Study on Effects of Mother Love
Your Oct. 28 article on the potentially harmful effects that lack of “mother love” and “maternal separation” may cause in the brains of infants failed to speculate on the equally damaging impact that lack of “fatherly love” might have on child development.
If researchers are positing that infants are at risk when they go without caresses, assurance, stimulation and other regular demonstrations of love, clearly these are forms of nurture and care that can (and often are) provided as easily by men as by women. That this was obviously not a point of inquiry for DuPont Merck Research Labs should have been pointed out. As it was, the front-page status you gave this research reinforces the very troubling stereotype that only women can provide the crucial love and support that infants need for a healthy start in life.
HEIDI TINSMAN
Irvine
* I am deeply concerned as to whether taxpayer money is being squandered to study “maternal deprivation” in animals, with empty promises of benefit to humans. These experiments have been conducted repeatedly for decades with the same results. Regardless of the species studied, the simple fact is that results from mice can only be extrapolated to mice, dogs to dogs, monkeys to monkeys, etc. We already have enough data and common sense to substantiate the realization that human infants deprived of touch and love will sustain emotional and physical damage.
Is there any justification to this continued wasteful activity? Money should be spent on responsible research such as Harvard’s clinical trials with the Romanian orphans. Or, here’s a novel idea: Why not contribute the money toward the care and nurture of those infants most in need of it in the first place?
MARY LOU WAGNER
Redondo Beach
* Well, I guess we have even more data now to make us mothers feel guilty for working and having a career. Are we mothers destined to be frightened into staying home and out of the workplace altogether while our children are small?
I raised my children in the 1960s and stayed home with them, and this kind of revelation even makes me feel guilty.
FLORENCE PETERSON
Downey
