In The Times today: Blind feminism has hurt our children

[twelveyeargap]

Blind feminism has hurt our children

She did, thank heavens - ironically enough, the ill health was caused by an operation using the private health insurance she had with the job she lost. Very nasty complication. And a very frightening, depressing time all round, really.

I'll bet. Poor you. So glad she recovered though. The one really sad and frightening period of my earlier childhood featured my mum becoming (mentally) ill and being hospitalised too, actually. I think we were lucky that we didn't have to deal with financial/housing fall out as a consequence. That must have been very hard. As you and Marina say, working parents are hardly number one contenders in the trauma stakes! Quite the reverse in some ways.

And yes, my understanding is that Bowlby's version of events is not usually swallowed wholesale in this day and age, though he and Mary Ainsworth (rightly, imo) still get lots of respect for coming up with the whole attachment concept. I think the reality is that the development and maintenance of ties of love can be pretty complex what with humans and their personalities and feelings and behaviour and situations and environments being so amazingly variable.

Yes, and I thought Bowlby studied children removed from the family completely who they were very close to and put into a different home or orphanage, wrenched apart. Obviously that detachment like death of a loved parent or being sent to Britain from India aged 3 or 4 hugely damages children. But later studies I'm pretty sure show that children can love and be attached to several adults.

What interested me, and my oldest is 22 now, is that we thought when they were younger this one nanny there for 10 years was so important for the attachment stuff but in fact it wasn't a big wrench when she left and the twins had three nannies and I noticed no difficulties for them when the nannies left and I could see their attachment to me, the nanny and the older siblings. Children love routine and hate change. They like security and certainty. Working parents give them that in most cases. All separation is hard - when mother goes to the toilet the baby cries. When she goes to the shops and leaves the baby with granny. When she or the father leaves for work. My sister who was into the continuum concept would presumably berate all you stay at home mothers who make a forcible wicked physical separation from your babies and children at night and don't have one on one contact and touch in your bed every night. Your severing of the bond for 8 hours a night could be doing the children untold damage - you never know.

We borrow children and we don't own them. Some mothers make their chidlren their whole life which is arguably psychologically a very bad thing but I don't go in for stay at home parent bashing so can't see much point in arguing that although it's a shame that there aren't as many press articles setting out the damage a mother at home with that far too close I am 100% to this smothered child thing might do as there are about working mothers.

Attachment studies ahve to be dealt with so carefully especially when accusations are being thrown about regarding our abilities as a mother and how much we love our children.

WE need to remember that Bowlby was a man of his times he was working in an age when we wanted women to leave the jobs they had secured while the men were at war as the men now wanted their jobs back and their wives at home, so surprise surprise the WHO funds a study that tells mothers they shoud be at home with their children. I am a fan of Bowlby but he makes interesting reading and says some quite shocking things about women for example thatthey should not leave their children at all as no one else will do- although he does later water down this idea and says some realtively modern ideas for his time about fathers.

Attachment studies arealso not without fault as you cannot breakdown childrens reactions into neatlittle compartments of secure non secure attachment esepcially in the cross cultural studies which were judges from a very anglophile stance.

I do belive that children need a full time carerat home but this need not be mum it could be dad, grandad or as Xenia has done a naannyand it can be a combination of carers as long as the stability and continuity is there.

Many of the attachment studies which judge mothers harshly for working outsie of the home do study children in oprhanages and very poor ones at that.

And as Xenia says below Bowlby's original thesis was based on his ideas about juvenile delinquents hardly a representative sample.

I also think Bowlby's thought was very much shaped by his own (typically English upper middle class of the time) childhood experiences. He had a very distant relationship with his parents and was close to his nanny who left the family home when he was 4. He was then sent to boarding school at 7.

Also meant to agree with Xenia that most later attchemnt studies , even Belsky who I think OJ quotes admit that there can be shared attachments especially with grandparents whom earlier studies ignored.

I don't understand why you would feel upsetatthe thought your child was attached to someone other than you, my dd hasd a very secure attachment to me, dp, her grandma, her dad, his partner and her aunties, in particularshe has a very secure attachment to her gidmother who cared for her while I was hospitalised and reovering. I do not feel threatneded or jealous of that just very happy thatshe has so many people around her with whom she has a loving relationship.

Yes. And one of my boys was definitely most attached to his twin rather than a specific adult at one point. The other thought I was the bees knees. Then they both tuned in to their dad totally. And now one is mostly into dragons and the other seems to have a shared attachment to all the members of McFly simultaneously. So attachments and taste and discernment can and do change over time, ime...

