Mother Knows Best?

Mums are good, aren't they? My own mum's alright. The mother of my nephews, my sister-in-law, despite voting Tory, has done a pretty good job of bringing up my nephews Daniel and Alex (22 and 17 now, so hardly children anymore), and my female friends with kids are all great mums too. I'm not a mother (or even a parent) myself but I was very honoured towards the end of last year when Michelle asked me to be Evie's godfather. 

Of course I proudly accepted - even though I don't believe in God. I believe in Evie though. I love her very much and miss her like mad (it's been over a year since I've been able to see her, swing her, or give her a squashy cuddle) but I don't worry too much about her. That's because I know she's got a truly wonderful mum looking after, and looking out for, her. But is that down to maternal instinct, something most Western capitalist societies happily accept as a fact of life, or is the story a bit more complicated than that?

I'd not given it a great deal of thought but Professor Maryanne Fisher (an evolutionary psychologist based at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia from where she was beaming in - an unexpected advantage of the events migrating online during the pandemic) had and she was presenting it to us in the form of a, roughly, forty-five minute lecture called Mommy Dearest:The Myth of the Maternal Instinct. 

Over the medium of Twitch (a new one to me but easier to use than MS Teams) and under the aegis of Skeptics in the Pub online. A group that combines Skeptics in the Pub groups up and down the country and even likes to imagine they're in a virtual pub, The Lock-In's Razor, to the point there's an interval before the Q&A (which took in hormones, oxytocin, and if it is possible to love a child even when you don't actually like them - yes, of course) so people can go get another drink! Which I did. With free entry to the evening I could afford to.

The talk was scheduled to celebrate International Women's Day (this coming Monday) but Professor Fisher, who has studied 'mating and dating' for many years, warned that her observations of female behaviour had led her to the conclusion that women are very very strange. Perhaps that's why she named her talk for the 1981 film Mommie Dearest. A biographical drama starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford as an abusive and manipulative mother who hurts her adopted children.

Particularly daughter Christina (played by Mara Hobel as a child and Diana Scarwid as an adult). The film was panned by critics at the time but went on to become both a commercial success and a cult classic. Which, perhaps, tells us something about motherhood. As a species, we like to judge those we perceive as, or society tells us are, bad mothers.

But the Prof wasn't having that. Her idea, hardly a revolutionary one, was that mothers are, at heart and not dissimilar to women that aren't mothers and men really, strategists. Often subconsciously - but strategists all the same. They have to decide when to co-operate and when to compete, when to share and when to hoard resources.

But how does this idea of mothers as strategists fit with the concept of maternal instinct? It doesn't - and the Prof was on hand to break this down to us. First by explaining some of the beliefs that underline the idea of maternal instinct. Beliefs like parental investment theory, in which it is held that, because of gestation, lactation, and handling the bulk of post-natal childcare, mothers are more invested in their children's health than fathers.

Belief in a maternal instinct, or even intuition, suggests there is an inner force that drives women to look after their children and they, somehow - almost magically, automatically know how to meet the demands of an infant simply because they are that infant's mother. An essential mammalian bond between mother and child.

The primary caretaker hypothesis proposes that the gender that has dominated infant nurture throughout history has simply evolved to be better at it. That mothers have evolved the ability to accurately register infant expressions and meet, or deny when necessary, their demands. This theory holds some water. Women, on the whole, do show more interest in small children. If you doubt that take a baby, or a photo of a baby, into an office and see who leaves their desk to come and look at it.

But this thinking feeds into a problematic binary. If there are good mums (and nobody doubts that the vast majority of mums are good) there must be bad mums too. Professor Fisher's research into competitive mothering (examples being over zealous self promotion of one's ability as a mother and denigration of other mothers) had cast doubt in her mind that maternal instinct was not something hard wired and immutable deep inside a mother's brain. Because if that was what was driving motherhood, then surely there would be no bad mums?

With a trigger warning, the talk went on to cover rare, but real, examples of negative mothering behaviours. Neglect, abandonment, and infanticide were all cited and though I would not include abortion as a 'negative mothering behaviour' it is likely that if maternal instinct was as prevalent as many believe then it would occur much less often.

The fact that these things still happen, our speaker - herself a mother of two small boys - contended, was because maternal instinct was nothing but an invention. In 1981, the French philosopher and author Elisabeth Badinter published 'L'Amour en plus: histoire de l'amour maternel', a book in which she charted the history of parenting in France in recent centuries.

