to wonder who Oliver James is? working mothers look away!

[Chulita]

Here Sorry if there's a thread on it already, I just read this and was a bit

I don't think it is as simple as that. The girl i mentioned only works part time, but still manages to spend very little time interacting with her son, what with after school care, clubs and so on.

I think it must be to do with quality of care. There must have been many unhappy SAHM who were disadvantaging their children if they were depressed and unresponsive.

As Oliver James says, it's not as simple as be at SAHM. If work fulfills you, or you need to work for financial reasons, then you are just as able to be a loving, responsive mother when home. The issue seems to be the childcare until 5. But what happens when the school class ratio is 30:1? Is it suddenly catastrophic for young kids to have less full on attention? No.

I sent my ds to nursery one day at week when he was one. I had to attend hospital and had no one to help out, family too far away. He hated it, cried every week. But I don't automatically assume the nursery was a bad place or he was neglected. I know that he is an only child, and prior to this, he was by my side 24/7. The separation was a shock to his system. But somethings have to be done, and he would need to learn to separate eventually, to adjust to school and so on. My mother was hyper critical of me, but the truth is, she was a depressed SAHM who was emotionally absent for us four a lot of the time.That instilled in me a fear of quiet suburbia.

There has to be a middle ground.

thesliversurfer - they are not trying to tell me how to raise my kids they can use whatever language they like.

I hadn't realised until I read the Guardian today that poor sensitive little OJ was so upset by his interview on Woman's Hour that he made a formal complaint to the BBC Trust. Awww... do you think early experience of boarding school makes people unable to cope with criticism, or is it just him?

Just in case he ever does a vanity google (and he strikes me as the sort who would), Oliver love, if you are going to make a career out of slagging off women, women are entitled to reply. Possibly in unflattering terms. If you don't like people disagreeing with you, you can always keep your trap shut.

01-Oct-10 10:00:34
"I do not need to tread carefully what needs to happen is that people need to open their minds to new thinking."

New thinking ? This is what all doctors used to think about autism 50 years ago, that it was caused by insufficient parental love. It's not new in any way; it's an old theory that was abandoned because people started noticing the obvious, namely that so many loving tightly knit families ended up having a child on the autistic spectrum.

I am sure there are plenty of children who develop various problems due to poor parenting. But the autistic children I have known have had very caring and loving parents with lots of time for them.

So my lad with ASD and all his behaviour issues are due to me working? Not the ASD?

Well, I don't work and yes, sometimes my son is naughty and sometimes it's the ASD and sometimes it's him being a git, blardy hard to tell one from the other though.

I had a shitty childhood Dr. and I was sodding glad when my mum went to work!!

I do think psychologists should bear in mind their profession's long and ignoble history of blaming mothers for any childhood ailment, before research eventually shows no, actually, autism isn't caused by bad mothering. Nor is schizophrenia. There are probably other examples I'm too tired to recall.

When crap come up like the first thing that springs to mind is that more than 50% of the SAHMs I knew when my son was pre-school age had children who attended nursery MORE than my son (ok, I only work part-time but even so....). Still, that that is wholely irrevevant - it is still a load of crap.

Clearly OJ is wrong on the Autism thing, not in doubt.

edam, he was well within his rights to complain. The BBC is supposed to be impartial, the 'interview' was so biased and aggresive, and constantly interupted his attempts to anwer Jenni Murrays questions.

I also complained, it was a shambles.

I do think he has a lot of good things to say, he is far from against working mothers, but all for higher quality childcare, whatever that may be.

Answer, sorry

Observer readers will be familiar with Oliver James' dubious attitude to women. This 50-odd man reported with undisguised glee that teenage girls were having sex younger than ever before. In a separate article he announced it was scientific fact that women start to lose their attractiveness in their late twenties, while middle-aged men grow more sexually attractive by the day (middle-aged men not unlike Mr James himself, one presumes).

It's one thing to use a newspaper column as an excuse for childish wind-ups of the opposite sex. But his tendency to make false claims such as "genes play no role in half of schizophrenia" is dangerous ( genetic factors always raise one's susceptibility to schizophrenia, which may then be triggered by environmental crisis).

IMO cod psychological explanations of mental illness should be treated with extreme suspicion. Witness the emotional distress Bruno Bettelheim (professional fraudster and possible serial abuser of children) inflicted on the parents of autistic children before his "refrigerator mothers" theory was shown to be sham. If you think the father of psychoanalysis was of higher mind, I'd recommend reading "Unauthorised Freud", where Frederick Crews exposes Freud as an unscruplous individual who lied about his therapeutic triumphs.