Agree 100% with scummymummy's post of 22:09

My only criticism of sure start is its givernemt brief which is to get mothers back into work, not because I don't think mother's should be working but because theyareofte targetting mothers who can barely hold their lives togther as it is and then on top of everything else theyaretrying to get them into work often before they are ready which means setting them up for another failure which only deepens feelings of worthlessness and unhappiness.

am going to bed now, so dp and I can become attached!

Good plan. I must do the same.

The irony about Sure Start is that its main failing is that its not reaching deprived families anyway on the whole - one of the government's main concerns is that it is middle class mum's who are using the sure start resources - such as free books, BF workshops etc, as it is they who grasp the value of such free resources immediately. The socially excluded parents have yet to be convinced of the value of some of these.

I'm slightly alarmed about these references to outdated attachment theories. Is anyone seriously suggesting that having a highly qualified Mum in a fab job really means a child is more likely to grow up with "social problems"? The idea makes me want to LOL and there is zilch evidence to support the idea that having a successful Mum who also has a career causes such problems.

There is masses of evidence however, linking poverty and lack of educational achievement in parents, to social problems in the next generation e.g children who've grown up in households where parents have never worked.

Another thing that slightly confuses me is the lack of ability to look back beyond our own generation. In societies where people live in extended families, children have attachment to many carers - grand parents, aunties, cousins etc and are passed around within the loving extended family while their mum's go off and do work (paid or unpaid).

There is nothing "natural" about living in a nuclear family, isolated and with little support from extended family with one sole carer (i.e. the position of some, not all, a sahms). Particularly if, as in some cases, that Mum is dysfunctional in any way - over protective, suffering from depression or whatever. Not suggesting sahms are dysfunctional generally, but there are high levels of depression amongst sahms compared with people who work.

I also think its important to understand the political agenda of newspapers such as The Times (and Express, Mail and Torygraph) which are fundamentally conservative and never tire of trying to score points on women who dare to pursue careers.

Traumatised because her not being there placed me and my two sisters in danger by the person she chose to be our carer.

What I'm saying is 'Going out to work' is only a good idea if you have a good childcare option. Just making do could be much worse than the alternative.

My mother was widowed when I was 2 BTW

fox, I agree. Full time life with parents at home and no money, deprivatino, sink council estate, awful school or both parents working hard and more money. In many cases the money helps. In other words all very well to talk about affluenza but if it's poverty or getting by with both parents working I think th ebetter outcome for the children will come from the extra money and the working parents in most cases. Most parents want the best for their children and most work.

I just get cross that it's always women criticised. Also I agree you can attach to several people perfectly happily. When any of the five children ask me who I love the most I say it's equal. I also think it's not rationed. I don't love each of the five children less because there are five of them than if there were one.

You don't believe in luck then Xenia?

Xenia - its also to do with the educational attainment of the parents isn't it? i.e.e if the parents are well educated, the children are more likely to do better in school.

Apparently over 75% mothers of young children do work anyway, either f/t or p/t.

I believe in luck strongly. I think that's why I object so much to OJ's smearing of sure start with his outdated agendas. It's all very well for him to sneer at buildings but he does not, I am sure, live on the Aylesbury estate, where the beautiful children's centre is one of the only nice buildings for some miles. It's insidious, this location of blame solely in people rather than their circumstances and environments. What he is saying, essentially, is that poor people don't need good services to improve their chances. Rather, they require therapy to fix them. I am not anti-therapy per se but I think this is a shameful approach.

Though I do think that fox has a point re those who access sure start. It is less strikingly apparent in some less affluent areas though and well designed spaces for children are a lasting legacy.

Scummymummy - Sure Start also funded a fantastic Community Centre in Stamford Hill where I used to work and are currently funding a new centre on South Acton Estate.

Coincidentally, we used to live right next to Aylesbury Estate - do you know it quite well then?

Generally, Sure Start has released funding for loads of fantastic facilities which are really benefitting people.

Yes- worked there in the past, fox.

As someone has already said Xenia, giving up work for 5-10 yrs to bring up your children does not waste your education - you can go back to working 100 hrs a week once they are older and use your education then. When Ds1 was 5 months, I went back to work but only for 2 days, rising to 3 when he was bigger. During that time I got the best contract I've ever had and loads of recognition, some of it public. You can (sometimes) have both.

I do agree with xenia that it's unfair to criticise only women, but the money my mother earned from her f/t work meant nothing to me. She would have been better putting more time into me than more money. My kids don't care how much money we have - we have to keep it away from them to avoid spoiling them anyway. You need money to get yourself out of poverty, but anything above that is a red herring. Time is more valuable than money.

I meant to type 'Tory journalist'. He isn't a tory journalist. he's a psychologist. Just correcting that misconception.