INTRODUCTION
Think about the word “mother.” Close your eyes and allow the images evoked by this word to come into focus. What comes to your mind? Images of a woman with a child? Images of your idea of an ideal mother? Images of your mother? Maybe the image you have is of a special person who mothered you at different times in your life? Regardless of the image you create in your mind, it is most likely a powerful image, spawning intense feelings of love, adoration, fear, sadness, or even rage. Continue to hold the image in your mind. What else do you see? A child? Someone you knew?
A sad, withering child who is in need of mothering? A happy, robust child who is in the arms of a loving mother? The child that was once you? Do these images jog your memory? What comes to mind? A quiet moment over homework? An outing? Sitting down to a meal? Being held as you cried over your skinned knee? Being punished? Or perhaps, the sight of your mother walking away from you on that first day of school?
There is nothing small about a mother; she evokes powerful images, feelings, and memories.
Throughout history mothers have been revered just as often as they have been feared. Even death does not alter the power of mothers. Folktales and traditional beliefs of several cultures maintain that the power and influence mothers have in the lives of their children and their children’s children transcends death and remains strong. Scandinavian folklore includes the story of the passing of wisdom from one generation to the next through grandmothers, mothers, and daughters (Paxson, 1998). Paxson tells of the young girl who sets herself down on her grandmother’s grave in order to learn from her teachings. Through the night the girl experiences a dreamlike phenomenon within which her kerchief-wearing grandmother appears with a plate of strudel. Come morning, the girl awakens to find herself still on the grave of her grandmother. She also finds the taste of sugar on her lips and the teachings of her grandmother in her mind. The maternal power has been passed on to her, adding maternal strength to her family. Mothers transcend boundaries to share wisdom. In
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other cultural tales, mothers transcend human boundaries to protect their children in times of danger (Paxson, 1998). Some have the ability to foresee the future, predicting the fate of a child.
The concept of mother connotes an interesting dichotomy between an altruistic, benevolent, wise, mystical goddess holding the power of fertility and birth and the awesome, secretive, merciless, devouring goddess holding the power of fate. Jung (1959) simply referred to this dichotomous archetyping of mothers as “the loving and the terrible mother.” Mothers have the power to give life and sustain it through their motherly love and actions, just as they have the power to end life or condemn it through the abandonment and refusal to bestow their motherly love and actions.
Historically, mothers have consistently filled both the “loving” and the “terrible” roles. In fact, van der Heever (1990), in an exploration of several studies, found that the further one goes back in history, the lower the quality of childcare and the more children were likely to be abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused (French, in Vol. 2 of this Handbook). Examining the relationships between parents and their children reveals an indifference to infants and small children, by mothers, fathers and society as a whole. Badinter (1981) characterized motherhood in eighteenth century France, where infants were routinely abandoned or left to the care of wet-nurses or surrogate mothers (often women of the lower, poverty class). van der Heever elaborated on this concept, suggesting that these children, even those from well-to-do families, received the poorest of care as women of poverty would often feed and care for their own children first, providing for the surrogate child only as time and resources allowed. Motherhood and caring for one’s infant were not seen as loving roles or behaviors, but instead were something to be passed on to the “peasants.”
The turn of the twentieth century brought with it the beginning of a shift in how mothers and children were seen (Cohler and Paul, in Vol. 3 of this Handbook). It was around this time that Sigmund Freud (1913/1955) made the claim that there was no love like a mother’s. He stated that this relationship was the strongest of all relationships, enduring for a lifetime, and the root of one’s future intimate relationships. His ideas gained momentum over the years, strengthening the beliefs that mothers were crucial to the development of an emotionally stable and successful adult. The acceptance and support of this belief came by way of a difficult scientific journey, which has taken over 100 years. Two separate but interconnected trails led to this understanding: maternal deprivation and maternal impact.
