Ongoing Trends of ‘Mother-Blaming’
Any mother who has blamed herself--or has been blamed--for a child’s psychological problems can take heart from the work of psychologist Paula J. Caplan, head of the Centre for Women’s Studies in Education in Toronto.
In a rather unusual survey, Caplan and a colleague reviewed articles about children with problems that were published in professional journals in the mental health field over a 12-year period.
“Mother-blaming,” they found, is rampant--and they conclude it is unfair and inaccurate. The clinical literature held mothers responsible for no less than 72 different kinds of psychological disorders in their children, including agoraphobia, arson, hyperactivity, schizophrenia and transsexualism.
The journals in the survey were published between 1970 and 1982--a period when feminism flowered, Caplan pointed out, yet the practice of mother-blaming did not abate; it continued in epidemic proportions, she said.
The general thesis seemed to be that if a child is sick, the mother must be sick. The researchers did not turn up a single article in which a mother was described as emotionally healthy, although some fathers were so described, and no mother-child relationship was described as healthy in any of the clinical articles.
In addition, clinical research seems to look first to the mother in explaining the child. “Far more space was used in writing about mothers than about fathers,” Caplan wrote in a report on her research published in the current issue of Psychology Today, adding that the clinical literature tends to describe fathers mostly in terms of their age and occupation, whereas mothers are described in terms of their emotional functioning--which is almost always “deemed essentially sick,” according to Caplan.
This attitude among professionals “is not only scientifically implausible but also socially destructive,” Caplan wrote. “Blaming mothers for their children’s psychological problems has a long and, unfortunately, respected history, particularly among mental health professionals. Sigmund Freud’s work included some such trends, and the more recent coining of such key terms as overprotective mother, maternal deprivation . . . swelled the mother-blaming tide. With professionals leading the way, it’s not surprising that mother-blaming was legitimized in the layperson’s mind as well.
“Mothers are unquestionably influential in their children’s lives, but so are fathers, other members of the child’s world and children themselves--a fact that often eludes both the blamers and the blamed,” Caplan wrote. “Mental-health professionals need to face up to the complexity of child development, stop relying on old and often invalid parenting theories and do the difficult but essential work of searching out and understanding the multiple influences on children’s development.”
Caplan added that if mothers’ successes in child-rearing were more often acknowledged, “mothers would be less readily scapegoated and more often supported in standing up to professional ‘experts’ who wrongfully berate them. . . . Our society usually fails to give mothers credit for the good they do, unless they are dead or described in the abstract as in ‘apple pie and motherhood.’ Yet mothers, despite their anxiety and guilt manage to raise millions of reasonably well-adjusted kids. They deserve far more credit for this than they get.”
A UC Santa Barbara study of infant mortality rates among different ethnic groups has come up with an unexpected result--a result that is good news for Latino mothers.
The study, conducted by research economist Ronald L. Williams, found that while most Latino women in California fit what has been determined to be a “high risk profile” for adverse outcome of pregnancy, their infant mortality rate is lower than their risk statistics would predict.
Williams looked at birth outcome statistics for four population groups--American-born whites, American-born blacks, American-born women with Spanish surnames and Mexican-born women.
In addition to what are regarded as risk factors in any group--low socioeconomic status, lack of prenatal care, high maternal age and a tendency to have many children--Latino women may also encounter language and cultural barriers in obtaining maternity care, Williams said. “It might be expected that Latinas would experience higher rates of infant mortality than do other ethnic groups,” he said.
However, they do not, and birth weight appears to be the key. Black women and American-born Latinas were very similar as regards the other risk factors such as low income and lack of medical care. However, birth weight is recognized as the single most important predictor of infant mortality, Williams said, and of the four groups he studied, Latinas had the fewest low birth-weight babies of any group.
Williams said that the most surprising finding of the study was the small percentage of underweight infants born to Mexican-born women, a group high in the other risk factors such as poverty and barriers to health care. Yet their rate of low birth weight was even lower than that for white women, whose risk when measured by income and access to health care is the least.
The widespread “favorable birth weight” among the Latino population is a “contemporary public health enigma,” Williams said. “It has been suggested that this phenomenon may be the result of better nutrition, lower rates of smoking and alcohol consumption or a higher regard for parental roles.”
