Gadget Inspector: Hands-On Parenting
Why is the Zaky, a fifty-dollar beanbag arm, flying off the shelves?
by Sam Apple
May 8, 2007
To Bowlby, as well as the handful of other researchers thinking along the same lines, the study of what he began to call "maternal deprivation" wasn't just another academic inquiry. It was a matter of life and death. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was still regular practice for hospitals, fearful of spreading diseases, to isolate sick babies from all visitors. And it was still regular practice for these babies to die. Antibiotics had eliminated most of the germs that once routinely killed small children in orphanages and hospitals, but they hadn't eliminated the high infant mortality rates. Otherwise healthy babies who had little contact with other humans seemed to wither away, as though literally starving for affection.
The tragic situations of these children became harder to ignore after World War II. The War had separated millions of children from their parents, and if Bowlby was right about maternal deprivation, the stakes for how these children were cared for were high. In 1950, the World Health Organization hired Bowlby to study the psychological impact of homelessness on children. In the revised popular edition of his report, which was translated into ten languages and sold 450,000 copies in English, Bowlby makes no effort to hide the moral underpinnings of his message. "The proper care of children deprived of a normal home life can now be seen to be not merely an act of common humanity," Bowlby concludes, "but to be essential for the mental and social welfare of a community."
By the time Bowlby published his report in 1951, he had little doubt about the effects of maternal deprivation on infants. The remaining question was why. Bowlby had plenty of evidence but still lacked a theory to explain why the absence of mother figure had such a powerful impact on the developing psyche. Over the next decade, Bowlby would find his answer where he never expected, not in the further study of institutionalized children but in the work of an eccentric monkey researcher and his terrycloth dolls.Harlow showed that denying a monkey any social contact for a year essentially destroyed its mind.
Bowlby's interest turned to ethnology in the '50s, when he learned of the imprinting studies being done on birds, but it was the monkey studies of Harry Harlow that would have the greatest influence on Bowlby's thinking. By placing infant macaques in isolation chambers he called "pits of despair," Harlow showed that denying a monkey any social contact for a year essentially destroyed its mind. In another series of experiments, Harlow put rhesus monkeys in cages with two fake monkey mothers, one made of wire and one made of terrycloth. When Harlow would terrify the young monkeys (sometimes by placing comically psychotic-looking dolls into their cages), they consistently turned to the cloth monkey for comfort. More revealingly, the scared monkeys went to the cloth mother even when they had already grown accustomed to eating from a bottle attached to the wire monkey. And so never mind the behaviorists' obsession with food. What the frightened monkeys wanted most of all was the security of a soft, warm touch.
For Bowlby, the lessons of Harlow's experiment wasn't only that food could not be at the center of infant bonding. It was also that the longing for physical nurturing was a part of our evolutionary heritage. Just as infants who didn't seek food, for example, would never have survived and passed along their genes, so infants who didn't have a powerful desire to cling to and bond with a mother would also have been at a great disadvantage in the dangerous environments in which our ancestors evolved. The damage to the body when a baby's biological need for food went unmet was obvious. The psychological damage when the baby's need for mothering was unmet was less visible but devastating just the same.
In her book Love at Goon Park, the journalist Deborah Blum chronicles this chapter in twentieth-century psychology. And what Blum makes beautifully clear is that that while Bowlby was a typically reserved British scientist trading in terms like "maternal deprivation" and "failure to thrive," at the heart of his research and theorizing was raw emotion.
©2007 Sam Apple and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Sam Apple's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first
book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was named a finalist for the PEN America award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005 he received the
annual Faux Faulkner award. Apple's new book, American Parent, is on sale now. |
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