospital policy because the bonding concept was politically useful in the struggle between advocates of natural childbirth and managers of the medical model of birth. The concept was also uncritically accepted because it was consistent with a longstanding ideology of motherhood that sees women as the prime architects of their children's personalities.

This paper presents an analysis of the processes by which one body of scientific research was transformed into a myth. It is a story in which there are no true villains except delusion, no true heroics except the zeal to reform. Research on mother-infant bonding in the 1970s claimed to find instinctual behavior in women which required that they maintain proximity to their infants right after birth. This "discovery" was actually a conservative fiction, rooted in the institutional needs of medicine and in popular beliefs about the true nature of womanhood. Yet parents, doctors, nurses, and social workers saw bonding as a scientific discovery and a means to reform, which would enhance women's power and the well-being of the family.

The consequences for women of this psychomedical construction are at best disappointing; at the worst, they amount to the continuation of a long tradition of blaming women for problems that are not of their own making.

The bonding studies purported to show that just a few hours of postpartum contact between mothers and their newborns had longranging effects on the quality of their relationship and on the child's development. Dozens of studies illustrating the benefits of postpartum bonding were published in the most prestigious pediatrics and psychology journals.

This research went unchallenged for a decade. Finally, in the early 1980s an avalanche of criticism appeared and the research was subsequently dismissed by most of the scientific community as having been poorly conducted. However, bonding had become extremely popular in the mid 1970s primarily because of its usefulness in the political struggle between the natural childbirth movement and hospital obstetrics. The bonding imperative appeared to give women more control over their birth experience, appeared to be part of a more natural birth, and allowed them to have their infants and family with them in what had previously been a lonely and often demeaning experience.

Bonding is still widely believed to be an established rule for governing the mother's behavior. In hospitals it is often a swiftly conducted obstetric procedure supervised by medical staff, in which the baby is placed in the mother's arms for a few minutes right after birth. In pediatrics and social work, postpartum parental bonding is seen as part of predicting and preventing child abuse.

Although the importance of bonding seems to have subsided in the arena of childbirth, where it was part of a political struggle for control, the concept has continued to flourish (in varying forms) as part of the ideology in which women's constant proximity to their infants (whether they desire it or not) is seen as a formula for preventing later problems of the child. As one representative for a center for teenage mothers put it, "During the first 30 days at the residence mother and child are inseparable, whether the former likes it or not. We want to make sure the bonding process takes place" (New York Times 1989:A18). How research findings that are so clearly flawed can become so deeply established and remain a rule for governing behavior is the subject of this study.

THE RESEARCH

The research on bonding burgeoned in the 1970s and proceeded for a decade virtually without criticism. Then in the 1980S the criticism erupted and the research died out. Yet the concept persists. In 1972, two pediatricians, John Kennell and Marshall Klaus, along with numerous colleagues, published a study purporting to show that mothers who were given 16 extra hours of contact with their infants right after birth exhibited better mothering skills when tested later, and their infants did better on a number of developmental tests, compared with mothers and infants who did not have the extra contact. The authors begin their report by explaining their biologically based rationale for a sensitive period:

In certain animals such as the goat, cow, and sheep, separation of the mother and infant immediately after birth for a period as short as one to four hours often results in distinctly aberrant mothering behavior.... In contrast, if they are together for the first four days and are then separated on the fifth day for an equal period, the mother resumes the protective and mothering behavior characteristic for her species when the pair is reunited....

In recent years several investigators have studied whether a similar phenomenon occurs in mothers of premature infants. . . . Early results from these studies suggest that the long period of physical separation common in most nurseries may adversely affect maternal performance of some women (Klaus et al. 1972:460)

To investigate these phenomena, Kennell and Klaus studied the "bonding" of 28 low-income, predominantly, black, unmarried primiparae (first-time mothers) of normal birth weight babies. Fourteen of these mothers (matched to control for age, social class, marital status, race, medication, and infant's birth weight) experienced one hour of nude skin-to skin contact with their newborns during the first three hours after delivery, plus an additional five hours of contact on each of the next three days. The 14 mothers in the control group went through the regular hospital routine, feeding their babies every four hours until discharge. After one month, the mothers returned to the hospital for interviews and observations. One of the interview questions related to the assessment of their "caretaking" was: "When the baby cries and has been fed, and the diapers are dry, what do you do?" On a scale of 0 to 3, 0 was given for letting the baby cry it out and 3 for picking it up every time. Another interview question was: "Have you been out since the baby was bom, and who sat?" A score of 0 was given if the mother had been out, felt good, and did not think about the infant while she was out and a score of 3 was given if she did not leave the baby or if she did go out but thought constantly about the baby. More of the extended-contact mothers reported picking up the baby when it cried and not wanting to leave the baby. The researchers evaluated this finding as evidence of stronger mother-infant bonding in the group that held their babies for 16 extra hours. Mothers were also observed during the one-month pediatric exam. A score of 3 was allotted if the mother stood next to the pediatrician and watched continuously; a score of 0 was given if she remained seated and looked elsewhere. The authors also noted whether or not the mother attempted to soothe the baby when it cried. If she did not interact with the baby, she was given a score of 0; if she was consistently soothing, she was given a score of 3. Out of fifty behavioral measures taken by a team of trained observers during the examination, three group differences were noted. The mothers who had early and extended contact with their babies were more attentive (stood near the examining table and watched), showed more soothing behavior, and engaged in more fondling than mothers in the control group evidence of better maternal bonding.

The mothers were also videotaped at this one-month visit while feeding their infants and were scored for 25 specific activities ranging from caretaking skills (such as the position of the bottle) to maternal interest and affection, such as en face looking (the mother's face aligned with that of the baby), whether the mother's body was touching the infant's trunk, and whether she fondled the infant. Experimental mothers spent more time in the en face position and more time fondling, though they spent no more time holding the infants close or looking at them. Again the group differences were interpreted to mean that the mothers who had the extra contact showed evidence of a stronger mother infant bond.

These mothers and infants were examined again a year later. The authors continued to find better mothering and infant development in the extra contact group (Kennell et al. 1974:172-179). At two and five years, with only 19 mother infant pairs remaining, they still claimed to find evidence of better bonding for the extra contact mothers (Ringler et al. 1975).



These studies provided the model for other bonding studies.' Yet each study is clearly flawed with regard to matters of conceptualization and methodology. First is the question of the degree to which many of these dependent variables, such as letting the baby "cry it out" or not going out without thinking about the baby, are actually valid measures of caretaking. The woman who can't leave her baby might be anxious or might not have anyone to leave the baby with: The woman who is able to forget about the baby when she goes out might have a trusted babysitter or might be self assured and highly competent. "Standing near the examining table" during the pediatric exam could be an indication of anxiety or attitudes toward medical authority, or it could result from the different treatment of the experimental group mothers might be less shy with doctors and nurses who witnessed their holding the babies during the extra contact treatment. Moreover, important preexisting group differences in pertinent maternal characteristics are not accounted for (such as whether the baby was wanted, the social support experienced by the mother), nor are differing, characteristics of the infants (some infants are temperamentally agreeable, others difficult). Also, the researchers give the appearance of having conducted a "fishing expedition": recording a host of dependent variables and then selecting the ones that appear to confirm the hypothesis and disregarding those that fail to do so. (Out of 75 measures in the first study, for instance, it appears that there were no group differences for the vast majority of measures.) Finally, what actually constitutes bonding is not clear. Must contact be right after the birth? Skin-to-skin? For how long-for how many hours' or days' duration?

Another fundamental problem with this research is the fact that evidence for maternal behavior having a biological basis rather than involving a process of learning, is never established. The authors did not analyze maternal hormone levels to see if there were differences between those who experienced the extra contact with their infants and those who experienced the standard hospital routine. Curiously, the authors conclude that although there is a striking parallel in animal behavior, "it is possible that the early presentation of a baby shortly after birth is taken by a mother as a special privilege ... that in itself may have altered her behavior." However, the authors continue to refer to bonding as a biologically based phenomenon.

A considerable number of bonding studies by other groups of researchers were conducted throughout the decade, in Europe as well as the United States and Canada. All were fashioned after the Kennell and Klaus model, but definitions of bonding varied from study to study, as did the phenomena that were considered outcome measures. Some of the subjects were middle-class; many were poor. During the ensuing decade, more than 200 articles on bonding were published in the pediatric, child psychology, allied health sciences, and social work journals-an indication of the degree to which the idea had become established. For ten years, no major objections to these fundamental empirical matters were raised. Then, in the early 1980s the bonding research met with an avalanche of criticism (see Campos et al. 1983; Lamb 1982a, 1982b; Myers 1984; Ross 1980). Critics reviewed the research and found the methodological and conceptual problems discussed above. They generally concluded that there was little substantial evidence to support the existence of a postpartum sensitive period for bonding, although even that conclusion was uncertain since extensive methodological problems in the research meant that positive, negative, or neutral findings could not be considered valid.