In this chapter we begin with a discussion of these two trails, maternal deprivation and the maternal impact. The meaning of motherhood in the context of becoming a woman is then explored in the section on becoming a mother. Next, the preparation for motherhood is examined within the pregnancy and postpartum periods in subsections on processes in pregnancy and processes in the postpartum period. A discussion on the capacity for mothering is presented, followed by a discussion on mothering from the context of a holding environment for the child. In this latter section we focus on three important functions of mothering: monitoring and surveillance, expected nurturing, and the responsive caregiving–social partner role. Finally, maternal responsibilities during interaction, developmentally based mothering, and challenges in mothering are explored.
MATERNAL DEPRIVATION
Eight hundred years ago, Fredrick II, who was the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, created an experiment in which he wanted to find out which language children would speak “naturally” or on their own (Stone and Church, 1957). He ordered that a group of babies be taken from their mothers and cared for by foster mothers and nurses. These caregivers were told to feed, bathe, and see to the needs of these children, but no one was to speak to these children at all, in any language. He apparently wondered which of the great languages the babies would naturally speak: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, or the language of their parents to whom they were born. Of course, Frederick never found out which language the children would have spoken. Sadly, his experiment resulted in the death of all the babies—because of the lack of appropriate mothering. The babies were not able to
live without being touched, seeing smiles and changes of emotion, and hearing the loving, soothing words of a mother. The babies became withdrawn, depressed, and died (Stone and Church, 1957).
At the turn of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for children to be placed in state-run institutions or foundling homes. During the early 1900s, several medical doctors looked into the extreme death rates, between 90% and 100% in some of these institutions. They found that even the few children who survived early childhood in these homes developed delays and disturbances in the normal course of development. Rene Spitz (1945, p. 54) described these child survivors of institutions as “asocial, delinquent, feeble-minded, psychotic, or problem children. . . practically without exception,” and he related these findings to the lack of maternal nurturance. Wanting to understand what effects the lack of mothering would have on a baby, Spitz (1946) observed and recorded what happened to a group of 123 infants who were deprived of emotional and physical contact with others by nature of their institutional environment. This environment provided these motherless babies with basic care but very little human interaction. They existed in a dimly lit, but clean and hygienic environment. They had adequate food, appropriate clothing with pastel colors, blankets, and regular medical care. They initially had no toys, although this changed with time.
These babies had little visual stimuli, and, in fact, they had sheets hanging in between the cribs or cots—essentially creating a “solitary confinement.” These babies had minimal human contact, limited primarily to feeding times. Spitz observed these children to deteriorate over time and to develop a group of symptoms, which he later termed anaclitic depression. This syndrome included the following symptoms: apprehension, sadness, weepiness, lack of contact, rejection of environment, withdrawal, retardation of development, retardation of reaction to stimuli, slowness of movement, dejection, stupor, loss of appetite, refusal to eat, loss of weight, and insomnia. He added that one additional symptom should be included, although it was difficult to describe. He portrayed it as a physiognomic expression, likening it to the expression of an adult who was depressed.
In 1945 Spitz compared children who were confined to institutions with same-age children living with their parents in either an urban or a rural area. The institutionalized children were the children of poor Latina women who did not have enough money to care for their infants. Their babies were generally healthy at first and were able to continue being breast-fed. Nonetheless, they remained in an institutional setting.
The other subgroup of babies were the children of what Spitz (1945, p. 60) termed “delinquent minors as a result of social maladjustment or feeblemindedness, or because they were psychically defective, psychopathic, or criminal.” These mothers were prisoners in a penal institution. The babies of these women were weaned early and continued to receive care from their own mothers, with coaching from others.
The Latina foundling babies fared the worst. These babies experienced a drop in IQ from 124 to 72 over the first year (the other groups remained the same or improved) and fell to 45 by the end of the second year. In addition, Spitz found increased illness and infection rates in the foundling babies, high death rates, and developmental delays. Sadly, only 2 of 26 surviving 21/2-year-old children could speak a couple of words, most were unable to do any self-care behaviors, and none had been toilet trained. Spitz argued that even though the Latina babies did have caregivers who were very sincere in their work with the babies, they did not have the time or the resources to adequately care for the babies. Essentially, he said, these babies were in “solitary confinement” as they rarely saw or interacted with a caregiver.
