Maternal Deprivation Flashcards
What is Monotropy?
Monotropy is the term Bowlby gives for the unique attachment bond between an infant and its mother. The mother acts as a secure base, which the child uses to explore the world and return to for comfort and safety.
Background Info
Bowlby proposed the theory of maternal deprivation 20 years before his attachment theory. However, the basis of the maternal deprivation hypothesis is the same as his idea of the critical period.
What is Maternal Deprivation?
Maternal deprivation is when a child’s monotropic attachment is disrupted during the critical period. This deprivation is said to result in negative and irreversible consequences.
What Causes Maternal Deprivation?
Maternal deprivation is caused by the prolonged separation or loss of emotional care from a primary caregiver, which is usually the mother, during a child’s early years - especially during the critical period (first 2.5 years of life). This deprivation can happen due to physical separation, e.g., due to illness, or emotional unavailability, e.g., neglect.
Although Bowlby believed that the effects of maternal deprivation would be at their most acute during the critical period, should substitute emotional care not be provided, he noted that there would be a risk of adverse consequences up until the age of 5.
What are the Consequences of Maternal Deprivation?
Bowlby believed that ongoing maternal deprivation would have lasting negative effects on a child leading to possible mental health problems or maladjustments. This includes:
- Delinquency - due to disrupted social development, behaviour is often outside acceptable norms.
- Delayed intellectual development - due to disrupted cognitive development, infants may display an abnormally low IQ.
- Affectionless psychopathy - due to disrupted emotional development, infants are unable to experience strong feelings towards other people, they experience little guilt and empathy.
Such outcomes prevent the development of normal, healthy relationships and are associated with criminality.
The Continuity Hypothesis
As the monotropic relationship with the mother is the first and most significant relationship the infant has, it forms a template (schema) for future relationships, called an internal working model .
The continuity hypothesis suggests that deprivation caused by prolonged separation from the mother limits the ability of the infant to form an effective working model, leading to unsuccessful childhood and adult relationships as well as issues with parenting skills.
Key Study: 44 Juvenile Thieves (Bowlby, 1944) - Aim
To see if early separation from the primary caregiver was associated with behavioural disorders.
Key Study: 44 Juvenile Thieves (Bowlby, 1944) - Method
- Children aged between 5-16 years old, who had been referred to a guidance clinic in London where Bowlby worked, were examined.
- 44 of the children were criminals (guilty of theft).
- 44 non-criminal participants were used as a control group.
- Bowlby interviewed the children and their families to create a record of early life experiences.
Key Study: 44 Juvenile Thieves (Bowlby, 1944) - Findings
- Bowlby identified 14 of the 44 thieves as affectionless psychopaths.
- 86% (12/14) of these affectionless psychopaths had experienced early and prolonged deprivation.
- Only 17% of the ‘other thieves’ had experienced such separations and 4% of the control group had experienced frequent early separations.
Key Study: 44 Juvenile Thieves (Bowlby, 1944) - Conclusion
These findings suggest a link between early separations and later social maladjustments. Maternal deprivation appears to lead to affectionless psychopathy and antisocial behaviour.
Maternal deprivation - Strength
Point: One strength of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is its valuable practical applications, particularly in shaping institutional childcare practises.
Evidence: Bowlby’s theory highlighted the psychological risks of prolonged separation from a caregiver, which was especially relevant to children in hospitals. Historically, hospitals restricted or even prohibited parental visits. Robertson and Robertson provide observational evidence of this impact in their study of a 2-year-old girl named Laura, who was hospitalised for 8 days. Laura exhibited clear signs of emotional distress due to the absence of her primary caregiver, illustrating the damaging effects of maternal deprivation.
Justification: These findings influence a shift in hospital policies, with institutions adopting best practices, such as allowing frequent parental visits and ensuring emotional care is provided when caregivers are present to minimise the potential harmful consequences. This reflects how Bowlby’s theory helped inform more child-focused environments.
