Maternal deprivation

• Bowlby's MDH

  • Continuous maternal care is essential for healthy psychological development
  • Disruption or breaking of this attachment can result in serious damage to the child's social, intellectual and emotional development
  • Consequences are permanent and irreversible
• Consequences of this disruption

  • Affectionless psychopathy (inability to show affection)
  • Low IQ
  • Delinquency
• Acknowledged 'ifs'

  • Separation will only have this effect if it happens before the age of about 2 1/2 years
  • Infants need a continuous and intimate with a mother or a permanent substitute mother figure to ensure continuing normal mental health - must provide emotional care
• Bowlby's 44 juvenile thieves - procedure

  • Interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy
  • Families also interviewed in order to establish whether the 'thieves' had prolonged early separation from their mothers
  • Control group of non-criminal but emotionally disturbed children also studied to see how often maternal deprivation occurred in 'non-thieves'
• Bowlby's 44 thieves - findings

  • 14 of the 44 identified as having affectionless psychopathy, none in the control group
  • 86% / 12 out of the 14 had experienced prolonged separation (for at least 6 months) in their first five years of life
  • This kind of separation only experienced by 2 in the control group
• Goldfarb study

  • Followed up 30 orphaned children until they were 12
  • Half fostered before 4 months, other half remained in orphanage
  • IQ tested when they were 12
  • Fostered children had average IQ of 96, remained in orphanage had average IQ of 68
  • Maternal deprivation during the critical period - mental retardation but the fostered children had an acceptable mother substitute figure so IQ returned to normal
• Eval - issues with the studies

  • Goldfarb - children growing up in orphanage deprived of more than just maternal care e.g. proper education, food. Evidence is only correlational, any other factor could've led to low IQ later in life, can't establish cause and effect
  • Bowlby - conducted the interviews and assessments himself, knew what he expected to find - investigator bias, biased results
• Eval - real world application

  • Impact on post-war child-rearing and how children are looked after in hospitals
  • Before, hospital visits were strongly discouraged
  • Bowlby, Robertson and Robertson carried out series of films showing distressed children during hospital stay
  • Policy change - introduced parent beds and family wings to allow parents to stay close to their children
• Eval - deprivation or privation

  • Rutter claimed Bowlby had muddled deprivation and privation
  • Severe long term effects are more likely to be the result of privation (having never formed an attachment)
  • Should've identified whether the children he studied were simply deprived of emotional care in early childhood of whether they had not formed early attachments
  • Then could whether the consequences were different
• Eval - psychically deterministic

  • Assumes that if a child experiences early prolonged separation in critical period, this will lead to development of affectionless psychopathy
  • Many young people around the world go on to develop 'normally'
  • Could be as a result of choosing to behave differently, young people have free will and resilience
  • Early childhood experiences do not always lead to negative consequences