The Maternal Bond

2014

Journal of Family Psychology, 2008

This study examined the relations among parenting behaviors of 97 coresident mothers and fathers of infants during a dyadic free-play setting. The authors examined the extent to which observed sensitive and intrusive parenting behaviors in mother-child and father-child dyads were related and how perceived marital quality may be associated with the similarity between maternal and paternal parenting behaviors. The authors found support for interdependence of parenting by mothers and fathers. High perceived marital quality was associated with interdependence of sensitive parenting behaviors in mother-infant and father-infant interactions. Negative parenting behaviors by mothers and fathers were interrelated regardless of marital quality. The findings highlight the importance of studying parenting by mothers and fathers as embedded within particular family systems.

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1996

Questions about how women integrate maternity into their sense of self have generated a quest for an heuristic model. We suggest that mothers struggle to balance themselves amid a set of polarities/tensions and that mothering can be situated within a phenomenological matrix of such tensions. We propose a model that includes the following developmental issues: loss of self/expansion of self; omnipotence/liability; life-destroying/life-promoting behavior; maternal isolation/maternal community; cognitive strategies/intuitive responses; maternal desexualization/ maternal sexualization. Investigation and understanding of how mothers cope with these tensions could yield insights into both universal and particular aspects of mothering. I held him so and rocked him. I cradled him. I closed my eyes and leaned on his dark head. But the sun in its course emerged from among the water towers of down-town office buildings and suddenly shone white and bright on me. Then through the short fat finge...

2001

In moving from concepts of motherhood and mothers to a theorisation of maternal subjectivity that emphasises unconscious intersubjectivity, this paper casts light on the following questions: ⇒ What is meant by maternal and who qualifies? ⇒ Do gender and sex of parents and carers make any systematic difference to an infant, child or adolescent's experience of parenting and their own capacity to care? ⇒ If it is agreed that a universal characteristic of the infant-mother relationship is a one-way, non-negotiable dependency, what are the implications for changes in the subjectivity of women who become mothers? ⇒ If it is necessary to uncouple the idea of maternal subjectivity from the figure of the mother, how do we understand the continuing relationship between these two? ⇒ How does the theorisation of infantile phantasy, and in particular the phantasy of maternal omnipotence, affect how we understand the effectivity of maternal, paternal and other-figure care? ⇒ Modifications to a Freudian Oedipal account of the father's role in boys' and girls' separation from the mother are necessitated by the theorisation in this paper. What are the implications for social policy in the context of changing family forms in which many boys and girls grow up without fathers present? In the context of changing family forms and reactive claims that 'families need fathers', it is of considerable relevance to inquire seriously into the gendered and moral nature of parenting and its consequences for children's wellbeing using the theoretical perspectives that critical psychology has been involved in developing. This paper is intended to contribute to such knowledge.

The Social Science Journal, 1998

This article discusses and deconstructs the myth of 'motherly love' by contrasting it with fieldwork on Israeli parents' reactions to their appearance-impaired child. The ethnography of these reactions presents a common pattern of rejection-alternatively consisting of both the abandonment of the child at the hospital and of various forms of abuse at home. The article concludes by rethinking the issue of 'motherly love' and 'bonding' as conditioned on some deeply-ingrained parental expectations regarding the appearance of their child. 'Motherly love' is a powerful cultural idiom constituted upon an almost inextricable blend of historical, sociological, medical and feminist discourses. In this paper I discuss the reification of 'motherly love' by contrasting it with my fieldwork on parents' reactions to their appearance-impaired child. Using this data as a test case, I confront it both with the social construction of the myth of bonding and the feminist thought concerning that issue. The objective of this article, then, is threefold: to introduce new empirical data into the discourse of parenting, to draw theoretical implications from it, and to use these implications to criticize both conventional and feminist conceptions of parenting, especially maternity. The presentation of empirical data, however, is intentionally delayed, appearing only after the articulation of the discourses has taken place. This retrospective reasoning is meant, to use a theatrical metaphor, to describe the 'stage' and 'decor' before the actors themselves appear. Hence the portrayal of theoretical discourses