One of the phenomena that prompted the bonding studies was the belief that there are higher rates of abuse and failure to-thrive (a syndrome in which the child fails to gain weight) in infants who were separated from their parents for long periods while they were kept in NICUs (neonatal intensive care units). A closer look at the research that appears to support such claims should lead us to be very cautious about accepting them. Most of the early studies concerning the link between bonding and child abuse were small and retrospective and often found higher abuse for the NICU population.' The validity of such studies is difficult to assess since they relied on parental reports and clinical records, which were often distorted or inadequate. Data from prospective, relatively large-scale investigations, however, show that the hypothesized relationship between neonate bonding and maltreatment is either not supported or constitutes a very small factor among many that account for abuse and neglect.'

In addition to child abuse it has been suggested that the problems of maternal bonding are responsible for nonorganic failure-to-thrive. Again, early studies investigating this problem were generally retrospective. The behavior of mothers of children who were failing to thrive was scrutinized, and when a pathology was found the mother was blamed for causing the problem. (In fact, a disturbed relationship might well be the result of having a child who is failing to thrive.) Again, prospective studies tended to be less likely to find disturbed maternal bonding or attachment as a significant factor.' Increasingly, attempts to understand these problems focus on factors related to poverty and social isolation. There is considerable debate whether such problems can be predicted from infancy (see Montgomery 1982). The research on bonding, then, is clearly without a firm basis. The original studies presumably establishing it were grossly flawed, and the research linking bonding to child abuse also proved to be in error.

INSTITUTIONAL REFORM

Parents were threatening to take their childbirth business out of the hospital in the 1970s, to experience a more natural birth over which they had control. Because bonding is a simple, familiar concept, promising an instant solution to complex problems, and because it has considerable plasticity, the notion of a sensitive period for bonding quickly became institutionalized. Hospitals provided special rooms for bonding, and medical staff claimed responsibility for assuring that bonding was accomplished during the hospital stay. One study of the role bonding played in hospital reform illustrates the "adaptive" characteristics of the bonding idea to shape itself to the varying factions in the struggle (Eyer 1988).

In the early 1970s the obstetric services at one typical hospital, "St. Christian's" (a pseudonym for the hospital I studied in the mid to late 1980s), were scattered over three floors in a dilapidated wing. Birth took place in a room designed for surgery, and medical interventions were routine. It was standard policy that when a woman came in to give birth she was immediately put in the labor room and "prepped" for surgery. General anesthesia was common. Husbands were not allowed to be with their wives during birth, and babies were kept in nurseries, to be given to mothers only according to a strict schedule.

By the mid-1980s, however, obstetrics was located on one remodeled floor of the hospital, and patients could choose from a half dozen birthing suites equipped with calico curtains, old-fashioned rocking chairs, and stereo systems, as well as electronic fetal monitors, IVs, and a set of stirrups hidden away in a trunk at the end of a homey- looking bed. The entire family-the infant's father, grandparents, even siblings ould be present at the birth. Bonding would take place right after the birth for an hour in a separate "bonding room" equipped with a radiant heat lamp. If bonding was not possible at that time, nurses would make certain that "it" was done later. At least one hour of postpartum bonding was considered essential as soon as the mother was physically able. The total amount of time spent bonding was noted on a nursing chart.

Middle-class mothers appeared to be informed about bonding and actively sought the bonding experience. On the other hand, poor, minority, and juvenile mothers seemed to have no knowledge of the process. They were actively singled out by nurses who made certain that they held their infants for the requisite time as soon as they were able. Plans were made to develop more extensive charts that would record the quality of the interaction, noting such factors as the mother's alignment of her face with that of the infant, whether she spoke to the infant in loving terms, and whether she had a positive attitude toward her birth experience.

The changes at St. Christian's in the next decade were the result of a struggle between a variety of individuals and groups who advocated opposing approaches to hospital birth during the mid-1970s. One reformer was a young obstetrician who claimed that two experiences alerted him to the limitations of his recent obstetrical training. During his medical internship in 1969, he had seen women who were "counter culture types" handcuff themselves to their husbands in order not to be separated from them during the hospital birth. In the early 1970s, stationed in a military hospital in Bangkok, he was surprised to find many women successfully giving birth without medical interventions. By the time he arrived at St. Christian's he was "looking to do birth more humanely." He formed an alliance with a head maternity nurse who was a local childbirth educator, already crusading for "family-centered birth" and more humane treatment of birthing women in the hospital.

The progressive thinking of this doctor and nurse was supported by growing numbers of women in the community who were taking Lamaze classes and wanted to have their husband/coach with them during the birth. They fought to have their husbands with them, and the medical staff eventually conceded that husbands who produced a certificate showing they had attended Lamaze classes could be present for a nonsurgical birth. The obstetric chief of staff at this time was so opposed to having husbands involved that he is said to have given general anesthesia to women in order to exclude the husbands. The head maternity nurse inherited a nursing staff that was also tied to surgical birth, in part because this meant that the patients were drugged and therefore "were very manageable." Infants, too, were more manageable in this system because they were all located in the nursery and brought out only according to a strict schedule (the nurses' schedule).

The "discovery" of bonding gave real impetus to change. Lamaze instructors adopted the term, and the reform- minded obstetrician, who became aware of the bonding concept in 1976 with the publication of Klaus and Kennell's book, claims that he was delighted to have a scientific reason to back up what he already wanted to do. Reformminded parents sought out this doctor, who sent them into the hospital with a written list of demands about how they wanted their birth to be conducted, euphemistically called "wish lists." While the older staff members continued to resist change, newer members tended to be more progressive. Moreover, the popular media was full of accounts of other hospitals that were successfully implementing family-centered care. The women's magazines were presenting natural childbirth very persuasively. In fact, most subjects in this study first heard about bonding from these magazines. Even doctors, who made vague and often inaccurate references to research, all mentioned the women's magazines as a primary source of their information about bonding. Finally, in 1979, promotion of behavior related to bonding became a policy at this hospital on a six-month trial basis. Parents were allowed to "bond" for one hour in a special room equipped with a radiant heat lamp to regulate the baby's body temperature.

The critical factor in forcing the change was the increasing competition for obstetrical business. Because of the declining birth rate, St. Christian's obstetric service was having to compete for business as never before. Obstetricians had opened branch offices in outlying areas to attract more patients by providing a convenient location for their services. Pushed by the reformers and the need to compete for obstetric business, the hospital embraced the family-centered care idea and remodeled its obstetric facility to include a half dozen "birthing suites." The birthing suites were heavily marketed with the slogan "Have Your Baby Your Way." And "your way" included an "early discharge" program (it was now expensive to keep mothers in the hospital) called "There's No Place Like Home."

During the course of the change, bonding had become a doctrine of almost religious proportions. At its height, one doctor is said to have fought with nurses to take infants off NICU respirators and carry them to their mothers for bonding, possibly jeopardizing the health of the infants. Nursing checklists were developed and high-risk groups of mothers, especially teenagers, were actively bonded to their babies by "nursing interventions" in which their behavior was observed, recorded, and in some cases corrected. Brothers and sisters of the newborn who had attended "sibling" bonding classes came to the hospital often frightened, crying, complaining, wanting only their mothers. There are accounts of some of these siblings being slapped and pushed by their fathers and told, "Get in there and bond with your new baby sister/brother. We didn't pay for all those bonding classes to have you act like this." One mother asserted later,

It made me feel like a rotten mother when I didn't get to bond with my first two children. Made me feel they were going to go out and rob a bank. . - - A lot of mothers felt, "I've got to do this or people are going to talk about me" (Eyer 1988:284).

Bonding had facilitated the almost inevitable change, in part because its meaning was so plastic that it could be shaped to the language and agendas of the various factions in the struggle for power over birth. For example, doctors, especially obstetricians, defined bonding as a kind of medical procedure, an inoculation against family failure. Typical of statements by obstetricians is the following:

After the baby is delivered I put the baby right on the mother, not necessarily skin-to-skin, a minute or two. The cord is clamped and cut. ... The baby is given to the mom or to the father and held for approximately 1.5 hours in the bonding room. We are concerned here with family failure. . . . Bonding, natural childbirth, taking photos and videos may help promote a better generation. Divorce is a real problem. If we can involve fathers we can help create a better society with more family stability. The long-term goal is to make a better society in our own small way (Eyer 1988:263-265).

