Times article: Can a bad mother help her nature?

[TheRationalist]

Unhelpful title, though interesting study on maternal neurons:
here

I think this must be a case of a newspaper inaccurately reporting some scientific research.
Does the research actually indicate that some mothers will carry on caring for a child even without support and under terrible stress and sleep deprivation, where others in the same situation will neglect or kill the child, and that the latter group lack these special neurons?

That is interesting and plausible. But it's not what the article says.

The article says
''Using brain-scanning techniques, they have identified a cluster of brain cells, created during pregnancy and ?switched on? after birth, that appear to correlate with good or bad parenting behaviours.''

Created during pregnancy. So no one who hasn't been pregnant can show good parenting behaviour. Adoptive or foster mothers, childless nannies or childminders, older siblings - oh, and of course fathers - cannot by definition have these special neurons. So they kill babies in their thousands, then?

?Our research showed that the mothers with fewer than this number of ?maternal neurons? tended to neglect or abuse their offspring, while those animals with the lowest numbers actually savaged or killed their own young.?

Human beings really don't tend to kill babies as a rule, even humans who've never been pregnant. I think the article must be really misrepresenting the research.

That's really interesting.

In my job I constantly see a cycle of bad parenting. Children who have been severely neglected often (though not always) go on to parent in an unacceptable way. This is simply because they were not brought up in a situation that promoted good loving parenting.

So if this research is correct. It would seem that no matter what nature tries, years of abuse and/or neglect will still prevent these children becoming good mothers themselves.

@dolphin

...except humans are not merely the product of their genes and background. They have free will, and they can choose to act in ways not predicted by their background.

When I did psychology at uni, we covered attachement theory, and it's idea that the relationship you have with you parents acts as a template for relationships later in life. A person with a 'secure' attachment to their parent tend to have better relationships with partners later on. Crap parenting, breeds craps relationships, breeds crap parenting.

The interesting thing was that a small group of individuals were described as 'earned secure'; they had had bad or indifferent attachement styles as a child but changed later in life, to have secure and happy adult relationships. Not a big group, obviously, but enough to make clear that we are not inevitably damned by our upbringing.

@l39
"Adoptive or foster mothers, childless nannies or childminders, older siblings - oh, and of course fathers - cannot by definition have these special neurons."

Yep. I'm a father, so by definition, when it comes to children, I'm flailing around like an incontinent chimp in a space shuttle. I can't tell my arse from my elbow, or (more importantly) DS's arse from his elbow. I usually just keep him quiet with whisky and CBeebies.

Yes, Kevlarhead, that was my point.

In other species, if you leave an adult that's not the mother alone with a baby, they'll ignore or kill it. So it makes perfect sense that even the mother animal, if she doesn't develop maternal neurons, would do the same.

In people, a mother who neglects or kills a baby isn't just being a 'bad mother'. She's being a 'bad human being' because humans, as a rule, will protect and care for children.

So lack of neurons developed in pregnancy can't be an adequate explanation for a mother who kills her child.