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Parenting - Coggle Diagram
Parenting
The Parental Bond
- Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the development of a child from infancy.
- Usually undertaken by the biological parents of the child, but older siblings, step-parents, extended family, etc also parent children.
- Parents support children’s development in several ways; physical, emotional, social, and intellectual.
- In the early 20th century, parenting advice focused on hygiene because there was a high infant mortality rate due to communicable diseases.
- In the US (1900-1915) up to 90% of children in orphanages died within the year.
Medical view of child-rearing
- Dr Luther Emmet Holt:
- urged parents to keep a clean house (free of contagious diseases).
- Strict schedules for feeding and toilet training, avoiding physical contact with the child.
- Babies under six months should never be played with > made nervous and irritable, sleep badly, and suffer from indigestion.
Psychological view of child-rearing
- John Watson
- All behaviour is learned through interaction with the environment.
- Happy children were made and not born.
- Some advice is still consistent today;
- Children should be engaged in activities during the day to prevent misbehaviour, and only punished if this doesn’t work.
- Other advice isn’t consistent;
- Love is a reaction that leads to over-coddling > insensitive to the emotional needs of children.
- Doting parents endow their children with weakened, reserves, fears, cautions, and inferiorities.
Harlow: the study of love
- Tried to use the medical and psychological principles to raise monkeys.
- Baby monkeys on wire floors generally survived only 5 days.
- Baby monkeys on cloth floors lived longer.
- Also the surrogate mother monkey experiment > food+wire/heat+soft
- Surrogate mother monkeys lived longer and were healthier and happier.
- The babies huddled the cloth mother and used the mother as a secure base from which to explore the world.
- Without the mother, the baby remains huddled in fear and distress.
- Irrespective of the ability to provide nourishment, the baby would huddle with the cloth mother when presented with a scary stimulus.
- Did not go to the wire mother > rather threw themselves to the floor, held themselves, rocked back and forth and screamed in terror.
- Irrespective of providing nourishment, the babies pressed levers more when viewing the cloth mother instead of the wire mother.
The monkeys had problems later in life:
- The cloth mother monkeys were more timid and didn’t know how to interact with other monkeys. They were also violent and antisocial when being taken to mate, and didn’t know the correct sexual positions (male and females).
- The female cloth mother monkeys were either indifferent or abusive to their own children.
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- The quality of parenting relationships, not the family structure, matters most for children.
- Children from same-sex families fare as well as children raised by opposite-sex couples for social development, academic performance, and emotional development.
- Children from same-sex families can fare better than children from opposite-sex couples in general behaviour and health.
- Family stability is important for positive child outcomes in same-sex families, like in other family contexts.
- Australian data suggests that health and well-being are affected by perceived stigma.
Fatherhood
- Outside of humans, there are only a few species of primates that engage in substantial social bonding between mates and offspring.
- Variations in partnal care across species.
- Indirect: remain in close proximity to protect mate and young, but not much else.
- Biparental: both parents are involved in care
- Father as main caregiver
paternal care
- Throughout history, fathers have been the primary source of indirect care, controlling material resources, physical conditions, and social status.
- In western societies, the involvement of a father in caregiving has increased.
- There is a popular view in the public that human mothers have better parenting skills than fathers > genetic basis > sexual dimorphism.
- In humans, crying is usually the way a baby expresses distress > one might predict that mothers are better at recognising the cries of their babies than fathers.
cooperative breeding hypothesis
- Challenges the view of the ‘maternal instinct’
- high levels of non-maternal care in humans
- Fathers and other non-mother people directly provide care to babies
- Skills for care of offspring are not restricted to mothers.
Motherhood
- How mammalian mothers prepare to raise children.
- No other figure is as critically important for growth, development, and functioning as one’s mother.
- A mother provides continuing survival by protecting the young from danger and providing food and comfort.
pregnancy
- Women experience a flood of
hormones that help prepare the
body and brain to meet the
needs of the baby.
oxytocin
- Levels rise at the start of labour, stimulating contractions of the uterine muscle. Triggers the production of prostaglandins, which increase contractions further. If labour doesn’t start naturally, it can be used to induce it.
- Produced in the hypothalamus.
- Has bonding effects
- Fosters maternal behaviour.
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estrogen and progesterone
- Both increase during pregnancy.
- Estrogen helps the uterus grow, maintains its lining, and helps fetal organs develop. Activates and regulates the production of other hormones. With progesterone > stimulates breast growth and milk duct development.
- More estrogen exposure during pregnancy than during a woman’s entire non-pregnant life.
- Progesterone helps establish the placenta. Stimulates growth of blood vessels that supply the womb and inhibits contraction of the uterus so it grows as the baby does. Strengthens the pelvic wall muscles for labour.
born to be a mother?
- In most mammalian species, non-mother females don’t display behaviours that we typically think of as mothering.
- Virgin female rats tend to avoid or attack infants. After a few days, they’ll tolerate them, and then display ‘good mothering’. (grooming, suckling, etc).
- For previous mothers, this is immediate.
- Baby mice cry to get their mother’s attention, but the mother doesn’t instinctively know her own. Like humans, they need to learn the cries of their infants > done with oxytocin.
- In mice, virgin female rats ignore these cries but can learn them by being housed with a dam (mother)
- Compared to controls (saline), virgins injected with oxytocin caused them to readily help a crying baby, like dams > still a learned behaviour, but learned faster than regular co-housing.
- Co-housing still necessary > experience increases the effects of oxytocin.
- Injections that block the effect of oxytocin changes the brains of dams > they stop retrieving crying infants.