I found while my child was four that sometimes he truly did like to have fun with a grownup other than his mother and father. He loved getting babysitters for example and would barely have a look at me when I went out the door. I'd speak, "Bye, Will," and he would barely turn around, so absorbed was he in his new friend that usually young ladies from the local university.
For the final five days, I have been sitting on a purple bench, outside a purple room, waiting. Talking with other parents and caregivers. Waiting. Looking through the surveillance window. Waiting. At times feeling a bit annoyed. Then feeling guilty about feeling annoyed. And waiting.
You see, my almost-three-year-old started nursery school this Fall. And as is the case in many thoughtful, well-run preschools across the country, we are undergoing a process called "phase-in." Every day that they go to school, my son and his classmates stay in the classroom a measured bit longer until, several weeks down the road, they are ready for the full schedule-three days a week, for three hours. Seems reasonable, if not downright indulgent, right? Any non-parent might wonder, How hard can it be?
In my case, the day often begins with me telling my son we are headed to the purple room soon, and him responding, "I might cry," or "I won't go," or "I stay here and play with my trains." My son is hedging his bets, negotiating with me and himself, trying on how this might all play out. Sure, we've read the book about the purple room, and looked at the photo of his teachers that they left when they did their home visit a week before school started. All this helps. It just doesn't help every day, every time.
It turns out that you can't think about and understand separation until you think about and understand attachment, a two-way street of coming-to-care, a suite of behaviors that unfolds between child and caregiver over time. Its currency is gazing, holding, and cooing in the earliest stages, reliable care and nurturance going forward. If all goes well, we now know, the parent or caregiver will become "a secure base" from which the toddler and young child explore the world.
Back when say, in our parents' and grandparents' day--separation between child and parent or caregiver wasn't something we gave much thought to. We just did it. Kids went off to school or, in some cases, to work. Children of the wealthy went to boarding school, sometimes at the age of six or seven. They went to the hospital if they needed to with few or even no visits from their parents allowed
Our concepts of parent/child relations have always informed our separation practices. Throughout the nineteenth and into the mid-twentieth century, psychologists, philosophers and other opinion-makers largely concurred that attachment--a bond between parent or caregiver and child was a simple matter of a baby requiring food, and a mother supplying it. A baby's connection to his mother, this belief held, was little more than drive-directed gratification. As for the mother or caregiver's feelings of attachment, many believed that touch, affection, and love would "spoil" kids. And indeed, for the last several centuries, mothers were instructed to feed their babies and then put them down right away, at the risk of creating an "overly dependent, indulged" baby and child.
By the 1930s, such theories of drive-directed child "dependency" and "spoiling" were being questioned and then dismantled by developmental psychologists like Ian Suttie and William Blaz, who asserted that the need for affection and love was primary, not just an outcropping or secondary effect of the drive for food. Social relationships, beginning with the mother/child dyad, were crucial for healthy development, these psychologists insisted.
Observing young children who were separated from their primary caregivers during World War II, Anna Freud found that, even though they may have been exposed to fewer horrors of the war, they did not fare as well as those children who remained with their parents, even in terrible circumstances. And in 1951, John Bowlby published the landmark and controversial Maternal Care and Mental Health, quickly followed by Child Care and the Growth of Love. Here he asserted that "the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment." Should these needs go unmet, Bowlby argued, there could be significant and irreversible mental health consequences.
The philosophy of childcare was thus turned on its head. Far from "spoiling" children, affectionate treatment, love and cuddling and kisses, was crucial for their mental development, their happiness and health, and their ability to separate and function down the road.
Intrigued by Bowlby's work, psychologist Harry Harlow sought to prove its central tenants. By placing infant rhesus monkeys in cages with two surrogate mothers--one made of wire who offered milk, the other milkless but constructed from touchable terrycloth--Harlow determined that infants are in it for much more than the milk. The monkeys strongly preferred the terrycloth "mother" and those with only a wire one may have had full stomachs, but they also developed diarrhea and other markers of stress (follow-up studies with rat mothers and their pups found that lack of touch had negative effects including elevated cortisol levels and weakened immune systems). Harlow concluded that the absence of contact is profoundly psychologically stressful for young monkeys and, presumably, human infants as well.
Far from spoiling our infants with touch, affection and attention, these theorists asserted, we are meeting one of their most basic and crucial needs. And in failing to meet them, we put their psychological health at severe risk.
What's it all got to do with the purple bench outside the purple room--or wherever parents and caregivers sit anxiously each Fall as their pre-school age children get it together to walk through the door into the classroom, and hold it together for an hour or two or three apart? Before Bowlby, there was a sense that children could be removed from their parents with little consequence. Fast-forward to today, and we may have been too selective in what we took from Bowlby.
How so, exactly? It's not just that "they need a challenge, they deserve to get big and go into the world away from mother and father," or that being in a schoolroom alone "toughens them up," a belief that could have been entrenched in us by a culture that places a high value of individuality and independence. No, Kandall stresses, the point is more that once the kid is prepared, if you separate you get a possible opportunity to get together again in a complete new way.
I think there is the start of a paradigm shift, one required to stop the guilt, negative labeling, and often harm that hostile marriages cause while adults avoid divorce because of the fear of what a stepfamily might do with a youngster. A more positive cultural viewpoint has a solution to go.
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