This volume explores the complex interaction and the importance of early communication between mother and baby from pregnancy to the first early months of development. It provides a rich and detailed ...study of this earliest relationship, and makes a significant and valuable contribution to this area of the mental health field.
The definitive collection on eighteenth-century generation and its many milieus,The Secrets of Generationwill be an essential resource for studying this topic for years to come.
Scholars turn to reproduction for its ability to illuminate the practices involved with negotiating personhood for the unborn, the newborn, and the already-existing family members, community members, ...and the nation. The scholarship in this volume draws attention to doula work as intimate and relational while highlighting the way boundaries are created, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Intimate labour as a theoretical construct provides a way to think about the kind of care doulas offer women across the reproductive spectrum. Doulas negotiate boundaries and often blur the divisions between communities and across public and private spheres in their practice of intimate labour. This book weaves together three main threads: doulas and mothers, doulas and their community, and finally, doulas and institutions. The lived experience of doulas illustrates the interlacing relationships among all three of these threads. The essays in this collection offer a unique perspective on doulas by bringing together voices that represent the full spectrum of doula work, including the viewpoints of birth, postpartum, abortion, community based, adoption, prison, and radical doulas. We privilege this broad representation of doula experiences to emphasize the importance of a multi-vocal framing of the doula experience. As doulas move between worlds and learn to live in liminal spaces, they occupy space that allows them to generate new cultural narratives about birthing bodies.
Regression periods play a central role in the psychological development of the human baby. Studies of infants have identified 10 periods of regression, or a return to a high frequency of ...mother-infant contact, within the first 20 months of life. These periods of emotional insecurity in the child signal forthcoming periods of developmental advance and the emergence of an array of new skills as a consequence of parent-infant conflict over body contact and the renegotiation of old privileges. Although the basic idea in this book is an old one, the authors believe that regression periods deserve further study and have identified four questions of central importance today: *Can the phenomenon of regression periods as found by Dutch researchers in 1992 be replicated in other countries and cultures? *What environmental conditions have an effect on these regression periods and how? *Are there physical conditions in infants that show a non-linear distribution over age similar to regression periods? *Have brain changes been detected since the review of Fischer & Rose (1994) at other ages than the six reported by them, and, if yes, how do these relate to the ages at which regression periods are found? Forming the core of this book, the replication studies performed in Sweden, Spain, and England provide support that regression periods are a rreliable phenomenon and should be dealt with accordingly whenever developmental processes in infancy are discussed.
Clinical psychologist Richard Ryder approaches three iconic celebrities - Horatio Nelson, Adolph Hitler, and Diana Princess of Wales - as though they were his patients and presents a short ...psycho-biography of each. Beneath their obvious differences he finds striking similarities in their backgrounds and early experience, especially being deprived of their mothers' love. In a short Epilogue the author asks what lessons might be learned for the future from these three famous figures of the past.
In this volume, leading authorities provide a state-of-the-art examination of disorganized attachment: what it is, how it can be identified, and its links to behavioral problems and psychological ...difficulties in childhood and beyond. The editors offer a fresh perspective on disorganized attachment, not as a characteristic of the infant or child but as the product of a dysregulated and disorganized parent-child relationship. They present cutting-edge research and exemplary treatment approaches. With attention to the subjective experiences of both mothers and children, the book shows how focusing on the caregiving system can advance research and clinical practice.
'The biological birth of the human infant and the psychological birth of the individual are not coincident in time. The former is a dramatic, observable, and well-circumscribed event; the latter a ...slowly unfolding intrapsychic process.'
Thus begins this highly acclaimed book in which Margaret S. Mahler and her collaborators break new ground in developmental psychology and present the first complete theoretical statement of Dr. Mahler's observations on the normal separation-individuation process.
Separation and individuation are presented in this major work as two complementary developments. Separation is described as the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother, while individuation consists of those achievements marking the child's assumption of his own individual characteristics. Each of the subphases of separation-individuation is described in detail, supported by a wealth of clinical observations which trace the tasks confronting the infant and his mother as he progresses toward achieving his own individuality.
A number of chapters are devoted to following five children epigenetically through their subphase development. A separate section describes the authors' methodology, the importance of the research setting, and the effects of changes in the setting. The extensive appendices by Fred Pine discuss the uniqueness of the data-gathering techniques used by the authors. In addition, a useful glossary of concepts defines the new terms that Dr. Mahler has introduced.
This book represents an important breakthrough in understanding the human infant and makes a unique contribution to the science of human behaviour.
What's mother got to do with it? Krane, Julia
What's mother got to do with it?,
c2003, 20030709, 2000, 2003, 2003-01-01, 20030101
eBook
A child's disclosure of sexual abuse can wreak havoc in many lives, especially that of the child's mother. Julia Krane offers a first-hand look into everyday protection practices of child welfare ...from the perspective of mothers of sexually abused children and their female social workers, charting women's complex, contradictory, and often costly relations with the child welfare arm of the Canadian state
Drawing on interviews with social workers and mothers of sexually abused children, examinations of client files and court documents, and reviews of training and procedural manuals, Krane argues that child welfare procedures designed to protect children and help parents instead end up scrutinizing mothers for their inadequacies, transforming them into a protective labour force expected to safeguard their children. Protection practices, she contends, essentially reproduce legacies of mother blame and responsibility for the child's sexual abuse, relieving the abuser and the state of all liability.
In conclusion, Krane uses her analysis to identify areas with potential for change, such as creating practice environments that render explicit the gendered nature of protection, offering support to women in their protective efforts, and allowing opportunities for women to explore and reflect on the context of maternal care and protection. This study lays bare another layer of gender in relation to child sexual abuse, and locates child welfare practice in feminist scholarly debates about women and the welfare state.
Maternal postpartum depression (PPD) exerts long-term negative effects on infants; yet the mechanisms by which PPD disrupts emotional development are not fully clear. Utilizing an extreme-case ...design, 971 women reported symptoms of depression and anxiety following childbirth and 215 high and low on depressive symptomatology reported again at 6 months. Of these, mothers diagnosed with major depressive disorder (n = 22), anxiety disorders (n = 19), and controls (n = 59) were visited at 9 months. Mother-infant interaction was microcoded for maternal and infant's social behavior and synchrony. Infant negative and positive emotional expression and self-regulation were tested in 4 emotion-eliciting paradigms: anger with mother, anger with stranger, joy with mother, and joy with stranger. Infants of depressed mothers displayed less social gaze and more gaze aversion. Gaze and touch synchrony were lowest for depressed mothers, highest for anxious mothers, and midlevel among controls. Infants of control and anxious mothers expressed less negative affect with mother compared with stranger; however, maternal presence failed to buffer negative affect in the depressed group. Maternal depression chronicity predicted increased self-regulatory behavior during joy episodes, and touch synchrony moderated the effects of PPD on infant self-regulation. Findings describe subtle microlevel processes by which maternal depression across the postpartum year disrupts the development of infant emotion regulation and suggest that diminished social synchrony, low differentiation of attachment and nonattachment contexts, and increased self-regulation during positive moments may chart pathways for the cross-generational transfer of emotional maladjustment from depressed mothers to their infants.
