Bowlby Maternal Deprivation Essay

Maternal deprivation is a term first coined by Bowlby in his 1951 research. He introduced the idea that a child may suffer detrimental consequences if he was separated from his mother or mother substitute. He believed children could only form this unique bond with the mother/substitute and not with other people as well, which he described as monotropic.

This was a radical idea at the time when it was common for children to be separated from their mothers for lengthy spells during hospitalisation, where the nursing care focused mainly on hygiene and medical procedures and not on emotional needs. The child's or parent's emotional needs or distress were not taken into consideration as only the medical care was seen to be of importance.

Children who lived in residential care were not only separated from their mother but they received little affection, warmth or stimulation from any family or carers. At the same time the World Health Organisation stated that nurseries caused permanent damage to emotional health. Bowlby's report caused the WHO to completely change how care was given to children in hospital. It may be the case that these types of institutions could cause more future emotional problems than if the child was away from the mother but was with close family members or in a

Though he did studies to try and prove this theory they were often biased due to a lack of a control group and not being able to discount other contributing factors in the child's life and development. Such factors could include abuse, bullying, level of stimulation, grief, divorce, poverty and parental mental illness, to name but a few. These were not measured or considered so I find it inconclusive to say that maternal deprivation is the only cause of the adverse problems children had in later