Freud and Burlingame (1944), Provence and Lipton (1962), and Dennis (1973), who also stud-ied institutionalized children deprived of a mothering relationship, all came to the same general conclusions—that in spite of proper physical care, infants and children who lack an opportunity to emotionally bond with a “mother or mother-substitute” can lead to extreme forms of dysfunction in the child or death. These children often demonstrated decreased growth, decreased development, increased risk of psychiatric disturbances, increased levels of illness, and high death rates.
Hrdy (1999) states that what makes human primates different is the combination of our intelligence and the empathetic capacity. The empathetic component is the foundation of morality. Kochanska
and Murray (2000) found that early mother–child relationships predicted preschool evaluations of the child’s moral sense. The National Institute for Child Health and Development’s daycare study found that the mother–child relationship explained more variance in child outcomes than the time in and quality of childcare environments (NICHD, 1999). Likewise, in a study of kibbutz infants, there was a difference in attachment security for infants sleeping with their mothers at night versus infants sleeping away from home, even though daytime contact with parents was similar (Sagi, van IJzendoorn, Aviezer, Konnell, and Mayseless, 1994). It thus seems that children need regular daily physical connections with their mothers in order to sustain secure attachments.
MATERNAL IMPACT
In 1951, the World Health Organization gave John Bowlby the task of exploring orphaned or homeless children. In understanding these children, Bowlby (1953, p. 11) determined that “what is believed to be essential for mental health is that the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute—one person who steadily mothers him) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment. It is this complex, rich, and rewarding relationship with the mother in early years. . . [that we] now believe to underlie the development of character and mental health.” Not only was it determined that proper and adequate mothering was essential for proper growth, but it was determined that the mothering received during this period was also necessary for children’s later ability to successfully mother their own children.
Brody (1956, p. 377) writes “The genesis of motherliness is to be sought primarily in the quality of the child’s attachment to her own mother in the first years of life. In that period the mother actively provides many passive satisfactions to the child, and is perceived as having the power to grant or withhold all of the pleasures that the child can imagine to be crucial. As the child grows capable of activity in her own right, she imitates the activity she is most familiar with, that of her mother.”
The research generated by these two prophetic statements has supported the ideas that our moth-ering is important in who we become as individuals and parents. Through this research we have also learned about the nature and behaviors of mothering—what supports the developing child and what sets the child up for a negative life trajectory. Some of the specific behaviors of mothering found to have positive effects include sensitivity, affect attunement (Haft and Slade, 1989), empathy (Basch, 1983; Settlage, 1980), emotional availability (Emde, 1980; Settlage, 1980), touch or stimulation (Fields, 1994), reciprocation (Mahler, 1961; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975), ability to read and respond to child’s cues (Sumner and Spietz, 1994), contingency (Sumner and Spietz, 1994), parental management and socialization processes (Greenberg, Speltz, and DeKlyen, 1993), and a history of secure relationships or attachments (Benoit and Parker, 1994; Slade and Cohen, 1996). The behaviors that lead to less desirable outcomes include things in direct opposition to those behaviors previously listed. A primary caregiver’s insecure attachment history has also been shown to have a strong effect, as has the presence of trauma (Lyons-Ruth and Block, 1996).
BECOMING A MOTHER: A PATH TO WOMANHOOD
Conception marks the beginning of a transformation: that of a woman to a mother. The progres-sion through pregnancy into motherhood leads to a second transformation: that of a woman with a newfound female identity (Pines, 1972), one developed out of the context of motherhood. Psy-chologically, pregnancy involves a series of transformations and becomes a period of introspection (Trad, 1990). The pregnancy changes women physically, altering the form and appearance of their bodies, as well as activating and changing certain functions of their bodies. These outward changes represent the inner work that needs to occur.
