Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation

Outline:

 Bowlby’s theory of attachment suggests attachment is important for survival.

 Infants are innately programmed to form an attachment. This is a biological process

and takes place during a critical period.

 The role of social releasers is emphasised. The child’s relationship with a PCG
provides an internal working model which influences later relationships.

Separation versus deprivation:

 Bowlby's theory is described as monotropic as the attachment is to a single specific

caregiver, the more time spent with his attachment figure the better.

 Bowlby’s theory of irreversibility states that negative consequences cannot be

reversed.

The critical period:

 Bowlby saw the first two-and-a-half years of life as a critical period for psychological
development.

 His view on critical period is that if attachment is disrupted or it is not formed during
the critical period, it is too late.

Effects on development:

 Bowlby believed that if children were deprived of maternal care for too long during
the critical period they would experience delayed intellectual development,
characterised by abnormally low IQ.

 A second major way in which being deprived of a mother figure’s emotional care
affects children is in their emotional development.

 Bowlby identified affectionless psychopathy as the inability to experience guilt or

strong emotion towards others.
Bowlby’s research:

 Bowlby aimed to investigate the link between affectionless psychopathy and maternal
deprivation.

 The sample in this study consisted of 44 criminal teenagers accused of stealing.

 All ‘thieves’ were interviewed for signs of affectionless psychopathy: characterised as

a lack of affection, lack of guilt about their actions and lack of empathy for their
victims.

 Their families were also interviewed in order to establish whether the ‘thieves’ had
prolonged early separations from their mothers.

 The sample was compared to a control group of 44 non-criminal but emotionally-

disturbed young people.

 Bowlby found that 14 of the 44 thieves could be described as affectionless

psychopaths and 12 of these had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers
in the first two years of their lives.

 In contrast only 5 of the remaining 30 ‘thieves’ had experienced separations. Only

two participants in the control group of 44 had experienced long separations.

 Bowlby conducted that prolonged early separation/ deprivation caused affectionless

psychopathy.
Evaluation

A strength of Bowlby’s maternal deprivation study is that there is supporting research by

Goldfarb. Goldfarb followed up 30 war orphaned children to the age of 12. Of the original
sample, half had been fostered by the age of 4 whilst the other half remained in an orphanage.
At the age of 12, both groups of orphans IQ were assessed using a standard IQ test. It was
found that the fostered group had an average IQ of 96 whereas the group that remained in the
orphanage averaged only 68. This is a strength because Goldfarb’s findings reinforce the
main assumption of Bowlby’s theory, showing that early separation and deprivation can lead
to long lasting effects on infant development and in their later life.

One limitation of the theory of maternal deprivation is the poor quality of the evidence it is
based on. Bowlby’s 44 thieves study is flawed because it was Bowlby himself who carried
out both the family interviews and the assessments for affectionless psychopathy. This left hi,
open to bias because he knew in advance which teenagers he expected to show signs of
psychopathy. Other sources of evidence were equally flawed. For instance, Bowlby was also
influenced by the findings of Goldfarb’s research on the development of deprived children in
wartime orphanages. This study has problems of confounding variables because the children
in Goldfarb’s study had experienced early trauma and institutional care as well as prolong
separation from their primary caregivers. This means that Bowlby’s original sources of
evidence for maternal deprivation had serious flaws and would not be take seriously as
evidence nowadays.

However, there is opposing research by Lewis. Lewis partially replicated the 44 thieves study
with 500 young people. She found that early prolonged separation from the mother did not
predict criminality or difficulty in forming close relationships. This suggests that Bowlby’s
theory might have made incorrect causal conclusions. Another opposing research comes from
Koluchova. Koluchova reported the case of twin boys from Czechoslovakia whose mother
died shortly after giving birth. They spent the first 18 months of their life in a children’s
home before their father and step-mother took custody of them. From this point on, they were
kept in isolation by their step-mother, who locked them in a cupboard. They were discovered
at age of 7 and adopted by 2 women who provided good care for them. They seemed to
recover fully from their early experience. Therefore, the effects of maternal deprivation are
not always so clear-cut.

An additional limitation of Bowlby’s theory of maternal deprivation is his confusion between

different types of early experience. Rutter drew an important distinction between two types of
early negative experience. Deprivation strictly refers to the loss of the primary attachment
figure after attachment in the first place – this may take place when children are brought up in
institutional care. Rutter pointed out that the severe long-term damage Bowlby associated
with deprivation is actually more likely to be the result of privation. So the children studied
by Goldfarb may actually have been ‘prived’ rather than deprived. Similarly, many of the
children in the 44 thieves study had disrupted early lives (e.g. spells in hospital) may never
have formed strong attachments. This means that Bowlby may have overestimated the
seriousness of the effects of deprivation in children’s development, which hence provides an
inaccurate assumption.

A further strength of Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation is the application of his work to
childrearing practice. This is as Bowlby’s work has led to significant changes in the way that
children are cared for hospital. For example, parents are now encouraged and allowed to visit
their children more frequently and there is greater flexibility in terms of visiting hours, to
ensure that deprivation does not occur. This demonstrates the positive impact and application
of Bowlby’s research to help improve childrearing practices of children in hospitals to ensure
deprivation does not occur.