Nurses often referred to bonding as "getting the family off to a good start." The nurses in the birthing suites were especially enthusiastic about what they called "family-centered care": "It's important for both parents and children to begin that process of creating a family unit. Physical contact promotes that caring feeling" (Eyer 1988:266).

The nurses who were charged with postpartum care of mothers and the nursery nurses were less glowing. In fact, many of the nursery nurses, who had lost considerable authority over their infant charges, felt that there was no basis for "believing in" postpartum bonding.
I don't have any problems with the bonding after birth like some here. They can go out and bond. It doesn't bother me. It would be better if women could just say, "Could I hold my baby or stay with it for awhile?" Babies don't cry less or smile more because they've been "bonded." We almost make a joke of it. We've been bonded-like glued together. I'm sorry, but I think anybody can be with the baby for the first three or four months (Eyer 1988:266).

For mothers, bonding was generally a form of leverage with hospital staff to have their baby with them. By the mid 1980s most mothers tended to see bonding as a means of greeting the baby, with no consequences for later development:

The importance of bonding? I was anxious to have him near me and not have him whisked away somewhere. The nurse was a little concerned that he was so calm, she wanted to take him. So I said, "Shouldn't I be allowed to bond with him first?" . . . There's absolutely no consequences for the relationship later on. It's just a nice thing to do (Eyer 1988:278).

Bonding at St. Christian's, then, was spurred by a wish to reform surgical birth-a movement started by parents but picked up by childbirth educators and progressive doctors and nurses. The force that tipped the scales in favor of institutional reform was the hospital's need to retain its obstetric business by responding to "consumer" demands. These changes were part of a much wider movement for reform that swept the country in the 1970s. This movement was fueled by the counterculture, the feminist movement, and consumer rights activism. The central feature of bondingIS appeal was that it was "natural," a term that had acquired the connotation of being inherently good, even moral. Nature was seen as an innocent in need of rescue-suffering from humanity's treatment of it through pollution, indiscriminate development, chemical agriculture, and so forth. Nature represented an existence free of commercialism and materialism. That bonding was the "natural" way was its greatest endorsement. Connected to this romanticized view of nature was a religiosity that fit beautifully with the earlier Christian underpinnings of the natural childbirth movement of the 1950s-a small but dedicated group for whom childbirth was a holy and heroic event rooted in the teachings of the Bible. In the 1970s the moral goodness of the "natural" inspired parents, childbirth educators, and other reformers to view bonding through this rosy lens. Bonding suited the spirit of the reformers; it also appeared to serve their ends, insuring a more natural childbirth that could still take place in the hospital where drugs and surgery were readily available should they be needed.

If bonding was well suited to the agenda of the parent reformers it also suited the views of medical professionals. Obstetricians and pediatricians claimed bonding as a kind of medical procedure, a product of their own scientific authority, a means of keeping and managing their obstetric clientele. Nurses, too, emphasized the importance of bonding in order to enhance their authority, working it into the checklists by which they evaluated their patients and taught them how to care for their babies. Although neonatologists and NICU nurses were not directly part of the battle for control over birth, bonding also provided them with a reassuring formula for redressing some of the problems of the NICU. They felt relatively powerless to affect the behavior of parents who didn't visit or didn't seem to want to care for their infants. For them, bonding was a kind of "medicine" they could prescribe for these unmanageable adult charges. If child abuse occurred, it would be because the patients didn't take their bonding "medicine."

In hospitals across the country, bonding provided a rationale for making the hospital more like home, appearing to give parents the best of both worlds. Hospital public relations departments had coopted the rhetoric and style of those advocating reform, offering freedom of "choice--the new buzzword that seems to have replaced "natural" as the sign of progressive practices. Soft-focus photos of mothers and infants along with the list of options regarding birth style made it seem like childbirth was akin to selecting a vacation package. Because bonding seemed to enhance the position of each party in the struggle for control of birth, it was widely embraced. For the same reason, fundamental change was avoided. Therefore, in the hospital and in the medical model bonding remained a pathological process that had to be monitored. Bonding helped to secure the beleaguered authority of medicine-it was their "discovery," theirs to administer. Bonding is now often reduced to a ceremonial procedure in which tired women are expected to love their newborns on the spot. Bonding is now part of the institutional structure that preserves the status quo.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE BONDING PARADIGM

Why was the bonding research published and applied for an entire decade without criticism when the scientific basis for it was so questionable? And how could there be such extensive disagreement between the investigators and their critics regarding what constitutes sound research? In recent decades, philosophers of science have been discovering the degree to which science-long thought to be a purely objective process, proceeding by strict rules of evidence and achieving an ever more objective account of nature-is actually socially constructed. Kuhn (1962) presents a theory about the evolution of the sciences and maintains that they develop through periods of "normal" science and periods of crisis or "revolutions." This course of evolution is not exclusively determined by rational factors, a matter of proof and disproof; rather it is also impacted by group pressure, competitiveness, and prevailing assumptions unwittingly held by the researchers. Kuhn does not deny the idea of empirical progress, but he is more interested in the ways paradigms or guiding theoretical concepts shift: "revolutions" occur as a result of changes in the researchers' commitments, not just because of new or disconfirming evidence. Empirical evidence that would bring into question the tenets of a paradigm is often ignored by researchers who are comfortable working within the existing paradigm. This period of "normal science" is a time when problem-solving is a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle. The inspiring picture, or model, has already been drawn; the pieces-the results of empirical studies- merely need to be put into place and the picture will be complete. For bonding research, the inspiring model was really "maternal deprivation" and "attachment"-research begun in the 1940s on institutionalized infants showing the severe depression that can result from deprivation of mothering. Bonding was another incarnation of this model, which establishes that mothers and infants have a biological need for each other and that interruption of this connection will cause harm to the young child. Far from being a revolutionary scientific idea as its authors claimed, bonding was simply the conduct of "normal science" within the maternal deprivation paradigm.

Both scientists and the public are likely to accept models that converge with their own view of the world. The guiding theoretical concept underlying the bonding research is of course evolution-the idea that animal models are pertinent to the study of human behavior and the misconception that all biologically based behavior is "good" because it is adaptive. More specifically, bonding research was embedded in the maternal deprivation and attachment paradigm, which helped to establish the presupposition that it is instinctual, promotes the survival of the species, and therefore that it is "adaptive" for mothers and young children to be in close proximity to one another. Thus the problem of mothers who failed to care for their infants was addressed as a matter of a biologically based survival mechanism by researchers trained in psychology and medicine. (Had they been sociologists they might have focused on the socioeconomic conditions that make it difficult for parents to raise their children.)

The idea of maternal deprivation grew out of Freudian psychology in the 1940s, which made the claim that a child's personality is fashioned by its emotional relationship with its mother. Research conducted by the psychoanalyst Rene Spitz and others appeared to establish the extent to which this mother-infant relationship was critical. They found that infants kept in nurseries literally died of depression and attendant physical illness because they lacked the constant emotional attention of their mothers (Spitz 1945; Spitz and Wolf 1946). On the basis of this research, and his own study of war orphans, British psychiatrist John Bow1by popularized the idea that infants and children must have one devoted caretaker during the first few years of life or they will suffer "maternal deprivation" (Bow1by 1951). In the 1960s Bow1by claimed that this need for "attachment" has an instinctual basis analogous to the imprinting behavior found to be necessary for the survival of some species of birds. For example, on the critical third day of a gosling's life (not before or after), it will learn to follow its mother (or a substitute) and will thereafter follow only that "mother--i.e., the two will be imprinted or attached." Reassessment of maternal-deprivation research reveals that these claims, like those from the research on bonding, were exaggerated in the service of reform-in fact, some of the data appears to have been fabricated in order to illustrate an idea that the authors intuitively "knew" to be true, and to promote the much-needed reform of hospitals and nurseries (Pinneau 1955; Rutter 1981; Yarrow 1961). Much of the severe deprivation experienced by infants was the product of institutions where children had as many as fifty different caretakers and were paid very little attention.

Research on attachment is also undergoing reassessment. The tremendous variability in animal behavior, not just among species but also within the same species in differing environments; the evidence that even abused animals continue to "attach" to their abusers; and the emotional adjustment of young children to day care all suggest that the interpretation that attachment behaviors require the sensitive attention of one continuously present mother has been biased. (The existence of these infant behaviors promoting proximity to the caretaker does appear to be well established, however; see Rajecki and Lamb 1978; Reed and Liederman 1983.) Because the idea of maternal deprivation was established by several decades of research (the criticism notwithstanding), bonding broke little new ground-it was an extension of this established "science" and for that reason was quite readily accepted.

