Bowlby's Maternal Deprivation Theory

• critical period


  the first 30 months of an infants life is when they must form a monotropic attachment
• what happens if a monotropic attachment is not formed within 30 months


  negative social emotional and intellectual consequences
• social consequences of lack of monotropy

  delinquency - behaviour outside of acceptable social norms
• emotional consequences of lack of monotropy

  affectionless psychopathy - cannot show or feel empathy to others
• intellectual consequences of lack of monotropy

  low IQ - disrupted cognitive abilities
• continuity hypothesis


  relationships with caregiver predicted relationships in later life. If a child does not have a relationship with a caregiver they cannot create an internal working model leading to a lack of later relationships
• 44 thieves study 1944 procedure

  Bowlby assessed 44 child thieves for affectionless psychopathy and interviewed their parents about what occurred during their child's critical period.
• 44 thieves 1944 findings

  14/44 of the thieves had affectionless psychopathy

  12/14 had maternal deprivation

  so there must be a link between maternal deprivation and social damage / delinquency.
• AO3 maternal deprivation weaknesses

  x problems - findings only correlational , parents may have social desirability bias or memory decay , Bowlby conducted everything so may have found what he was looking for.

  x socially sensitive - mothers must stay with baby or they will become a criminal. Cant return to work increasing gender pay gap. Alpha bias.

  x opposing evidence - Lewis 1954 interviewed 500 young people and found no correlation between maternal deprivation and later difficulties in any aspect of life
• AO3 maternal deprivation strength

  + real life application - when children should go to nursery , allowing parents to stay in hospital with sick child , length of maternity leave , child welfare policies
• deprivation


  the removal of maternal care
• privation


  the lack of any maternal care ever