Translation: mommy didn’t love me but I’m too immature to recognize it. We need to treat such people with compassion but be firm in reminding them that their dysfunction is their private issue and should be resolved with a psychologist paid for with their own money.
There’s altogether too much of people strewing around their mental rot because they are too cheap or too stupid to seek paid help in cleaning up their psyches.
I cannot access this article, but do you mean even asking this question should be forbidden since of course every normal woman has this selflessness and tenderness?
Not all fathers have it, but mothers yes?
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Nature (or God) made it so that mothers of all species don’t abandon their young. Without this mechanism, life wouldn’t continue because there’s no reason to feed and protect babies without it. It’s a physiological mechanism that causes a hormonal surge upon the moment of birth. It’s like a drug cocktail and it changes you completely and forever. Of course, there are always broken people who are an exception but that’s rare. If it were frequent, we’d all die in early infancy.
This question has been answered by science many times over. Here’s a good, vivid explanation:
“What I didn’t know then — what I wish I had known then — was that I was in the midst of the most rapid and dramatic neurobiological change of my adult life. The unmooring I felt, and that so many new mothers feel, likely was at least in part a manifestation of structural and functional brain changes, handed down through the millennia by mothers past and intended to mold me into a fiercely protective, motivated caregiver, focused on my baby’s survival and long-term well-being.”
// It’s a physiological mechanism that causes a hormonal surge upon the moment of birth.
What if it’s a C-section birth?
I once read something about deer not bonding with their young unless it’s a natural birth. Something like that.
It has to be psychological rather than mainly physiological for C-sections and painkillers not to affect the bonding.
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It isn’t the pain that causes the bonding. It’s the placenta and it’s removal that creates the hormonal storm. I had two C-section births and, wow, it was like being hit over the head with a sack of potatoes. Many times. You truly become a completely different person.
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My husband just marvels that my brain doesn’t run out of my ears when they’re little, since it’s obviously turned to soup.
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Thanks for the article. Very interesting.
You know, I do think human biology, reproduction and caring for kids should be taught at schools, including info re sex and birth control.
High school students get driving licenses and schools have a course to help them pass the theory exam for the driving test.
Why not teach a little about child psychology and care? Specially since quite a few American high school students from poor backgrounds become parents in their teens.
Yes, that would be great but unfortunately impossible since we can’t even agree whether men can give birth through the penis. :-)))
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“Not all fathers have it, but mothers yes?”
I’d say there is a range of nurturing instincts found in men and women on a bell graph it would go from very low (left) to very high (right). Generally the female average will be a bit highter (maybe standard deviation or so) than the male average, something like this but maybe a bit closer
Most people hate the idea of range of behaviors and want to lock people into rigid roles. Some want to lock women into nurturing angels and some want to turn them into turtles (who give no thought at all to their offspring).
Also, many people with relatively low nurturing instincts in general will be extremely nurturing with their own children (that was my mother who said she never much liked children except for her own whom she adored).
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My father hated children. Couldn’t stand them. He tried to conceal it but it was impossible. And at the same time, he adored his own children and wanted nothing more than to play with us, take us for walks, invent things for us.
Often, also, men bond through the women they love. My close friend’s husband told her their two children were a mistake, he didn’t want them and he wanted her to leave and pursue a child-free lifestyle.
My friend left. The husband met a divorced mother of 7. He adopted them all and raised them with uncommon tenderness and care. He was insanely in love with their mother, so he loved the kids, too. His actual kids, however, see him maybe once every 5 years. This is a very male type of bonding. I’ve never heard of a woman who loved stepkids more than her own kids.
Ah, but a little pernicious editorialising never hurt anyone …
Which is why the Pitchfork Armies that show up at the NYT always are a surprise.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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