The criticism of the research on bonding is partly due to the differing agendas of two scientific subcommunities. The critics were primarily psychologists whose standards of research were geared toward establishing broad principles of human behavior. The bonding studies, on the other hand, were directed primarily by pediatricians who used the concept to solve some problems of doctor-patient relations and to reform institutional regulations regarding the management of infants in nurseries. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a burgeoning technology allowed for the widespread construction of NICUs and facilitated the development of a new professional specialty-neonatology. The result was a large population of parents troubled by separation from their newborn infants who were not at first healthy or normal and often proved difficult to care for. Bonding helped to redress this pediatric problem.

It is not surprising, then, that bonding was constructed to appeal to this particular scientific subcommunity. J. Kennell (personal communication, 1990) explains that two prerequisites of acceptance of the bonding phenomenon by the medical and scientific community were to establish a biological basis and use a controlled design with statistical analyses. Kennell adds that the standards of journals like Child Development were very rigorous-much more stringent than those of the pediatric journals (personal communication, June 1990).

Another bonding researcher, P. H. Leiderman, claims that pediatricians were generally not able to publish in the developmental journals because "developmentalists didn't believe in the pediatric paradigm. They didn't work with live sick people, or even at that time, with families." Moreover, Leiderman asserts that as a psychiatrist, he did not have to prove that there was a biological basis for bonding in order for bonding to be accepted within the psychiatric and child-development research communities (Leiderman, personal communication, May 1990). In the same vein, according to psychologist Michael Lamb, most developmentalists did not accept the research from the outset. They felt the claims had been greatly exaggerated (Lamb, personal communication, May 1990).

In retrospect, Kennell also feels that "we worded things in a way that was a little exaggerated-we just wanted to help mothers" (personal communication, June 1990). The criticism of the bonding paradigm occurred after the reforms had been made and the political impact of criticizing the strictly empirical problems could be defused. Psychologists at first withheld their criticism because they, too, saw the need for the reforms that bonding promised. As bonding became a rigid doctrine, however, they began to criticize the research.

Another factor in the acceptance of bonding was the powerful analogy with animal behavior, which pediatricians may have been more likely to accept because of the tradition of using animal models to test physiological processes thought to be parallel to those in humans. Yet from the start, negative analogies were abundant. In 1971, for instance, Klopfer, one of the animal researchers whose work with goats apparently sparked Klaus and Kennell's hypothesis in the first place, wrote of his attempts to identify the variety of complex hormonal and environmental mechanisms that might account for the bonding behavior in one type of goat. Klopfer makes no claims to suggest there are parallels in humans. In fact he underscores the complexity and variety of biologically based mechanisms to be explored. Klopfer points out that goats are one type of ungulate that exhibits stable, specific, and rapidly formed bonds. On the other hand, among two European ungulate species, roe deer females will naturally adopt alien fawns whereas fallow deer females will not. Moose females are very prone to adopt aliens, particularly when they have lost their own young; they may even kidnap the offspring of other females. Although female goats generally limit their solicitude to their own kids, such behavior even varies within the species. According to Klopfer, when feeding habits require a high degree of dispersion, as among moose or deer, there may be less occasion to exclude alien individuals than when the social group is compact (as among goats) and the animals are compelled to maintain a great deal of contact with one another. Given the extent to which the negative analogies abound even among ungulates (one of the animal groups most likely to exhibit mother-infant bonding) and even in one type of goat within that group of animals, it is astonishing how freely the positive analogy was extrapolated from the animal research.

The research on bonding, then, was not simply the product of purely objective work, proceeding by strict rules of evidence. Rather, it was constructed by researchers whose prevailing assumptions provided a number of distorting lenses through which the work was seen.

NEED FOR A HYBRID PARADIGM

In looking at the problems of the bonding research it appears that Kennell and Klaus and their pediatric colleagues may have been operating with assumptions different from those of their psychologist critics regarding what constitutes legitimate research. The attempt to diagnose
and treat disease through physiological research, clinical studies, case studies, and observations appears to be the main focus of the pediatric paradigm. Research is often a response to pressing problems of illness and doctor-patient relations. Research in developmental psychology, on the other hand, stems from an entirely different set of premises. Child development research emerged at the turn of the century as part of an attempt to shed light on the process of the evolution of the species. The primary goal of child development research was simply to define normative, age-related behaviors for each stage of development. It may be that in transferring their biomedical research training and experience to research addressing emotional matters pediatricians did not realize that the laws of evidence so trustworthy in physiology and biochemistry were inadequate to assess the psychosocial complexities of individuals, which are less immediately evident or manipulable.' It also appears that for physicians, carefully constructed research may remain secondary to knowledge based on clinical inferences-the art of medicine, where research may be used to back up or illustrate what doctors already feel they know. Although Kennell's previous research addressed the psychological realm of parent-child and doctor-patient relations, it appears that the criteria for knowing were rooted in solving problems of practice rather than the assessment of universal behaviors. It should be noted that pediatricians generally do not have much training in research design and analysis unless they specialize in doing research. Klaus, for instance, did have special training in physiological research, which he obtained at the Cardiovascular Research Institute in California in the 1960s. Kennell, on the other hand, had only the standard medical education of a pediatrician with no formal training in research design (Kennell, personal communication, June 1990).

Certainly the pediatric paradigm, as practiced by Kennell and Klaus, was inadequate to address the problems they were trying to solve. Motherhood and family relations were treated as if they could be reduced to biologically based phenomena, varying quantities of which could produce regular changes in people's lives. Each mother-infant pair was also treated as if it were a clinical case in which a medical type of treatment could be prescribed, on the basis of the unassailable opinion of the doctor. However, emotional problems of parents do not have solutions like the physiologically based medical treatments pediatricians are trained to administer. By the same token, the problems Kennell and Klaus were addressing were not likely to be solved by developmental research. These problems needed immediate solution-not years of research to establish broad principles. The need for a truly hybrid paradigm-a behavioral pediatrics-is evident.

THE POWER OF METAPHOR

If the pediatric paradigm was not adequate to the task of dealing with the complex emotional and social problems of human beings in the bonding research, certain theoretical aspects of the model also got in the way of assessing the soundness of the research. The semantic and iconic properties of the analogy overpowered the paradigm, so bonding was eventually mistaken for the things it was first thought to be (somewhat) like-animal instinct and glue. All scientific theory is based on analogy; it gives to one set of phenomena (the body, for instance) a name or description that belongs to another (the machine, for instance) based on a proposed set of similarities between the two. In fact the "discovery" of mother-infant bonding might be said to have sprung from Klaus's perception of an analogy. He claims that "What got us was the startling analogy with the behaviors of mothers of prematures-they didn't seem to see their baby as their own after they had been separated. It was just like the animals we had been reading about!" (Klaus, personal communication, June 1990; emphasis added). The use of animal models in medicine can be deceptive when the simulating models appropriate for physiological processes are assumed to have equally valid simulating properties for human behavior. Klaus claims that he saw the biological basis of bonding as "a system very much like the first breathsomething has to turn it on-there are several switches, not just one. In the same vein, there are multiple switches that lock mother and infant together for the survival of the species."

In addition to the "instinctual" analogy, bonding is also metaphorical in another sense. It has a very different but related analog. Bonding also refers to the connecting of molecules in certain chemical reactions, such as the adhesive action of glue. Inferentially the bonding/mechanical parallel is therefore also drawn. In many ways it is quite different from the instinct-based comparison rooted in biology and evolution, yet it is similar in that both metaphorical roots suggest automatic response. The mechanical and instantaneous have a natural appeal in our late twentieth century technological society.

THE IDEOLOGY OF MOTHERHOOD

Perhaps the most profound influence of all on the construction and acceptance of bonding was a deeply embedded ideology regarding the proper role of women and the political need to retain at least something of that ideology in the face of the feminist challenges of the 1970s and
the continuing migration of women into the labor market. Ideas of "femininity" have been consistently tied to the shifting currents of socioeconomic and cultural issues within society and have influenced the periodically redefined tenets of motherhood. The notion that a woman's proper role requires her to stay at home with her children had its origins in the Industrial Revolution, a time when women from middle-income households might have been tempted to leave the home and join the wage labor force. In response to the conflict this choice produced, the "cult of true womanhood" emerged, in which women's femininity was said to be tied to the preservation of Puritan values. To protect these values against the growing (sinful) commercialization of the industrializing world, the woman was to become the virtuous "guardian angel" of the hearth (Welter 1979; Wishy 1972). A woman's place was in the home, and her charge was to raise virtuous children. After World War 11 this "hearth angel" concept reemerged with the support of Freudian psychology to become the "feminine mystique" during another time when there was a need to regulate women's labor and redefine social values. It was in this period that the idea of "maternal deprivation" gathered force as a means of persuading women to stay out of the wage labor force after many of them had taken paying jobs while the men had been fighting. The cautions of John Bowlby, claiming that women must be with their children for at least the first three years (and love every minute of it) or they would be causing maternal deprivation, echoed throughout the psychomedical. advice of the 1950s and beyond.

