Manufacturing "Bad Mothers": A Critical Perspective on Child Neglect • Fathers and Developmental Psychopathology • Mothers and Sons • No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost
Swift presents a clear discussion of positivist, interpretive, and critical social science theories and uses a critical perspective to underscore the impact of class, race, and gender in interventions due to child neglect. She argues that the fundamental function of interventions for neglect is to exert authority over marginalized people and that the notion of helping clients serves to distort the true nature of this underlying goal.
Swift maintains that practice in this area could be enhanced by developing a positive understanding of clients, based partly on the belief that social conditions, not character deficiencies, are at the root of child neglect. Swift believes that interventions mandated by reports of neglect attempt to help children by controlling parents, and she reasons that such families would be better served by eliminating neglect as a category of child maltreatment while also providing voluntary services for these families. Her precise, analytic attention to the broad meaning and function of social casework is refreshing, and a pragmatic guide to intervention with these families based on her analysis would be welcome.
Vicky Phares, in her book Fathers and Developmental Psychopathology, notes a popular children's television show in which an infant dinosaur refers to its father as "not the momma." Thus begins her argument that the role of fathers in normal and pathological child development has been undervalued.
Phares has written an exhaustive, thorough, critical review of our state of knowledge about fathers and the development of psychopathology. She presents comprehensive reviews of the research on mother blaming, the role of fathers in normal development, and their role in the development of psychopathology. Phares presents concrete methods for ensuring fathers' involvement in research projects, debunking the myth that fathers are more difficult to engage in studies than are mothers. Finally, Phares discusses the value of involving fathers in clinical interventions with their children and discusses directions for future research in this area.
Babette Smith, in Mothers and Sons, explores the reciprocal impact of the social construction of masculinity on the mother-son relationship. This work is largely anecdotal. Using a population sample of mothers and sons from her native Australia, Smith looks at the shifts that have occurred from the 1950s through the early 1990s in the perceptions that mothers and sons have of each other and their motivations and needs.
The focus of Smith's hypothesis is that tension and dissatisfaction is inherent in the mother-son relationship because mothers cannot see beyond the myth that masculinity is a biological given. Hence, they misunderstand what their sons need. In Smith's schemata, as young boys become young men and defensively hide their vulnerability and need for closeness, mothers mistake this attitude for "male strength." Feeling rebuffed and unneeded, mothers stop offering love and warmth, either idealizing their sons' "strength" or resenting their sons' snubbing.
To complicate the significance of this phenomenon, in the absence of involved fathers, mothers paradoxically have to help their sons become men, but, again, they have only the cultural stereotypes of masculinity to inform their efforts. Left alone to parent, they fill the void, trying to prepare their sons for the world. They become too keenly aware of their sons' behavior, make the rules, set the limits, and enact the culture's expectations of "manners, morals and virtue." Their sons come to view their mothers as cold, strict rule makers who have to be opposed, guilt-provoking martyrs from whom they must free themselves.
Because of the burden of responsibility the mothers have had to carry as transmitters of the culture, their sons are left to feel uncared for, their real selves unknown. In reaction, these men become uncaring, self-centered, and "emotionally irresponsible," completing the circle in the construction of emotionally unaccountable men. Unfortunately, Smith's heavy-handed, pop-feminist framework falls headlong into the same stereotypes that she so decries.
In the richly human No Voice Is Ever Wholly Lost, Louise J. Kaplan, Ph.D., explores the power of the reciprocal dialogue between the young child and her caregivers to shape and sustain the human capacity to form loving relationships. Beyond this, Kaplan explores ways in which this archaic dialogue, and the thread it draws through the fabric of life, becomes the symbolic center to which one who has sustained a significant loss returns to re-find the meaning of life.
Using a psychoanalytic and object relations framework, Kaplan weaves together clinical anecdotes and literary allusions ranging from Freud's observation of his grandson playing his game of fort-da (gone and back) to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. In addition, Kaplan dramatizes her ideas about the transformational and healthy power of mourning with vignettes about the kin of the Disappeared in Argentina and the bereaved relatives of the victims killed in the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Focusing on the momentous loss of a child in a parent's life or a parent in a child's life, Kaplan untangles the varying forms that mourning can take—the acting out of a repetition compulsion in an effort to get a lost relationship to turn out right; a higher-level healing process in which survivors symbolically re-enact some particular value or ideal cherished by the lost person, transforming grief into a powerful living memorial; and the communication or "transposition" of stifled grief from one generation to the next, as may occur between Holocaust survivors and their children. Throughout, Kaplan poetically articulates her theme that the fullest work of mourning is not about the letting go of attachments but about the confirmation of attachments. The medium for this reconnection is the shadow of the archaic dialogue that shaped the earliest bond.
These volumes provide a rich and varied view of the role of relationships and social context in human development. Clinicians strive to understand social and relational causes of client dilemmas, and these works contribute to our ability to think broadly about alternative hypotheses and intervention strategies. Taken as a whole, they help expand our knowledge of the problems clients present and the varied avenues to pursue in addressing them.
Footnote
Mr. Horwitz is a psychotherapist and adjunct assistant professor at the Smith College School for Social Work in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Mr. Perse is a psychotherapist in private practice in Northboro and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Child neglect has itself been neglected in recent years as discussion in child protective services has focused on sexual abuse, physical abuse, and abandonment. In Manufacturing "Bad Mothers": A Critical Perspective on Child Neglect, Karen Swift relies on both her experience as a protective social worker and critical social science theory to discuss the social context of neglect and the function of intervention in neglect cases. Reasoning that "seemingly ordinary social concepts perform functions of social reproduction," Swift argues that "child neglect . . . is a concept through which more powerful groups maintain their dominant position over particular vulnerable and marginalized groups."
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Published in print: February 1998
Published online: 1 April 2006
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