Mother and Child Communion: A Collective Challenge for Our Future
As I move on from my beloved home on Page 13 of the Wet Set Gazette toward other projects, I want to say how proud I’ve been to appear here each month, with so many wonderful writers, educators and practitioners who articulate important insights and information about living in a conscious way through the parenting journey. I’ve been free to write about things that may not have been happily welcomed in more mainstream publications, and for this I am unspeakably grateful. As my final word here (I’m probably preaching to the choir), I unapologetically and politically incorrectly declare what I know to be an irreducible truth about human development: Children need their mothers.
Nature set it up this way, and it’s based on psycho-biological realities which we ignore at our collective peril. Of course one doesn’t say this in polite company, at least if one doesn’t want to be branded an anti-feminist threatening to overturn women’s rights. Yes, fathers are irreplaceably important and can indeed be the primary caregiver, as can any consistent, loving, attuned adult… eventually. But in those early weeks and months, it is mother whom the child knows from their nine months of prenatal communion, it is mother whose very body, voice, smell, heartbeat and essence is perceived as an extension of his very being, and it is indeed mother in whose sphere he will experience the most unperturbed, healthy unfolding of his self.
This is never more true than in the hours and days following birth, and yet the standard hospital birth in America routinely separates mothers and babies, which I believe establishes an insidious precedent: separation as “not that big a deal.” But it is a big deal. Thomas Lewis and his colleagues describe in A General Theory of Love the internal havoc that erupts, invisibly, within a baby separated from its mother:
Cortisol is the body’s major stress hormone, and its sharp elevation in separated mammals tells us that relationship rupture is a severe bodily strain. Cortisol levels rise six-fold in some mammals after just thirty minutes of isolation. …The physiologic signature of the despair phase is that of wide-spread disruption of bodily rhythms. Heart rate will be low, and on the electrocardiogram we will find abnormal, serrated beats intruding into the regular procession of slender spikes that demarcate a healthy heart’s metronomic cadence. …The level of growth hormone in the blood will plummet. Even immune regulation undergoes major alterations in response to prolonged separation.[1]
“When the mother is absent, an infant loses all his organizing channels at once. Like a marionette with its strings cut, his physiology collapses into the huddled heap of despair. …Once separated from their attachment figures, mammals spiral down into a somatic disarray that can be measured from the outside and painfully felt on the inside,” they write. The enigma of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)—of which the U.S. has the highest incidence—has been theorized to involve the lack of the critical bio-regulating influence of the parent on the young infant sleeping alone in his crib; human societies with the lowest incidence of SIDS are also the ones with widespread co-sleeping.
But the topic of whether mothers “should” be with their children is a political/philosophical “landmine,” fenced off from scrutiny by a “cultural code of silence,” notes Mary Eberstadt in her bracing Policy Review article “Home Alone America.” Columnist George Will points out that “we are far advanced in a vast experiment in mother-child separation that is essentially off-limits to public debate.” Observes Eberstadt, “The combination of individual compassion for the circumstances in which many adults find themselves, alongside the profound desire to see no evil, whether in one’s own home or anyone else’s, has produced a modern social prohibition of almost primeval force.”
The past fifty years of social and human-rights evolution has flung open doors and choices to women; and yet, the past fifteen years of advances in brain and developmental science have given us information that should—if we’re paying attention—make those choices harder: Relationship with a consistent, stable, attuned, loving adult, within a predictable, stable environment, is what builds a healthy brain and develops a successful human, period. In addition to the serious neurodevelopmental implications of infant/child-mother separation—and despite massive amounts of propaganda to the contrary—statistics show that infants and children who spend more than 30 hours per week in institutionalized day care exhibit more aggression, cruelty, noncompliance, lack of impulse control, and other precursors of the violent adult. Their social brain has developed differently.
Now I’m really asking for it! Especially when the prevailing cultural atmosphere is expressed in blog entries like this one I just read: “I love my son, but I was losing my mind staying home with him. We finally put him in day care part-time; I reasoned that I could spend $100 a week on a therapist, who would tell me to put him in day care, or I could send him straight to day care for the same price.”
Eberstadt writes,
Faced with the endemic uncertainties and boundless chores of domestic life, many adults, male and female, end up preferring what Hochschild calls the “managed cheer” of work. Modern office life, she argues, offer[s] simpler emotional involvements, more solvable tasks, and often a more companionable and appreciative class of people than those waiting at home.
Due to what Eberstadt calls “the reluctance of many academics and opinion leaders to be seen as hostile to the social advancement of women,” this mother-child conundrum is either ignored or reduced to a polarizing, oversimplistic “Mommy Wars” caricature. But women’s lib isn’t the culprit; it has been the choice of mothers in eras long before feminism to contract out the “drudgery” of childcare to others. The loss here is deep and pervasive: no ruling class in human history has a collective positive memory of the endeavor of raising children. Those who are equipped to really enjoy being with their children, who find full-time mothering an enriching experience, are still a cultural anomaly! It is no wonder then, in a society where social programs are driven by consumer demand of the economic majority, that we don’t have family leave, career flexibility, and other policies that would support mothers and children being together for the critical first three years. We wish we wanted them, but do we really?
Full-time mothering can bump us up against our own most painful, unresolved material—unconscious memories of how we were received and mothered—and I believe that along with a love of our careers, there is often an element of avoidance: we don’t want to go there. But it is these very memories, our stories, that carry the power to heal us and in turn, heal the world. The 21st century consciousness revolution unfolds within each of us, and with exquisite intensity when we become parents. If we can bear it, mother-child communion reveals to us ourselves.
I also suspect that many of us, with all of our “stuff,” harbor fears that we aren’t equal to the momentous role of shepherds to these newly-minted beings with limitless potential. We lack this or that virtue, we’re clumsy with intimacy, we’re imperfect. Take heart: our shaping force on our children, which is huge indeed, need not be constrained by our internal limitations and challenges, but is rather open to the wider horizons of the ideals toward which we dedicate our energies.
Our children learn from our striving, not our perfection.
♥♥♥
- Some suggest that separation’s physiologic despair isn’t limited to the baby. All of the sensory cues directing the new mother’s hormonal and brain chemistry are missing when the baby is not with her postpartum. The mother may perceive, at the level of her limbic brain and hormonal chemistry, that her baby is dead; this may be a potent contributor to postpartum depression.
I have stood on the shoulders of many thinkers to bring you all that I have written over the past 3 years (including Nancy Jewel Poer, whose idea closes this column.) Prominent among them are the “Beloved Bruces” (Perry and Lipton), Magda Gerber, Robbie Davis-Floyd, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Rudolf Steiner, and Allan Schore. My hearty thanks to WSG editor Jill Franks, for her hospitality and artistry. But a special bouquet of gratitude is reserved for my dear friend and colleague Laura Uplinger, whose generous brainstorming and editing elevated every column. Fifteen of them remain at QuantumParenting.com for your eternal reference.