The meanings given to infancy also shift according economic and cultural issues in the adult world. In the nineteenth century, the true nature of the infant was at first defined by the church as utterly innocent and therefore in need of the protection of the church and its agent, the virtuous mother. As the pace of cultural change quickened the infant was seen as infinitely malleable according to increasingly secular experts who began to advise mothers. In the twentieth century, concepts of infancy seem to change with almost every decade. The infant of the 1920s and 1930s was "known" to be in need of discipline. He should not be picked up every time he cried or he would become "spoiled" and would not learn the important habits of living according to a strict and efficient schedule. This advice reflected the great respect adults had for the efficiency of science and industry, although there was little research evidence to corroborate this advice. In the 1940s and 1950s the infant was "known" to be in need of constant gratification. He should be picked up every time he cried or he would become frustrated and develop a neurotic personality. Such advice reflected the influence of Freudian psychology, which was also in the service of promoting the
nuclear family as a consumption unit (Ehrenreich and English 1978; Hardyment 1983; Stendler 1950). Again there was little research to corroborate these claims, but mothers were consistently held responsible for the shape of their children's lives (especially their problems).

Bonding is a compacted version of these constructions of the critical mother-infant dyad, dependent on expert advice for its survival. Now that mother has finally left the hearth for the marketplace, the allpowerful maternal sculptress must perform her work on the infinitely malleable infant, in a matter of hours or days. If motherhood and infancy are social constructions, one might wonder, who is doing the "constructing"? During the past century and a half, obstetricians and pediatricians have continually redefined infancy and motherhood in medical terms, contributing to the lore. The most current redefinition involves the epidemiological model in which all mother- infant pairs are seen as being "at risk" for various disorders, which can be addressed through medicine by the collection of huge amounts of background information to determine who is "at risk" for the "disease" of faulty mothering. Women are considered either "high risk" or "low risk" for problems of mothering (there is no category of "no risk"). This model authorizes doctors to monitor every aspect of family life from treating childhood diseases to diagnosing and providing services for drug abuse, child abuse, and even marital problems, as the problems of family life have been redefined in medical terms (Arney 1982). Those reformers who saw bonding as a means of returning to natural childbirth and providing women with more autonomy from medical authority were bound to be disappointed. All women simply came to be "at risk" for bonding failure and were therefore subject to medical scrutiny in a renewed form. The ideology regarding motherhood was preserved.

EFFECTS OF THE BONDING MYTH

Although the concept of bonding helped to usher the family into the hospital, it did little to give women more control over their birth experience or to promote a more natural birth. The burgeoning of complex technology in the 1970s increased the atmosphere of fear and danger surrounding birth and enhanced medical control. Now, one in four women will experience a surgical birth-a cesarean section. In fact, long before a woman is in labor, ultrasound will be used to examine her fetus. (And like the fetal X-ray before it, ultrasound may cause damage to the fetus.)' Most women, about four out of five, receive medication, though in reduced amounts compared to the pre-1970s norms. About 90% of women having their first vaginal delivery receive episiotomies. Induced
labors and "outlet" forceps remain common. Use of the seriously inaccurate fetal heart monitor, which contributes to the high cesarean rates, has become routine in American births. The limitations that monitoring puts on the woman's mobility during labor are considerable-she must lie relatively still to enable the monitor to pick up the requisite information. Moreover, the routine use of the fetal monitor is a testimony to the degree of underlying antagonism between doctors and their obstetric patients, since doctors are aware the monitors are inaccurate but they feel the need to use them to protect themselves from lawsuits.' In fact, doctors have now shifted their focus to the fetus and are even suing mothers who in their opinion do not meet medically established standards of care for the fetus.'

If bonding failed to give women more control over their birth, it also provided another means for doctors and psychologists to continue to caution women about going to work. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, America's premier child- rearing expert, cautions women that working during the first year of life jeopardizes bonding, and the result may be children so troubled that they become terrorists (Moyers .1988). On the other hand, it appears women could easily overdo their bonding. One prominent developmental psychologist discovered in the early 1980s that mothers were selfishly "overwhelming their infants with excess attention in order to alleviate their guilt" about working. In fact he claims that these employed women are not only overstimulating their infants, but in so doing they are preventing fathers from having their share of playtime (Birns and Hay 1988:60). The bonding myth does not represent progress for women (or their infants and families).

BONDING AS FOLKLORE

Our concept of the mother-infant relationship is not universal. A Balinese infant is at first called "caterpillar" or "mouse"; it is not given a name until it has survived for three months (Mead and Wolfenstein 1955). In premodern Europe when the infant mortality rate was very high, babies were not named until they had survived the first year (Aries 1962). In twentieth-century America, infants are named at birth if not before in fact, increasingly, the establishment of parental-fetal relationships is becoming integral to the standard child-rearing process. How did this twentieth-century belief in the importance of establishing a close relationship between parents and infants at the earliest possible moment arise? Can it be distinguished from previous customs because it is a "truth" that rightly overturns previously held beliefs by means of improved evidence? Is this early acceptance analogous to acceptance of the
fact that the earth revolves around the sun, or is it simply a culturespecific custom that is as useful but groundless as the threat of djins or the evil eye in that it keeps parents' energies focused on the caretaking of their babies? There have always been ideas about protecting children from harm. One cannot help but wonder if our definition of mother love, which appears to have migrated so far from an understanding of complex feelings and interactions in a network of human relationships, has not joined the realm of cautionary tales and folklore. Djins and the evil eye may be useful beliefs in a nomadic society in which toddlers could easily lose their lives by wandering off or even be snatched away by strangers. In our own society, large numbers of children fail to thrive and are neglected and even abused by their own families. Often these children grow up to be destructive both to themselves and to others. Moreover, this society increasingly sees its children as burdensome. So perhaps we need a custom that reminds us to bind ourselves to one another for our children's sake in a time when divorce is also frequent and the children will therefore suffer. Unfortunately, the bonding analogy has become so well established that no one is interested in seeing where the similarities end-how mothers and babies are not like goslings or goats, or glue-and how fathers are not like mothers, families are not like hospitals, and so forth.

The belief that infants and children are so profoundly shaped by their own mothers that a few hours of contact with them could inoculate them from harm, even enhance their lives for years to come, would seem to border on magical thinking. Yet the idea was readily embraced as a scientific truth because it fit so perfectly with presuppositions about women and infants that have been socially constructed over the course of a century and a half and were threatening to come undone. Bonding had an intuitive appeal and data may well have been gathered to confirm it. Unfortunately, selecting the behavior of a few species of animals and using them to explain the behavior of women ultimately reduces women to automatons who behave the way they do not because of their capacity to reason, their complex psychology, or their economic or social circumstances, but rather because of their inherent characteristics, which are often misconstrued as being inevitable. This behavior, of course, then requires the full service of science and medicine to direct it. Curiously, those who conducted and adopted the bonding research saw themselves as among the most enlightened reformers-freeing women of institutional constraints and saving children from abuse and neglect. Where and how did such noble intentions go wrong?

The investigation of bonding was distorted by the overwhelming need to reform childbirth and by the overpowering assumptions people have about instincts and mechanics, the role of women, and the infinite malleability of infants. This does not mean that the concept of bonding should be dismissed entirely, although it is doubtful that the extensive claims made for the role of "instinct" in human maternal behavior will be supported. In the case of bonding, for example, it is important to know whether a few hours or days of postpartum contact will in fact enhance a child's development or a parent's love. If bonding does have such effects, are they based in any way on the release of maternal hormones? What kind of learning is involved? According to Confucius, "A misunderstanding of the truth is responsible for all the miseries of the world." It would certainly seem that the mother-infant bonding imperative is a "misunderstanding of the truth."

Perhaps it could be argued that it is a harmless misunderstanding: it did contribute to some much-needed reforms regarding the hospital organization of childbirth. Does it really matter whether doctors are actually inoculating infants against parental failure by encouraging bonding? Does it really matter if it is the bonding time or other factors, such as learning or socioeconomic circumstances or psychological characteristics, that determine what familial relations will be like? By providing an organizational formula for knitting up certain growing loopholes in the social fabric-the increasing atomization of individuals due to divorce, frequent geographic and social moves, drugs, and povertybonding presents people with a ceremonial means of emphasizing these threatening issues.