Implication: As a result, the theory’s real-world impact on improving childcare systems strengthens its external validity, demonstrating that it not only explains behaviour but also has meaningful implications for safeguarding children’s emotional well-being during a vulnerable and challenging time.
Countargument: However, a limitation of applying Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation into real-world settings is the practical and economic challenges associated with implementing recommended changes.
Evidence: While the theory has encouraged institutions like hospitals and nurseries to prioritise emotional care and reduce separation, doing so often requires increased staffing, specialised training and adjustments to infrastructure. For example, ensuring constant emotional support for children when caregivers are absent may not be feasible in under-resourced or overstretched systems.
Justification: These demands can place a financial strain on institutions, particularly in low-income areas, where funding and staff availability may already be limited.
Implication: As a result, the theory’s application may - though beneficial in theory - may not be universally achievable in practice as it presents economic, logistical and resource-intensive problems that hinder their consistent implementation across different settings.
Maternal deprivation - Strength
Point: A strength of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is its significant contribution to the development and refinement of his attachment theory, proposed 20 years later.
Evidence: Bowlby’s early emphasis on the importance of continuous emotional caregiving highlighted a shift away from purely physical needs in child development, drawing attention to the essential role of emotional bonds. This conceptual foundation laid the groundwork for his monotropic theory of attachment and influenced subsequent research, such as Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, which built upon his ideas to empirically assess the quality of caregiver-infant attachments.
Justification: By integrating the concept of maternal deprivation into a broader understanding of emotional development, Bowlby offered a more holistic view of child psychology. His theory helped establish the idea that the absence of emotional care - particularly during a critical period - can result in long-term developmental consequences, such as emotional instability and difficulties in forming later relationships.
Implication: This enhances the explanatory power of Bowlby’s theory, as it not only addresses the short-term effects of separation but also provides a meaningful framework for understanding how early experiences shape later psychological outcomes, therefore playing a foundational role in shaping modern attachment research and child welfare practices.
Maternal deprivation - Weakness
Point: A significant limitation of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is the presence of conflicting evidence that challenges its claims about the long-term impact of early separation.
Evidence: Lewis conducted a replication of Bowlby’s original 44 juvenile thieves study using a larger sample and found no clear link between prolonged separation from a primary caregiver and increased the risk of criminality later in life. Instead, Lewis concluded that factors such as parental disharmony, poverty and overall social environment were more influential in predicting criminal behaviour. Furthermore, Barrett found that the effects of deprivation vary based on attachment style, with securely attached children being more resilient to separation than those with insecure attachments.
Justification: These findings showcase that the relationship between early deprivation and later negative outcomes is not straightforward and may instead be influenced by a range of individual and contextual differences.
Implication: This is a weakness of Bowlby’s theory of material deprivation as it provides a deterministic view of development, suggesting that early separation inevitably leads to negative outcomes, without considering the role of individual differences and other mediating factors. This emphasises the need for a more complex, multifactorial explanation of maternal deprivation, considering factors beyond the simple absence of a caregiver.
Maternal deprivation - Weakness
Point: One limitation of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is the conflation between the concepts of deprivation and privation.
Evidence: Rutter criticised Bowlby for failing to distinguish between these two terms. Deprivation refers to the loss of an existing attachment bond, whilst privation refers to the failure to form an attachment at all. Rutter argued that these experiences are not equivalent and do not produce the same developmental outcome, claiming that Bowlby uses these terms interchangeably. His research into Romania orphans revealed that children who experienced privation exhibited significantly more severe emotional, social and cognitive impairments compared to those who had experienced a dismantled attachment.
Justification: This distinction is important because Bowlby’s theory assumes that the negative effects observed following early separation are the result of deprivation, but in reality, some of the most extreme cases of dysfunction may be due to privation. By failing to clarify this, the theory may overstate the effects of deprivation and misattribute certain consequences.
Implication: As a result, this hinders the practicality of Bowlby’s work. If professionals cannot clearly distinguish between two closely linked yet distinct concepts, they may struggle to provide appropriate interventions tailored to the specific needs of children, ultimately limiting the usefulness of the theory in real-world settings.
