Psychoanalytic theory, on which much failure to thrive research has been based, places great emphasis on the role of early adverse experiences in the aetiology of problems in adulthood, and it has generally been thought that maltreated children are likely to become
abusive parents, although more recently, researchers have questioned this assumption (e.g., Kaufman and Zigler, 1987; Simons, Whitbeck, Conger, and Chyi-In, 1991).
Attention has been paid to adverse early experiences in mothers of infants who fail to thrive, with rather mixed results. Early research (e.g., Fischhoff et al., 1971 ; Evans et al., 1972; Shapiro et al., 1976)) related growth failure to the mother’s experience of loss or lack of nurture in childhood, or to “ghosts” in the nursery (Shapiro et al.); these are the ghosts of unresolved conflicts in the mother’s childhood. These studies are generally based on clinical impressions, making it difficult to generalise any conclusions about the role of parental history. Nonetheless, more stringent research has also implied a link between mothers’ early experiences and infant failure to thrive. For example, Pollitt et al. (1975) reported that mothers of hospital referred infants who were failing to thrive had more stressful recollections of childhood than mothers of thriving controls, and Altemeier et al. ( 1985) observed that negative maternal recollections of childhood - such as feeling unloved as a child, reporting an unhappy childhood, and the frequency of beating by a carer - were related to infant growth failure.
An association between adverse maternal experience and infant failure to thrive has not been consistently observed; Newberger et al. (1986) reported that recollections of childhood did not discriminate between mothers of growth retarded infants and controls. Very little information was provided about the content and validity of their interview, so it might be argued that the assessment failed to measure adverse experiences adequately. However, identical interviews distinguished between mothers of abused children and mothers of non-abused controls, implying that the measure had discriminant validity, and that the lack of differentiation between mothers of growth retarded and thriving infants was genuine.
Dubowitz et al. (1989) compared recollections of childhood among mothers whose children were failing to thrive or had been abused. No group differences were apparent, but there was no control group of mothers without parenting difficulties, so one cannot say whether
the results mean that both groups have had unhappy childhoods or that they have both had happy childhoods. Few mothers reported negative feelings; they may have been reluctant to express their emotions, given the circumstances of the interview (during the child’s hospitalisation following abuse or failure to thrive). The mothers’ reported lack of negative feelings might also reflect their idealisation of childhood (Main and Goldwyn, 1984), so the interview may have failed to assess their actual experiences.
Benoit et al. (1989) reported inconsistent results in their controlled study of childhood attachment experiences among mothers whose infants were failing to grow. Mothers in the failure to thrive group had less secure representations of attachment than comparisons, according to independent ratings of their responses to a structured interview (The Adult Attachment Interview; George, Kaplan, and Main, 1985), but no case-control differences were found in ratings of childhood on a self-report questionnaire (the Mother-Father-Peer scale; Epstein, 1983, cited in Benoit et al., 1989). The authors concluded that this discrepancy occurred because the interview measure produced a more valid measure of adult attachment; equally, the two instruments may measure different constructs. The Adult Attachment Interview asks specific questions about childhood experiences, which are rated independently; the Mother-Father-Peer scale requires that the respondent makes her own judgements. These judgements may be idealised, and are likely to be subject to a higher degree of distortion than memories of actual events in childhood (Brewin, Andrews, and Gotlib, 1993).
In summary, the literature suggests a link between mothers’ recall of adverse early
experiences and infant failure to thrive, but this association is clearly not inevitable. Rutter (1989, p 321) argued that “intergenerational discontinuities are at least as striking as
continuities” ; an understanding of the mechanisms underlying the intergenerational cycle of parenting difficulties requires consideration of why adverse early experiences lead to
problems for some parents but not for others. Negative childhood experiences create vulnerability for a variety of problems, such as psychiatric disorder (Andrews, Brown, and Creasey, 1990), and child rearing difficulties (e.g., Dowdney, Skuse, Rutter, Quinton, and
Mrazek, 1985). Mainstream psychological research has suggested that the intergenerational transmission of maladaptive caregiving may occur through social learning of inappropriate behaviour (e.g. Feshbach, 1974; Hertzberger, 1983) or through distorted representations of early attachment experiences (e.g., Bowlby, 1969; Main and Goldwyn, 1984); equally, early maltreatment may give rise to psychosocial disadvantage that creates vulnerability for caregiving difficulties (see for example, Rutter, 1989). Models of the determinants of parenting, such as Belsky’s (1984) ecological framework, have indicated that links between a mother’s care experiences and her child’s functioning will be mediated by her current circumstances and cognitions about events in caregiving; this understanding might usefully be applied to studies of children who have failed to thrive.