Maternal deprivation

• What was Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation?

  Bowlby suggested that prolonged emotional deprivation would have a long term effect on development. there are 3 important strands of this theory: maternal care, critical period and long term consequences.
• Critical Period - the idea that certain periods of life are more sensitive to experience than others. if these periods aren’t met then it will lead to problems later in life.
• Maternal Care - the quality of early relationships with parents is crucial for normal psychological development. If they don’t receive adequate care then they may suffer psychologically throughout their lives
• Maternal deprivation

  before this research it was thought that only food and physical care could affect development. Bowlby stated that a warm, loving relationship with a mother or permeant mother substitute was essential for a healthy development and continuing normal mental health.
• Critical period - Maternal Deprivation

  Frequent or prolonged exposure to separation can leave a child emotionally disturbed, if the separation happens before the age of 2 and a half years and there is a continued risk up until the age of 5. Potential damage can be avoided if there is a maternal substitute in place.
• Long term consequences - Maternal deprivation

  Bowlby suggested that long term consequences from this deprivation was emotional maladjustment and mental health disorders like depression
• 44 juvenile thieves - aim

  To provide evidence to support the maternal deprivation hypothesis in a sample of children attending the Tavistock child-guidance clinic.
• 44 juvenile thieves - procedure

  44 young thieves took part in unstructured interviews so gain knowledge of their childhood. they completed IQ tests and had a psychiatric assessment. Bowlby then interviewed the boys with their mothers to gain info on childhood experiences and separation. diagnosis were made, follow up interviews were done and psychotherapy was offered.
• affectionless psychopathy:


  inability to experience emotionally intense relationships, lack off affectionate behaviour and specific lack of guilt and remorse when causing distress to others.
• 44 juvenile thieves - sample

  44 thieves - 22 referred by school, 2 by schools but a patents request, 8 by parents, 3 as court orders and 9 by probation officers. 50% were chronic offenders, 16% had been stealing for over 3 years, 20% has been involved a few times and 10% had been involved in one incident. the control group was 44 maladjusted children who didn't commit crimes but where matched on age and intelligence.
• 44 juvenile thieves - findings

  out of 14 affectionless thieves, 86% had frequent separation from mother before age of 2. out of 30 thieves, 17% had frequent separation from mother before the age of 2. out of all the thieves, 39% had frequent separation from their mother before the age of 2. only 2 of the control participants had this separation. The findings suggest that early separation is linked with poor emotional development and lack of continuous care can cause emotional maladjustment.
• researcher bias - 44 thieves

  Bowlby conducted the psychiatric assessments himself and made the diagnoses, however, he knew which of the children were in the control group and 'theft' group. consequently his findings may have unconsciously been influenced by his own experiences.
• limitations of 44 juvenile thieves:

  the data on maternal deprivation was collected retrospectively. some of the parents were recalling events from up to 14 years ago. consequently the data collected cannot be accurate. furthermore, the study was replicated on a much larger scale by Lewis. He found that a history of prolonged separation did not predict criminality or difficulties in forming future relationships. This suggests that other factors can affect outcomes of early maternal deprivation and this can be an extraneous variable.
• 44 juvenile thieves - real world application

  Bowlby's research had a huge impact on how children are treated in hospitals. before, children were separated from their parents if they were in hospital, and visiting was discouraged or even forbidden. Bowlby and his colleague James Robertson worked together to change the system and how children were cared for in hospital.
• Limitation - 44 juvenile thieves


  Rutter said there was a lack of clarity from Bowlby as to whether the children had an attachment and it broke, or if it was never formed in the first place. Rutter believed the latter, which would have had far more serious consequences for the child. therefore he used the term privation to describe a situation where an attachment was never formed and deprivation to describe a situation where it was formed but then broke.