However, some serious negative consequences of this mythologizing must be considered. At a time when obstetricians pay the second highest premiums for insurance against lawsuits, the degree of mistrust and the struggle for power between these doctors and their patients cannot be taken lightly. Overstated imperatives that later prove to be virtually groundless cannot enhance trust. Moreover, the history of child-rearing expertise is full of fads and formulas of varying utility that simply confuse parents, who increasingly wonder what to believe. (In fact, parents' unrealistic expectations of their children are a major contributor to child abuse.) Bonding is an impossible standard to adhere to. Locking women into such standards and then blaming them for failing to conform is an emotional drain not only on women, but on the entire family. Counselors and social workers who are being taught that bonding is an ingredient in formulas for preventing child abuse may overemphasize bonding at the cost of dealing with the complex social and emotional problems of the family members. And finally, conceiving of women as unthinking automatons, the prime architects of their children's fate, blinds us to the real causes of the problems of children, not to mention women, such as poverty and social isolation.

Interestingly, although bonding research and even the bonding craze have subsided, the term itself has migrated even further from its original basis, illustrating the profound social need for the concept. Bonding persists as a new word with a very general meaning, one that operates at the level of romance, as an idealized means of automatic instant social connection. In fact, bonding appears to be like Velcro: apparently able to attach itself to almost any form of social connection. A "human resources" newsletter tells "management" how to "bond" employees to new ideas. A television character tells his sister not to worry about the likelihood that a school chum will let him down. "We're real bonded," he says. An article in a geriatric journal refers to "pair bonding" among the elderly. In the psychological journals, articles on "pet bonding" now abound. A businessman overheard on an airplane tells his colleague, "We bonded them real good." The feeling that it would be good if all mothers and infants "bonded" is a social myth that did little to help mothers or their infants, but it did create a new and much-needed magic word.
Diane Eyer earned her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently writing a book on the ways in which the concepts of bonding and attachment have affected our understanding of appropriate early childcare.


NOTES

1. Between 1970 and 1987 some 107 articles about bonding were published in 51 pediatric journals and six books. Of those articles, 38 were actual reports of research findings; the remaining 69 were discussions of applications of bonding and evaluative commentaries. in the allied health sciences literature between 1974 and 1986, 43 articles in 25 journals discussed the implementation of bonding (Eyer 1988). Additional articles suggesting a link between premature and low birth weight babies and later child abuse and failure-to-thrive expands this number, as does a whole body of social work literature on bonding.

2. Typical of this type of study is some of the work of Margaret Lynch and her colleagues (1976). For instance, based on a retrospective study of 50 abused children, they conclude that abuse could be predicted by identifying problems of bonding. Lynch also found that the abused group were more likely to have been in the Special Care Nursery (59%).

3. For example in one study of 321 low-income women, Seigel and his colleagues (1980) examine the effects of two interventions--extra postpartum contact and home visits by health care professionals--on maternal attachment and child abuse and neglect. They found that the home visits were not significant and that the extra contact had a very small effect (2.5% of the difference in some variables at 4 months, 3.2% of the difference in one variable at 12 months). The interventions were unrelated to later child abuse, although they were related to attachment. The authors conclude that the maternal background variables of race, marital status, parity, education, age, and verbal test scores were the most important factors in predicting abuse.

4. A significant number of the failure-to-thrive infants are, however, premature or low birth weight babies. The authors of a typical prospective study do not use this finding to invoke a bonding failure explanation. Instead, they postulate that a complex chain of events, including certain characteristics of the infants, results in the syndrome (Vietze 1980).

5. Many psychologists also worked on the bonding studies, but the model was conceived by pediatricians and they were most often in charge of conducting the studies.

6. Ultrasound has never undergone the large-scale clinical trials that would prove its safety, although more than a hundred articles in the scientific literature suggest that it may have some ill effects on the fetus, especially on the central nervous system (Oakley 1985:98-105, 168-171).

7. From 71% to 95% of babies delivered by cesarean section for presumed fetal distress shown on the fetal heart monitor are not, in fact, distressed at birth, which means that the cesarean was not necessary. In 1985, a study of 13,000 patients conducted in Dublin showed no benefits from monitoring. Rather, monitoring increased the use of cesarean section and forceps for presumed fetal distress. This study confirmed the results of a number of smaller studies which also showed no benefits from routine monitoring (MacDonald et al. 1985).

8. As of 1987 there had been 11 court orders for cesareans on unwilling mothers for the sake of the fetus. In one case the mother was dying of cancer. The cesarean was performed, but mother and infant died (Wertz and Wertz 1989:270).



REFERENCES

Aries, P. 1962 Centuries of Childhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arney, W.

1982 Power and the Profession of Obstetrics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Birns, B., and D. Hay

1988 The Different Faces of Motherhood. New York: Plenum Press. Bowlby, J.
1951 Maternal Care and Mental Health. Monograph Series No. 2. Geneva: World
Health Organization.


Campos, J., K. Barrett, M. E. Lamb, H. Goldsmith, and C. Stenberg 1983 Socioemotional Development. In Carmichael's Handbook of Child Psychology, No. 2, C. Mussen, ed. Chapter 2. New York: Wiley.
Ehrenreich, B., and D. English
1978 For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. New York: Doubleday.
Eyer, D.
1988 Maternal Infant Bonding: Portrait of a Paradigm. Ph.D. dissertation, Developmental Psychology, University of Pennsylvania.
Hardyment, C.
1983 Dream Babies: Three Centuries of Good Advice on Child Care. New York: Harper and Row.
Kennell, J., P. Jerauld, H. Wolfe, D. Chesler, N. Kreger, W. McAlpine, M. Steffa, and M. Klaus
1974 Maternal Behavior One Year after Early and Extended Postpartum Contact. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 2:172-179.

Klaus, M., and J. Kennell 1976 Maternal-Infant Bonding: The Impact of Early Separation or Loss on Family Development. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby.
Klaus, M., P. jerauld, N. Kreger, W. McAlpine, M. Steffa, and J. Kennell
1972 Maternal Attachment: Importance of the First Postpartum Days. New England Journal of Medicine 286:460-463. Klopfer, P.
1971 Mother Love: What Turns It On? Studies of Maternal Arousal and Attachment in Ungulates May Have Implications for Man. American Scientist 59:404-407.
Kuhn, T.
1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lamb, M. E.
1982a The Bonding Phenomenon: Misinterpretations and Their Implications. Journal of Pediatrics 101:555-557.
1982b Early Contact and Maternal-Infant Bonding: One Decade Later. Pediatrics 70:763-768.
Lynch, M., J. Roberts, and M. Gordon
1976 Child Abuse: Early Warning in the Maternity Hospital. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 18:759-766.
MacDonald, P., A. Grant, M. Sheridan-Pereira, P. Boylan, and 1. Chalmers
1985 The Dublin Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial of Intraparturn Fetal Heart-rate Monitoring. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 152: 534-539.

Mead, M., and M. Wolfenstein
1955 Childhood in Contemporary Cultures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montgomery, S.
1982 Problems in the Perinatal Prediction of Abuse. British Journal of Social Work 12:189-196.
Moyers, B.
1988 "The World of Ideas: Dr. T. Berry Brazelton on Bonding." A video series produced for public television.
Myers, B.
1984 The Status of the Critical Period Hypothesis. Developmental Review 4: 240-274.
Oakley, A.
1985 The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women. England: Basel Blackwell.
Pinneau, S.
1955 The Infantile Disorders of Hospitalism and Anaclitic Depression. Psychological Bulletin 52:429-562.

Rajecki, D., and M. E. Lamb
1978 Toward a General Theory of Infantile Attachment: A Comparative Review of Aspects of the Social Bond. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3:417-464.
Reed, G., and P. Leiderman
1983 Is Imprinting an Appropriate Model for Human Infant Attachment? International Journal of Behavioral Development 6:51-69.
Ringler, N., J. Kennell, R. jarvella, B. Navajosky, and M. Klaus
1975 Mother-to-child Speech at 2 Years-Effects of Early Postnatal Contact. Journal of Pediatrics 86:141-144.
Ringler, N., M. Traus, and M. Klaus
1976 Mother's Speech to Her Two-year-old: Its Effect on Speech and Language Comprehension at 5 Years. Pediatric Research 10:307.
Ross, G.
1980 Parental Responses to Infants in Intensive Care: The Separation Issue Reevaluated. Clinics in Perinatology 7:47-60.
Rutter, M.
1981 Maternal Deprivation Reassessed. Middlesex, England: Penguin. Seigel, E., K. Bauman, E. Schaefer, M. Saunders, and D. Ingram
1980 Hospital and Home Support during Infancy: Impact on Child Abuse and Neglect, and Health Care Utilization. Pediatrics 66:183-190.
Spitz, R.
1945 Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1:53-75.