 

In seventeenth and early eighteenth century France, children were often regarded as little more than a nuisance. There was a high rate of child mortality and when a child died, often there was very little mourning. Which seems both unimaginable and horrific. As the eighteenth century progressed and the French nation needed more people an idea of 'mother love' surfaced and this was encouraged by prominent French intellectuals who promoted the idea of maternal instinct to encourage more women to have children - and, hopefully, to help them stay alive.

Scientists even found models of insects to prove, or suggest, that maternal instinct was a biological fact across all of nature. The case would have been quite overwhelming but, as we've established - this is a Skeptics event after all, our speaker was here to provide a counter narrative to that which prevails.

She cited further evidence, following all that horrible abandonment and infanticide stuff, against maternal instinct. Breast feeding does not come easily, or automatically, to all mothers. Wet nurses have, throughout history, been employed to help women who can't, or won't, breast feed. A more startling case came from northern Taiwan where, between 1906 and 1930 - a very specific period of time and very specific region for sure, 69% of all female infants were given away to live with the families of their future husbands.

Who had, of course, been decided for them. These children were given away to make room for the girls who would come the other away as future wives for their sons. It's an irregular sounding arrangement whichever way you slice it but it does suggest, at least in northern Taiwan at the start of the last century, that maternal instinct, if it did exist, only worked for male children and not for female ones.

Professor Fisher felt that a healthier idea than maternal instinct is the idea of maternal love. An emotional commitment to the child which is contingent on ecological (for which read economical) and historical circumstances. Upsettingly, this could include giving up children for adoption or foster care if mothers are unable to look after them. 

The theory being that the love for the child, as well as the need to look after themselves, would be so powerful that in doing this the child would have a better chance in life. Studies of twins where one twin is healthy and the other is unwell have had interesting results too. Mothers who are affluent, or at least financially secure, were shown to prioritise the more needy child, mothers in poverty were shown to prioritise the healthier twin.

Mothers are constantly having to balance the needs of (sometimes several) existing children, potential future children, as well as their own needs and if mothers feel isolated or denied adequate resources to help them look after their children (because society says that should just be instinctual) this can actually harm the bond between mother and child.

This difference between maternal instinct and maternal love may sound, on the surface, like splitting hairs or a mere semantic digression but the Prof finished the talk by presenting us with what she feels, and I tend to agree - at least on most points, proves that it is more than that, that it's important.

Maternal instinct supposes that women who can't, or choose not to, have kids are somehow lacking a vital part of what it is to be a woman, that they are, in some way, defective. It enables men to remove themselves from their share of parental responsibilities and, for those men who chose to be as involved as possible, it devalues them. 

Talk of paternal instinct is negligible in comparison with that of maternal instinct and in capitalist Western societies there is still, it's changing but it's still there, a widely held belief that stay at home dads are somehow weak and emasculated. Stay at home dads are held up to thinly veiled ridicule as surely as working mothers once were.

Worse even than this, to my mind, is that the idea of a maternal instinct stigmatises mothers who seek assistance with their parenting skills. Struggling mums, to some, are not seen as victims of circumstance but, quite simply, bad mums. In an interesting talk, if one that ocassionaly erred towards slightly dry academia, this was the one point that hit hardest home with me.

Seeking help with your parenting doesn't make you a bad mum. It makes you a good mum. Worrying that you might be a bad mum doesn't make you a bad mum. It can help make you a good mum. Doing everything you can to help your child have the best, safest, start in life is what makes somebody a good mum. It looks, and is, exhausting work, both emotionally and physically, and to say that mothers do it because it comes natural is both reductive and shows a lack of appreciation for the hard work that mums everywhere do.

Perhaps because most mothering is done in private homes, late at night by a child's bedside, we, as a society, have undervalued it for too long. Seeing, and hearing, my friends' stories of motherhood, I've come to realise just how challenging it is - but also how rewarding it can be. Professor Maryanne Fisher made me think about it in an even deeper way than before and for that I thank not just her, not just Skeptics in the Pub, but all the brilliant mums out there. In fact, you can even have a special day just for yourselves. We can call it Mother's Day and have it next Sunday. You still won't get a break from being a mum though. That job's permanent.