Bowlby's Theory of Maternal Deprivation

Bowlby’s Theory of Maternal Deprivation

John Bowlby proposed the theory of maternal deprivation. Maternal deprivation is the emotional and intellectual consequences of the separation between a child and their mother or mother substitute.

Bowlby suggested that continuous care is important for normal psychological development and that any prolonged separation from this adult can cause serious damage to the child’s emotional and intellectual development.

Separation is not the same as deprivation. Separation is when the child is not in the presence of the attachment figure, and only leads to deprivation if the emotional care is damaged in someway. Brief separation from a caregiver will not be an issue if there is a substitute caregiver who can provide emotional care.

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Bowlby suggested that the first 2 1/2 years of life is a critical period for the child’s psychological development. He proposed that if the child is separated from their mother and there is no suitable substitute care, the child experiences deprivation which can lead to issues. During the critical period it is important for the child to make a primary attachment bond, but there is also an increased risk if the child experiences deprivation up to the age of five years of age.

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The Effects on Development:

Intellectual Development

Bowlby believed that if the child was deprived of maternal care during the critical period, they would experience delayed intellectual development which is characterised by a low IQ.

There are adoption studies which give evidence for this, for example the research of Goldfarb (1955). Goldfarb followed 30 children up to the age of 12 years who had spent time in an orphanage. Half of the sample had been fostered by the age of four months of age whilst the other half remained in the orphanage. At 12 years of age he measured their IQ and found that the fostered group had a normal IQ of 96 compared to the group that remained in the orphanage who had a significantly lower IQ of 68. He concluded that this was due to the poor emotional care within the orphanage.

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Emotional Development

Another way that maternal deprivation affects a child is in their emotional development. Bowlby suggested that the extreme effects of maternal deprivation can lead to the child becoming an affectionless psychopath. This is the inability to express guilt or strong emotion towards others, or remorse for their actions. This was demonstrated in Bowlby’s research, the 44 juvenile thieves study.

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Evaluation

1. Bowlby’s 1944 study of 44 thieves gives evidence for the emotional effects of maternal deprivation. He studied 44 criminal teenagers who were accused of stealing. These criminal teenagers were interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy. Furthermore, their families were also interviewed in order to establish whether these children these boys had experienced any separation from their mothers early in life. He compared the 44 thieves to a control group of 44 non-criminal boys who were emotionally disturbed. Bowlby found that 14 of the 44 thieves could be described as affectionless psychopaths and of these 12 of them had experience prolonged separation from their mothers in the first two years of life. In contrast only five of the remaining 30 thieves had experienced prolonged separation. In the control group only two of the boys out of 44 had experienced long separations. Therefore Bowlby concluded that prolonged early separation caused affectionless psychopathy.

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2. One limitation of the theory of maternal deprivation is in relation to the evidence on which it is based. Bowlby’s 44 thieves study is flawed because Bowlby carried out the research himself. This could lead to investigator bias because because he knew in advance which teenagers he expected to show signs of psychopathic behaviour.

Other research has also been criticised, for example the findings of Goldfarb’s (1955) orphanage study.  This study has problems because the children had experienced early trauma and institutional care (because they were war orphans) as well as prolonged separation from their primary caregivers. Therefore, the study has confounding variables which were not controlled.

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3. Another limitation in relation to Bowlby’s 44 thieves study is that later research has failed to find the same results. Hilda Lewis (1954) looked at 500 young people who experienced maternal deprivation and found no association at all between early separation and later psychopathic behaviour; whether criminal or relationship difficulties.

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4. However, there is research by Levy (2003) which gives evidence for Bowlby. Levy at found that separating baby rats from their mothers for as little as one day has a has a permanent effect on their social development.

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5. Another limitation of Bowlby’s theory is that he failed to due to distinguish between deprivation and privation. Michael Rutter (1981) suggested that privation is more likely to lead to serious consequences for the child, compared to deprivation. Privation is the failure to form any attachment bond in the first place and is usually the result of being brought up in institutional care. Rutter suggested that the severe long-term damage that Bowlby referred to with the term maternal deprivation is probably more likely to be the result of privation.

It might be that the children in the Goldfarb (1955) study as well as the boys in the 44 thieves study might have experienced privation rather than deprivation.

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6. Another limitation of Bowlby‘s theory is in relation to the concept of a critical period. For Bowlby damage was inevitable if the child had not formed an attachment in the first 2 1/2 years of life; the critical period. However, there is evidence that children can recover from this early deprivation as long as the care provided afterwards is good quality. The study conducted by Koluchova ( 1976) of the Czech twins showed that they were able to recover from the severe physical and emotional abuse that they experienced from the age of 18 months up until the age of seven years old. Although they were severely damaged emotionally by their early experiences when they were found,  the excellent care that they received later on meant that they recovered fully. This means the inevitability of privation can be questioned and the critical period might be better referred to as being a sensitive period.

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