I liken it to some of the fights we see parents and children battle in the classroom: If a child isn’t doing well, rarely do the parents go in to say, “Hey, this system you have isn’t working and doesn’t reflect my child’s abilities or worth”, but rather they try to shape the child to the system. Liberal feminists have done the same thing: They are focusing on how women and mothers can have value on the patriarchal playground instead of saying, “Hey, this playground doesn’t work for those of us who are mothers and we need a new one”.
So all of us continue to be bombarded with the idea that we are less-than if we are not contributing in the way our society prefers.
Whereas early feminism fought for women to be able to walk onto the patriarchal playground, liberal feminists have fought for the ability of us women to climb just as high as the men can.
Being the one who is home mothering (whether man or woman) on this playground is like being the kid who is sitting alone on the teeter-totter waiting for someone to come play while everyone else is busy climbing. At some point you’re probably getting off the teeter-totter and joining the rest because they can’t all be wrong, can they? When your friends tell you that you have to climb like the rest of them because we’ve been fighting to be able to climb and that’s what matters, you’re likely going to believe them.
So we have this culture that is built upon a patriarchal ideal of valuing the masculine while devaluing the feminine, and a liberal feminism that has upheld this ideal. What effect has this had on our mothering? I argue it’s led to the “detached mother” – seems pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Let us first examine what this means.
The pillars of detachment
When talking about “the detached mother”, there are four pillars of detachment that I want to discuss. These pillars are intricately linked to the cultural mothering practices many mothers and fathers engage in and are based on – you guessed it – patriarchy and liberal feminism.
These practices include formula use over breastfeeding, scheduled feeds over feeding a baby on demand, babies sleeping in cribs instead of next to or on their mother or another carer, the use of extinction sleep training so baby fits the parental world instead of us fitting into the baby world, unnecessary medicated birth and numerous birth interventions, the use of toys and gadgets to entertain baby instead of human contact, strollers instead of wraps or carriers, and daycares over the village. It’s important to note that these are not all “bad” – some can be downright great – but they have their roots in the joining of patriarchy and liberal feminism and as a whole, these practices work to detach mothers.
a) The first pillar of detachment that stems from these practices is the act of physical detachment of the child from the mother – keeping the physical distance that enables others to care for the child, freeing mum up to pursue the masculine ideal of work outside the home.
Traditionally – and I mean looking at human history, not the last few generations – the child’s biological need for touch was respected and mothering respected this.
Children were physically attached to a mother (again, including male and female) and expected to be for an extended period of time.
Dr. Barry Hewlett has covered research on infant touch in his book Diverse Contexts of Human Infancy and whereas in traditional societies babies are held or touched approximately 98-99% of the time, that number falls dramatically to between 12-20% in our own North American culture. This is for young children in the first few months of life and shouldn’t be too surprising when we think back to what our culturally-normative practices include.
b) This physical detachment can’t help but lead to the second pillar of detachment: emotional detachment. This is because of the immense importance of touch to our emotional well-being. One just needs to look at the work of Dr. Tiffany Field to see the negative repercussions in our society that exist because of a lack of or reduction in touch on a larger scale. For our infants, touch helps regulate them physiologically and if they do not receive enough, especially not in stressful situations, this results in a physiological stress response which influences later neurological development.
Notably, in research, we know that separation from a caregiver is one of the surefire ways to elicit stress in any mammalian infant. Yet the continued push to separate ourselves physically means our children experience more stress than they should and is likely one reason why we have seen a dramatic decline in empathy in our society over the last 40 years.
As children are forced to detach, they lose the capacity to care for others, including their own parents.
If we think about how our elders are being cared for – something that is often cited as a problem in our society – we can see they are cared for in ways similar to how we care for our children: Their basic needs are being met by strangers or “professionals” in an institutionalised setting, but lacking the emotional connectedness that would help them thrive.
c) The third pillar of detachment is the detachment from our role as mothers. Women’s identity as mothers is ignored or dismissed. It’s not a valid identity yet how can it not be? Whether a woman grows a child inside her for months or adopts a child with the choice to take on this vital role, or is a father taking on the role of mothering, the rest of society has decided that this identity is not “enough” and pushes – subtly and not-so-subtly – women and men towards other endeavours outside the home.
