Bowlby’s Theory of Maternal Deprivation

• This is the theory that an attachment is essential for healthy psychological and emotional development. It states that there will be many negative consequences of maternal deprivation, such as:

  • An inability to form attachments in the future (see the Internal Working Model)
  • Affectionless psychopathy (being unable to feel remorse)
  • Delinquency (behavioural problems in the child’s teenage years)
  • Problems with cognitive (brain) development
• Privation is when a child fails to form any attachments at all. This has been said to be more harmful to a child. One of the most common causes of privation has been institutional care.
• Bowbly conducted his 44 juvenile thieves study. He found that out of 44 thieves, 14 displayed signs of affectionless psychopathy and 12 of these had suffered from maternal deprivation during the critical period of attachment formation i.e. the first 30 months of life. This was compared to only 5 affectionless psychopaths in the remaining 30 thieves. Therefore, on this basis, Bowlby believed that early maternal deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy and consequently, criminality
• weakness —

  Lewis et al disagreed with Bowlby’s conclusion that affectionless psychopathy and maternal deprivation caused criminality. Through collecting qualitative data from interviews conducted with 500 juveniles, the researchers found no link between maternal deprivation and a difficulty in forming relationships in later life. This suggests that Bowlby may have made incorrect causal conclusions
• weakness -

  Bowlby’s 44 juvenile thieves study suffers from several methodological limitations. One of these includes researcher bias - Bowlby was aware of what he wanted to find and so may have phrased the interview questions in a way which influenced the respondents to reply in a certain way i.e. leading questions.
• weakness -

  The effects of the critical period may not be as concrete as Bowlby originally believed. For example, the case of two twins locked away in cupboards in Czechoslovakia for the first 7 years of their lives was reported by Koluchova. Despite the obvious trauma and maternal deprivation which occurred for an extended period of time, even exceeding the critical period, the researchers found that with appropriate fostering, the twins made a full psychological recovery. Therefore, the effects of maternal deprivation are not always so clear-cut.