Spitz, R., and K. Wolf
1946 Anaclitic Depression. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 2:313-342. Stendler, C.
1950 Psychological Aspects of Pediatrics: Sixty Years of Child Training Practices, Revolution in the Nursery. Journal of Pediatrics 36:122-134.
Vietze, P.
1980 Newborn Behavioral and Interactional Characteristics of Nonorganic Failure-to-thrive Infants. In High-Risk Infants and Children: Adult and Peer Relations, J. Field, ed. London: Academic Press.
Welter, B.
1979 The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. In American Vistas (1607-1877), third ed., L. Dinnerstein and K. Jackson, eds. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wertz, R., and D. Wertz
1989 Lying In: A History of Childbirth in America. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wishy, B.
1972 The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Yarrow, L.
1961 Maternal Deprivation: Toward an Empirical and Conceptual Reevaluation. Psychological Bulletin 58:459-490.

 

[crysede]

If you get through all this and want more "credible evidence" supporting my argument just let me know, there's plenty more out there - but I'm not going to sit here for weeks typing studies into the computer, lol, I'll give you the exact references - hell if you tell me the university nearest to you I'd be happy to locate the journals on their database (all university libraries use equivalent databases now, so I'm pretty familiar with navigating them - but it can be a pain to find stuff at first when you're not used to them - of course, as far as I know you might be very used to using electronic databases, in which case never mind lol) and give you the relevant call numbers.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Piffle.

A couple quick comments and I'm done.

Saying that Susan Smith killed her children proves that women don't make good mothers is a bit of a stretch.

You quote Dianne Dyer out of context. She is trying to dispell the implied argument that all the problems in society are due to a lack of "bonding" in early childhood. This is only a small part of your position. She is not rejecting motherhood or claiming that the fact that women have to reconcile work and family is "unfair". You are doing that, a gross extension.

In almost every family I know (and I travel internationally quite a bit) the mother is the primary caregiver and the "ruler of the hearth". I think it's great that women have the choice to work, but most working mothers still maintain their "ruler of the hearth" status.

Your argument is going one step (or maybe two steps) beyond Dianne Eyer and the others. You're claiming that "motherhood", including the role of primary caregiver or "ruler of the hearth" is "unfair" to women. You state that men should be more active in childcare and cite studies saying there's no reason why they shouldn't. But, in order to be "fair" then men would have to be the "ruler of the hearth" in approximately 50% of the cases....because, by your definition, anything less would constitute "social pressure" by expectation of a gender based role and would be "unfair".

Even the feminists and Dianne Dyers and her peers acknowledge (Dianne Stone)..:"Since marriage and motherhood have been treated as moral obligations of women, if not sacred callings, the question of whether virtue consists in performing disciplined, paid work is shaped by the alternative moral vision of women as guardians of the family and hearth. Probe yet one level deeper and the debate for women is over something even more fundamental: How to reconcile work and womanhood?

You're rejecting this statement of motherhood, through the example of the mother and the PhD candidate as an example of "social pressure" that women suffer through.

Adding the bibliography at the bottom of the page adds "weight" to your paper, but no substance. For the most part, they are the studies used by Eyer to discredit the notion that societies problems are based on a lack of effective bonding (is bonding only naked skin on skin or can it be through clothing?)...LOL.. (As a tangent..I'll believe this when I see some long term studies done and not just a few scattered shotgun blasts - though I have an open mind - she wrote in 1994, not long ago).

You still haven't provided any evidence of YOUR position...which is far and away further "out there" than Dianne Eyer's or Hays or any of the others. They acknolowedge "motherhood" the importance of the hearth etc. while you reject it and call it "unfair." Concentrate on your assertions where they vary with the others.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

This tactic of "baffle them with bullshit" usually works, especially in school, but I don't buy it. Show me evidence that supports your position...I've read Eyer and the others. They don't reject "motherhood" as "unfair" whereas you do. Give me something that supports YOUR position.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Your argument is going one step (or maybe two steps) beyond Dianne Eyer and the others. You're claiming that "motherhood", including the role of primary caregiver or "ruler of the hearth" is "unfair" to women. You state that men should be more active in childcare and cite studies saying there's no reason why they shouldn't. But, in order to be "fair" then men would have to be the "ruler of the hearth" in approximately 50% of the cases....because, by your definition, anything less would constitute "social pressure" and would be "unfair".

uh?

 

[crysede]

You quote Dianne Dyer out of context. She is trying to dispell the implied argument that all the problems in society are due to a lack of "bonding" in early childhood. This is only a small part of your position. She is not rejecting motherhood or claiming that the fact that women have to reconcile work and family is "unfair". You are doing that, a gross extension.

LOL I quoted the entire article, that's not out of context - and I am not rejecting motherhood, nor claiming that the fact that women have to reconcile childcare with work is unfair - I have repeatedly said that what is unfair is that women are the only ones who are seen as having to do this.

Let's recap: you said that

The biggest weakness in your argument is the bit with the "most cognitive psychologists regard mother-child bonding as a gradual process that takes place in the first years of the child's life " and the"There is no evidence to suggest men are incapable of such bonding".

How many is "most"? Do they discount the pregancy part and the little kicks inside? I was under the impression that the bonding started in the first trimester. And I bet, I can find many baskets full of studies that support it.

Well now, if that's the biggest weakness, then it makes sense for me to prove that I am correct about this doesn't it? I mean, if I'm going to go about proving my case, doesn't it make sense to show that the so called "biggest weakness" is in fact a valid statement? I've given you loads of evidence to show that this mother-child prenatal bond is not an accepted position, it's time for you to present the baskets full of studies that support your claim that there is a biologically driven mother-child bond that develops prenatally and thus women instinctively bond to their children before birth, and fathers cannot form the same level of attachment children.

In almost every family I know (and I travel internationally quite a bit) the mother is the primary caregiver and the "ruler of the hearth". I think it's great that women have the choice to work, but most working mothers still maintain their "ruler of the hearth" status.

Your argument is going one step (or maybe two steps) beyond Dianne Eyer and the others. You're claiming that "motherhood", including the role of primary caregiver or "ruler of the hearth" is "unfair" to women. You state that men should be more active in childcare and cite studies saying there's no reason why they shouldn't. But, in order to be "fair" then men would have to be the "ruler of the hearth" in approximately 50% of the cases....because, by your definition, anything less would constitute "social pressure" and would be "unfair".

I've said this two or three times already, but fine, I'll say it yet again: NO NO NO NO NO!!!!

I am claiming that society insisting that women be 'rulers of the hearth' is unfair - this is totally different from claiming that a woman being the 'ruler of the hearth' is unfair.

I state that a vast number of men want to be more active in childcare - this is totally different from saying that they should be.

I cite studies showing there is no sound basis for societies continued dismissal of men's nurturing ability, and showing that men are as nurturing as women - this is totally different from saying that there is no reason that men are incapable of nurturing: I am making the positive claim that they are just as capable of nurturing as females.

I claim that in order to be fair, society would have to accept the scientifically proven fact that men and women are equally good caregivers - that society would have to stop claiming that mothers are inherently better at raising children than fathers, that society would have to stop assuming that deep parent-child attachment is something that most men do not want, and are incapable of having anyway. Do you see a single reference to what individual men and women should do? NO!


And my further claim is that, if society becomes fair and men and women are not pressured as to how much of the responsibility each will bear, that the responsibility will likely be shared more or less equally between the sexes.

This does NOT mean that 50% of children will have a male primary caregiver and 50% a female one: that's like claiming that the only way 100 glasses of water can be half full on average, is if half are empty and the other half filled - that's blatant silliness: there are an infinite number of possible combinations that would result in the glasses being half full on average!

Even the feminists and Dianne Dyers and her peers acknowledge (Dianne Stone)..:"]i]Since marriage and motherhood have been treated as moral obligations of women, if not sacred callings, the question of whether virtue consists in performing disciplined, paid work is shaped by the alternative moral vision of women as guardians of the family and hearth. Probe yet one level deeper and the debate for women is over something even more fundamental: How to reconcile work and womanhood?[/i]

I am not rejecting this statement - this statement is exactly my position.

Adding the bibliography at the bottom of the page adds "weight" to your paper, but no substance. For the most part, they are the studies used by Eyer to discredit the notion that societies problems are based on a lack of effective bonding (is bonding only naked skin on skin or can it be through clothing?)...LOL.. (As a tangent..I'll believe this when I see some long term studies done and not just a few scattered shotgun blasts - though I have an open mind).

