maternal deprivation

• Maternal deprivation - the emotional and intellectual consequences of separation between a child and their mother or mother substitute
• Bowlby proposed that continuous care from a mother is essential for normal psychological development, and that prolonged separation causes serious damage to emotional and intellectual development
• Bowlby saw the first 30 months of life as a critical period for psychological development
• Bowlby believed that if children were deprived of maternal care for too long during the critical period they would suffer mental retardation characterised by abnormally low IQ
• Goldfarb (1947) found lower IQ in children who had remained in institutions as opposed to those who were fostered and thus had a higher standard of emotional care - however other factors in institutions may have led to decreased IQ
• Bowlby identified affectionless psychopathy as the inability to experience guilt or strong emotion for others
• Bowlby's 44 thieves study:

  • ‘thieves’ were interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy
  • Their families were also interviewed in order to establish whether the ‘thieves’ had prolonged early separations from their mothers.
  • A control group of non-criminal but emotionally disturbed young people was set up to see how often maternal separation/deprivation occurred in the children who were not thieves
• Findings of Bowlby's 44 thieves study:

  • Bowlby found that 14 of the 44 thieves were affectionless psychopaths
  • Of these 14, 12 had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers in the first 2 years of their lives
  • only 5 of the remaining 30 ‘thieves’ had experienced separations
  • Of the control group, only 2 out of 44 had experienced long separations
  • Conclusion: prolonged early separation/deprivation caused affectionless psychopathy
• problems with Bowlby's 44 thieves study:

  • Correlation does not equal causation. 
  • Small sample
  • Researcher bias. - Bowlby conducted the interviews
• Bowlby drew on a number of sources of evidence for maternal deprivation but many of these were flawed. e.g War-orphans were traumatised and often had poor after-care, therefore these factors might have been the causes of later developmental difficulties rather than separation
• Lewis (1954) partially replicated the 44 thieves study on a larger scale, looking at 500 young people. In her sample, a history of early prolonged separation from the mother did not predict criminality or difficulty forming close relationships
• Levy et al (2003) showed that separating baby rats from their mother for as little as a day had a permanent effect on their social development though not other aspects of development
• Rutter (1976) claimed when Bowlby talked of ‘deprivation’ he was mixing two concepts together. Deprivation means the loss of the primary attachment figure after attachment has developed, whereas privation is the failure to form any attachment in the first place. Rutter claimed that the severe long term damage Bowlby associated with deprivation is actually more likely to be the result of privation