T he first two editions of The Role of the Father in Child Development (Lamb, , 1981c contained encyclopedic introductory chapters in which Lamb attempted to provide inclusive reviews of the primary and secondary literatures. Such endeavors were no longer possible by the time of the third edition, when the reference list for such a chapter would have occupied more space than any of the chapters in the book! For the same reasons, this fourth edition of the anthology instead includes an introductory chapter in which we attempt to articulate major themes in our contemporary understanding of father-child relationships and paternal influences, while referring readers to the chapters that follow for more detailed reviews of the relevant literature. In this chapter we thus discuss some defining assumptions about fatherhood and recent work on the characteristics, determinants, and effects of paternal behavior, and we then close with summaries of the chapters included in this book. Substantial progress has clearly been made by scholars over the last 30 years. Hundreds of studies have enriched the empirical literature, while theorists have elaborated and refined the conceptual frameworks designed to elucidate fatherhood, father-child relationships, and paternal roles. When the first edition of this anthology was published in 1976, most social scientists doubted that fathers significantly shaped the experiences and development of their children, especially their daughters. As a result, contributors to the first edition all made concerted and often explicit efforts to demonstrate that fathers (a) indeed had a role to play in child development, (b) were often salient in their children's lives, and (c) affected the course of their children's development, for good as well as for ill. Although somewhat less defensive in tone, contributions to the second edition, published just five years later in 1981, not surprisingly emphasized the same conclusions. By contrast, chapters in the third volume (1997) reflected widespread acceptance of the notion that fathers are often affectively and formatively salient. The contributors' focus was thus placed on more nuanced issues and concerns.

Philosophy in Review, 2013

These three books bring a variety of philosophical perspectives to bear on issues of family and intimate association in contemporary western societies. Whatever their different approaches, none of these authors aspires to offer universal, acontextual approaches to these most personal of relationships. Brake and Overall contend that their topics-respectively, the sort of institution that marriage should be in a politically liberal society and the reasons for having children-are 'philosophically undertheorized' (Brake 1). Ramaekers and Suissa maintain, by contrast, that while parenting has much been theorized of late, it has been theorized in the wrong way, and that more helpful and appropriate ways of thinking about the parent-child relationship are urgently needed before these distorting perspectives do yet more damage. Following in the footsteps of Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Brake subjects the institution of marriage to careful scrutiny and stern criticism without concluding that it should be abolished. She explores what liberals should make of contemporary marriage and inquires as to what sort of institution, if any, they should defend. Brake recommends a revised version of marriage, in which the state protects the freely chosen and just caring relationships of its adult citizens.

2021

This is an extract from our book The Claims of Parenting: Reasons, Responsibility and Society in which our main concern is to show how the parent-child relationship has been claimed by certain languages and forms of reasoning, to the extent that it has become difficult to find other ways of talking about it and exploring its significance, at both an individual and a societal level. The idea of writing the book emerged partly from our experience as parents, and our sense that dominant accounts of “good parenting” in both policy discourse and popular literature for parents were raising significant conceptual and ethical questions that, as philosophers, we should have something to say about. Yet at the same time, we felt a dissatisfaction with many discussions of families, parents and children in philosophy of education, moral philosophy and political philosophy, where parent-child relationships seemed to be framed as a sub-category within a broader moral or political theory rather tha...

Infant and Child Development, 2005

Page 1. Infant and Child Development Inf. Child Dev. 14: 327–343 (2005) Published online 23 December 2004 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.393 Construction and Maintenance of Parent–Child Relationships: ...

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 1996

Reliance on the mother-child dyad as the primary context for understanding child development has caused fathers to be underrepresented in published research on child development and developmental psychopathology. In order to investigate whether this pattern was also evident in the work of future psychologists, we reviewed Dissertation s from 1986 through 1994. Results showed that fathers were the focus of significantly fewer dissertation studies (10.5%) than were mothers (59.5%) or both parents (30.0%). We argue that essentializing the mother-child bond is a political philosophy about the roles of men and women that places the discipline of psychology at risk for inadvertently becoming an apologist for the neoconservative political right. Specific suggestions for revising graduate training are presented. The social policy implications for continuing this trend into the next generation of psychologists are discussed.