Eyer is focussing on bonding immediately after birth - but if you read the article you'll note that her argument also shows that women do not form some special bond with children prior to birth due to some biological mother-instinct possessed exclusively by women (which was your claim). The majority of the evidence she cites also supports this corollary from argument.

You still haven't provided any evidence of YOUR position...which is far and away further "out there" than Dianne Eyer's or Hays or any of the others. They acknolowedge "motherhood" the importance of the hearth etc. while you reject it and call it "unfair." Concentrate on your assertions where they vary with the others.

My position is exactly that Kimmel& Aronson, of Brannon & Bacon, of Carey Linde, and of Hrdy (and, with regards to the whole bonding issue, that of Eyer). The evidence they provide to support their positions supports mine.

 

[crysede]

This tactic of "baffle them with bullshit" usually works, especially in school, but I don't buy it. Show me evidence that supports your position...I've read Eyer and the others. They don't reject "motherhood" as "unfair" whereas you do. Give me something that supports YOUR position.

I don't know what sort of school you went too, but bs is harshly penalized in mine.

Look, there is a very good reason why have not given evidence to support what you insist on referring to as my argument: that is because the argument you have invented (and erroneously attribute to me) is obviously bs.

And honesty, the fact that you still appear to think that your invention is my argument cannot be blamed on some lack of clarity on my part - I've been extremely clear as to what my argument is, and on several previous occasions have objected to your invention, and have pointed out EXACTLY why your invention is NOT my argument.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

"LOL I quoted the entire article, that's not out of context - and I am not rejecting motherhood, nor claiming that the fact that women have to reconcile childcare with work is unfair - I have repeatedly said that what is unfair is that women are the only ones who are seen as having to do this. "

These are two sides of the same coin. You're saying the exact same thing as me, just from a different direction.

"Women are the ones who are seen as having to do this"

This = "Motherhood, ruler of the hearth and primary childcare"

If "This" is unfair, the only way to change that is to make it more equal. To make it more equal is to have men share "This", that is, again, "Motherhood, ruler of the hearth and primary childcare" or to be "This" in approximately 50% of the cases, otherwise there'd still be the expectation that it was a woman's role and, having that 'definition' would be 'unfair' in your words.

And, if you no longer want women to be "the ones who are seen as having to do this" almost exclusively, then they must, by definition, not be the ones that are largely responsible for "This" in most cases.

It adds up to the same thing.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

I am claiming that society insisting that women be 'rulers of the hearth' is unfair - this is totally different from claiming that a woman being the 'ruler of the hearth' is unfair.

There doesn't seem to be much difference here. None in fact.

 

[Ishmael]

Let me throw my two (or three) cents in about that research paper.

1. Anything written by nearly anyone about bonding and/or child rearing is probably not worth the reading. They are all written after the fact and most of them don't have a clue.

2. The human race has survived, and thrived, for hundreds of thousands of years. It has done so without physicians, philosophers, psycologist's, engineer's, or two bit hacks such as ourselves.

3. Health and education issues aside, there is no evidence whatsoever that we are any better at child rearing than the ancient Egyptians. And no little body of knowledge that may suggest that the Egytians were actually better at it.

4. Studies of our closet realtives, the primates, tend to suggest that the female is the primary care giver for some period of time. After which the males begin to emulate the adult males of the troop whereas the females emulate their mother. This occurs before puberty. (Where in the hell the people in the study got the idea to base their research on the ungulates is beyond my ken. Ungulates are food animals, man is a predator. Predators have unique methods with regard to the young. Mainly because of the difference in intelligence and the requirements for more learned behavior as opposed to atavistic behavior.)

5. Studies of aboriginal cultures tend to verify the above observations. The female is the primary care giver until such time as the motor skills have reached a point where the genders begin to 'specialize' in those traits that yeild the best chance for survival of the group.

6. My observations of women in the work place also tend to indicate that there is a tendency to want to be with the child for the first 3 to 5 years. These were employee's that I wanted back. There was no encouragement on my part for them to stay home. It was their choice. (Albeit probably made with the husband.)

The flaws in the research papers cited were obvious for the most part. From the group selection to the concept of a 'control group'. I can think of several studies that would yeild far more information, but would never be allowed to occur.

As in nature with predators, bonding may, or may not occur. In the higher species, child rearing is as much learned as it is instinctual. But, the formula that has advanced the human race seems to work. Tamper with it at your own risk.

Ishmael

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

if you accept this:

Since marriage and motherhood have been treated as moral obligations of women, if not sacred callings, the question of whether virtue consists in performing disciplined, paid work is shaped by the alternative moral vision of women as guardians of the family and hearth. Probe yet one level deeper and the debate for women is over something even more fundamental: How to reconcile work and womanhood?

Then you are in contradiction of this statement:

I am claiming that society insisting that women be 'rulers of the hearth' is unfair

The above quote uses "treated as moral obligations of women, if not sacred callings", as a premise, you're disputing it.

 

[crysede]

I am claiming that society insisting that women be 'rulers of the hearth' is unfair - this is totally different from claiming that a woman being the 'ruler of the hearth' is unfair.

There doesn't seem to be much difference here. None in fact.

Let me get this straight - you don't feel there is any difference at between these two statements:

Statement 1: Women should be the primary caregivers of children

Statement 2: Women are the primary caregivers of children

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Eyer is making an assertion. It is not "Scientifically proven fact". If there's a study over a generation on her theories and they prove to be true, then they'll become fact. An assertion is not fact.

I'll look forward to the results of her studies, though, again, they aren't supporting your argument, they're only addressing the "bonding" issue as it relates to how much time a mother spends with her child and how that child might turn out. Where you're asserting...I am claiming that society insisting that women be 'rulers of the hearth' is unfair

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Yes..women should be......"motherhood, rulers of the hearth and the primary caregivers - albeit with lots of male support and participation - as there mostly always has been"

And, women are......yes, same thing. Different tense of course. I did recognize that much.

"And that's all I have to say about that" - Forrest Gump.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I don't think that it's ceased to so do at all [edited to add: remark re. my question of why social pressure was no longer influencing women]. I think that women are taking on more responsibility now.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, your position is that men actually becoming less involved in childcare now?

No. Women are taking on more responsibility outside the home now (I'm supportive of women having the choice to do this).

 

[crysede]

Studies of our closet realtives, the primates, tend to suggest that the female is the primary care giver for some period of time. After which the males begin to emulate the adult males of the troop whereas the females emulate their mother. This occurs before puberty. (Where in the hell the people in the study got the idea to base their research on the ungulates is beyond my ken. Ungulates are food animals, man is a predator. Predators have unique methods with regard to the young. Mainly because of the difference in intelligence and the requirements for more learned behavior as opposed to atavistic behavior.)

Actually, I'm pretty sure we're still considered to be omnivores not predators - just take a look at human teeth, eye placement, and jaw alignment. And since it is accepted practice - indeed it is de rigueur in medicine - to compare us to rats and mice, I'm not sure ungulates are that much of a stretch.

. My observations of women in the work place also tend to indicate that there is a tendency to want to be with the child for the first 3 to 5 years. These were employee's that I wanted back. There was no encouragement on my part for them to stay home. It was their choice. (Albeit probably made with the husband.)

But the real question is, have you found that men tend not to want to be with their child? I know that men do not get such things as paternity leave and the like, but based on your experience with fathers, do you think that if they had the opportunity to spend more time with their child, they would choose not to?

As in nature with predators, bonding may, or may not occur. In the higher species, child rearing is as much learned as it is instinctual. But, the formula that has advanced the human race seems to work. Tamper with it at your own risk.

I agree with you (well except for the predator part), but I think that the potential benefit of greater paternal involvement - to men, women, and children - justifies attempting to further ease social restrictions against men as caregivers.

 

[crysede]

Yes..women should be......"motherhood, rulers of the hearth and the primary caregivers - albeit with lots of male support and participation - as there mostly always has been"

And, women are......yes, same thing. Different tense of course. I did recognize that much.

"And that's all I have to say about that" - Forrest Gump.

No, different tenses would be:

Women will be the primary caregivers of children

Women are the primary caregivers of children

Women have been the primary caregivers of children

'Will', 'are', and 'have been', are different tenses of the verb 'to be'. 'Should' is a modal verb (other modals include 'can', 'must', 'ought', and 'want'), not a different tense of the verb 'to be'. (Well, 'shall' was used in old english instead of 'will', but I'm using modern english)

Perhaps using a different example would make things clearer, would you say that someone telling you :

1) You should not be stepping on my flowers

is the same as them telling you:

2) You are not stepping on my flowers