Women prepare to become the mothers of their children, while at the same time are still children of their mothers (Pines, 1972). These are among the first tasks of this developmental shift. Lester and Notman (1988) argued that pregnant women may experience a reactivation of feelings of dependency on their mothers as well as a wish for fusion with them. They need to understand who their mothers are, what they represent to them, what part of their mothers they want to incorporate into themselves, and how to incorporate the “ideal” mother images they have been developing and carrying within their own minds (Solchany, 2001). They come to understand their mothers from the perspective of another mother, creating a new level of relating. As this reworking of the relationship with their mothers continues, pregnant women also need to begin to develop and establish a relationship with their babies. This requires a psychological reckoning with both the long-imagined babies of their minds (Pines, 1972) and the perfect babies they had wished they would have been (Deutsch, 1945).
Pines (1972, p. 336) summarized these processes by stating, “Motherhood is a three-generation experience.”
Benedek (1959) clearly described the transformation to motherhood as a developmental stage at which motherhood acts as the catalyst for transformation of the identity of self (Demick, in Vol.
3 of this Handbook). As the mother begins to “mother” her child, she finds that she satisfies the infant’s needs much of the time. She also finds that, at times, she fails to satisfy her baby’s needs.
Meeting baby’s needs generates feelings of accomplishment, success, and competency within the mother. Failing to meet the perceived needs of the baby generates feelings of failure, inadequacy, and emotional pain within the mother. Benedek (1959, p. 392) called this “emotional symbiosis”
and defined it as “the reciprocal interaction between mother and child which. . . creates structural change in each of the participants.” In other words, the baby’s experience with the mother affects the baby’s psychological processes, just as the mother’s experience with the baby affects the mother’s psychological processes. Each time the mother feeds her hungry baby, the baby experiences the mother as a good mother who takes away the pain of hunger and replaces it with satiation, warmth, soothing, security, and safety—all is good in the world. When the baby does not get fed, the world becomes a bad, painful experience. For the mother, when she is able to feed and satisfy her hungry child, she feels satisfied herself; however, when she is unable to satisfy her infant, she feels less satisfied and frustrated in her own abilities. Benedek (1959) described this process for the baby as translating to good mother= good self; and a reciprocal process for the mother as good-thriving-infant= good-mother-self. Whatever the experience, one of satisfaction or one of frustration, it becomes integrated into the personalities of both the baby and the mother. With good mothering, the egos of each member of the dyad are fed and nurtured, building confidence. With disturbed mothering, the relationship within the dyad turns into a vicious circle, fed by aggression and a lack of mutual satisfaction (Benedek, 1959).
The transformation to motherhood requires women to accept and work through feelings of loss and grief. Barclay, Everitt, Rogan, Schmied, and Wyllie (1997) found women experienced a loss of a sense of self, of how they used their time, of freedom and independence, and of their life as it used to be. Women grieve over the changes in their bodies, their relationships, their professional lives, their activities, and the context in which they viewed and experienced life (Solchany, 2001).
They need to reconcile with the facts that they will never again be women without children—even if the pregnancy they experience tragically ends through miscarriage or fetal death—and that their bodies and their lives are forever altered. Trad (1990, p. 359) described, “motherhood [as] a dynamic process in which change is virtually unceasing, [and] flexibility and the ability to deal with these transformations and concomitant losses are necessary traits of the adaptive mother.” The processes of grief and loss often breed feelings of conflict, ambivalence, hostility, regression, aggression, and negativity.
Hartrick (1997, p. 271) described a period in which “the taken for granted infrastructure” the women had or had assumed they had in their lives “is questioned and begins to crumble.” This idea is echoed by Barclay et al. (1997, p. 721), who found that women go through a period of realization of “the overwhelming process of becoming a mother and the consequences this has on one’s life.”
Hartrick (1997) described resolution of these issues through a reclaiming for women of certain parts of who they were and in the recognition that they had choices. Recognition of choice allowed them
Hartrick (1997) described resolution of these issues through a reclaiming for women of certain parts of who they were and in the recognition that they had choices. Recognition of choice allowed them