Mother as Primary Caregiver

The NHS recommends if possible, infants are breastfed for at least the first six months of their lives. Breastfeeding, they report, offers the healthiest start for infants because it protects them from infections and diseases. The NHS also claims that ‘it can build a strong physical and emotional bond between mother and baby’, which is important in emotional development.

This argument means that the infant’s mother is the individual's mother is the individual who is going to need to be available to feed the infant, possibly every two hours. This argument alone means that it is practical and essential to the infant’s survival, that the mother be the primary caregiver.

This means that anyone else, including the father, is obviously limited to a supporting caregiver role. A similar relationship between a pit crew and a Formula One driver.

In the 1950’s behaviourists promoted their view that infants were classically conditioned to associate their mother with a sense of pleasure; food creates pleasure. The mother is associated with feeding and hence becomes a conditioned stimulus becomes a conditioned response of pleasure.

Harlow (1959) placed infant monkeys with two wire ‘mothers’. One had a feeding bottle attached and the other was covered in soft cloth. The monkeys spent most of their time on the cloth-covered ‘mother’, most especially clinging to this ‘mother’ when frightened. This demonstrated that food does not create an emotional bond - contact comfort does.

Schaffer and Emerson (1964) supported this finding in a study of human behaviour. They found that primary attachments were not formed with the person who fed or spent more time with the infant. Strongly attached infants had carers who responded quickly and sensitively to their ‘signals’ and who offered their child the most interaction.

Sigmund Freud believed that the mother-infant dyad was of the greatest importance in the initial oral stage of psychosexual development. Infants depend upon their mothers to satisfy the needs of their libido. Overindulgence or frustration leads to emotional problems later in life, such as neediness.

Freud also claimed that separation anxiety is caused by the infant realising that their bodily needs will go unsatisfied if separation will occur.

It is important to consider the historical context of Freud's ideas. At the time he was writing, women didn’t even have the right to vote. His ideas about the different roles played by the mother and father really may simply reflect the norms and values that were held by society in the 20th century. If Freud were writing today, he might portray quite a different picture of the father’s role.    

John Bowlby demonstrated that early and prolonged separation between a child and its mother can have lasting emotional effects. Most especially, that such separation is likely to lead to an affectionless character, someone who lacks the ability to feel normal affection, shame or sense of responsibility. Such a character is more likely to become a thief and also is likely to have difficulty forming relationships.

Bowlby thus identified a central role for the mother in healthy emotional development. Initially, his ideas were based on his training as a Freudian psychiatrist. Subsequently, Bowlby (1969) was influenced by the evolutionary theory and proposed that attachment to one caregiver has special importance for survival. He called this one special emotional bond monotropy.

Although Bowlby used the term ‘maternal’ in the maternal deprivation hypothesis, he did not mean this was exclusively the child’s mother. He suggested that ‘mothering’ is not exclusive to a child’s mother.

A further issue can be taken with the claim that such a relationship is indeed of crucial importance. Bowlby himself presented research that some children show no ill effects from early separation. The children in this study were very ill with tuberculosis and spent years in hospital with little contact with their families. Nevertheless, most of them showed few problems later in life. Bowlby et al. suggest that those children who coped better may have been better attached to their mothers in the first place and thus more resilient.

It is possible that women are best as primary caregivers because most men are just not psychologically equipped to form this kind of intense emotional relationship. This may be due to biological or social factors. In terms of biology, the female hormone oestrogen underlies caring behaviour so that women, generally, are more oriented towards emotional relationships than men.

In terms of social factors, there continue to be sex-stereotypes that affect male behaviour, such as it being feminine to be sensitive to the needs of others. There is evidence that men are indeed less sensitive to infant cues than mothers (e.g. Heermannn et al. 1994). However, Frodi et al. (1978) showed videotapes of infants crying and found no differences in the biological responses of men and women.

There is plenty of evidence that men are quite capable of forming close attachments with their children, as is the case in single (male) parent families. The view that men are not emotional is outdated. Our changing stereotypes have meant that both men and women feel freer to take on roles traditionally reserved for the opposite sex. Women are not the only parent who becomes hormonally adapted to parenthood. Gettler et al. (2011) suggest that a father’s testosterone level drops in order to help ‘a man respond more sensitively to his children’s needs’.  

The view of the mother as primary caregiver is out of date for two main reasons. First of all there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that the primary caregiver has to be female.

Second, it mistakenly emphasises the fact that children have one primary carer. The reality is that healthy development relies on multiple important relationships. Bowlby proposed that there is one primary attachment figure - but he also proposed that secondary attachments provided a vital emotional safety net for situations where the primary carer is absent.

Research has also shown that, while women more often are the main emotional figure in a child’s life, men typically provide an equally important ingredient in development. For example, fathers are more playful, physically active and generally better at providing challenging situations for their children (Geiger 1996). Perhaps the biggest mistake is thinking that any caregiver has to be ‘primary’.