way of raising children is not actually standard. A study carried out in the late 1970s of 186 non-industrial cultures by two anthropologists. Weisner and Gallimore, found only five societies where the mother did not share the care of her children with other people.11 Similar conclusions were noted in the seminal study Mothers of Six Cultures by a team of American anthropologists carried out over almost two decades from the 1950s to the 1970s. They observed that the American mother was unique among the cultures they studied in having sole responsibility for her children.
Many of the greatest minds of child development and mothering, including Michael Rutter, Nancy Chodorow, Ann Dally and the eminent British psychologist Barbara Tizard, have all surmised that shared parenting or shared mothering is just as good for children. Some even consider it to be preferable.
Dally provides a closing thought on the theory of attachment and how it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy:
Over the last forty years we…have been trying to condition babies to become attached to their mothers exclusively and, having done that, we…proceed to do research which reveals the undoubted distress caused when an infant who has been conditioned in this way is suddenly separated from his mother…This research is then used by academics and politicians to ‘prove’ that young children should be tied even more totally and exclusively to their mothers.12
Psychology has succeeded in creating what it originally set out to describe.
Towards a child-centred philosophy of childcare
Since Bowlby published his theories, childcare has become increasingly focused on the child whose needs now take centre-stage. Throughout the 1950s, the man who defined ‘motherhood’ was the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who elaborated and built on Bowlby’s themes of attachment and interdependence. Winnicott’s influence gave way in the 1960s to America’s Dr Benjamin Spock, who was regarded at the time as outrageously permissive in his ‘let the child decide’ approach to raising children. If greatness were measured in book sales and popular appeal alone, then Spock would stand head and shoulders above the rest of the gurus. Sales of his original volume Baby and Child Care reached 40 million and Spock continued to write until he died aged ninety-four in 1998.
Freudian ideas influenced both theorists. Spock and Winnicott emphasized the mother’s unique and (as far as Winnicott was concerned) irreplaceable role in the emotional growth of the child.
Donald Winnicott made his name at a time when mothers were still reeling from the extremes required by Truby King in the name of discipline and training. Mothers neither trusted their own judgement nor did they have any faith in the advice of their own mothers who still believed in the value of four-hour feeds. Indeed, the ‘gurus’ of the twentieth century have been almost solely responsible for breaking down the time-honoured passing of wisdom and knowledge about childcare from mothers to daughters. Winnicott won women over with his sympathetic approach which stressed maternal warmth and love instead of rules, rations and timetables.
Most people in the 1950s came to know of Winnicott through his immensely successful BBC radio lectures on childcare. For Winnicott, just like Bowlby, a woman could not be with her baby enough and anything less than total devotion to the role of mother was an absolute dereliction of a duty bestowed by nature. Perhaps his most famous contribution to twentieth-century ideas about motherhood was to say that there is no such thing as a baby, only a mother-baby unit.
Winnicott praised women’s efforts and their contribution repeatedly and self-consciously: ‘I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother…makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.’13 And he set himself apart from other professionals who sought to tell mothers what to do and interfered with the natural process of mothering which, according to him, women knew best. Women warmed to him. At last it seemed, here was someone who thought about mothers and not just children.
Winnicott was just as frequently patronizing, though, and the accolades came mixed with condescension. In his essay ‘A Man Looks at Motherhood’ he remarks: ‘you do not even have to be clever, and you don’t even have to think if you do not want to. You may have been hopeless at arithmetic at school, or perhaps all your friends got scholarships, but you didn’t like the sight of a history book and so failed and left school early.’14 The man who invented the notion of the ‘good enough mother’ concludes the paragraph with this observation intended to reassure his readers: ‘Isn’t it strange that such a tremendously important thing should depend so little on exceptional intelligence.’
Being a ‘good enough mother’ on Winnicott’s terms wasn’t so easy. A woman needed a saint-like capacity for patience, devotion, self-sacrifice and the ability to find fulfilment in even the most mundane tasks of motherhood. She had to delight in every filled nappy, every burp or fart or night-time wakening. ‘All you need is love’ might have been Winnicott’s refrain, and that wasn’t asking much because, according to him, women were like that anyway, it was simply part of female nature. The role of fathers, who were otherwise never mentioned, was simply to make baby love his mother all the more by being ‘hard and strict and unrelenting, intransigent, indestructible’.15 Trying to help the mother out would just interfere with his proper function.
In case any woman found her capacity to give waning, Winnicott backed up his sweet refrain with a few well-placed threats, promising stunted emotional development and psychological malfunction in the child if the mother failed. This is what happens when a mother doesn’t pay attention and picks her child up without supporting the infant’s head: ‘There are very subtle things here,’ listeners to the broadcast were warned:
If you have got a child’s body and head in your hands and do not think of that as unity and reach for a handkerchief or something, then the head has gone back and the child is in two pieces – head and body; the child screams and never forgets it. The awful thing is that nothing is ever forgotten. Then the child goes around with an absence of confidence in things.16
The Winnicott child was a fragile bloom who, without showers of love and constant nurturing, would wither and fail.
Of course, everyone in Winnicott’s world was white, middle class and lived in a nuclear family. With his emphasis on raising children in the correct environment, in his extraordinarily prescriptive world there was no room (and, one presumes, no hope either) for children with different family arrangements.
Winnicott also introduced the idea that, in addition to their mothers’ continual presence, what babies needed most of all was familiarity in their environment. In other words, once a routine had been established it should not be changed, nor should the child be moved from location to location. So the woman who put her faith in Winnicott could expect to spend her time isolated at home with her child, unable and unwilling to do much more than make a trip to the shops for fear of playing havoc with her child’s psyche. One wonders what he would have made of, say, Tuareg children who from the moment of their birth are on the move and do not see the same spot from year to year, whose tented homes are pitched in a different place week by week and who are cared for by several women and not just their mothers. Although Winnicott claimed that most mothers were ‘good enough’ mothers, the tone of his writing and lectures was every bit as rigid and moralistic as Truby King’s.
In contrast, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare was
