My Bleeding Heart: Tragedies from lack of parental care

[drscott]

We're driving down to Palm Springs tomorrow and I'm supposed to be packing. This entry reminds me to get back to what I was doing when we return....

I've just finished the first few chapters of Becoming Attached by Robert Karen. (You can read a large chunk of the book online here.) I can't copy any of this material to excerpt, but I burst into tears on page 22.

This film is terribly sad. A silent film from the 50s, it demonstrated how damaging then-accepted practices of depriving infants of loving attention (often from misguided attempts to prevent disease transmission) were to their emotional development.

Comments

[audrabaudra.livejournal.com]

Friends of mine in the States adopted two wee girls from China...was that really 10 years ago? I guess it was.

The first little girl had lived with a foster family. Today, she is attached to her American parents, has learned to play violin, is lovely and charming and vivacious, as any twelve-year-old girl has a right to be.

The second little girl had spent her first two years in an orphanage. My friends have done all in their power to help her, but she is very much like a beautiful porcelain doll with an invisible crack running through her.

Starving for touch is still starving.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I'll ask my Dad about this on Sunday. He's a retired child psychiatrist (as you may remember, former board member of the American Academy of Child - now Child and Adolescent - Psychiatry) and was throughout his career a believer in the vital importance of the parent/child bond in infancy in particular.

[omero-hassan.livejournal.com]

I remember watching something about the children of the blitz, and it was talking about their psychological health after the war. Some children had been removed from their parents in London to live in the country during the war for their safety. Other children were not removed, and had to endure the stress of bombings. In comparison later in life, the children who had been removed from their parents but were not bombed had greater mental health issues than the children who were bombed but were able to stay with their parents. Apparently, one can handle almost anything if one has a good connection with one's parents; without them, even idyllic settings are damaging. That insight reduced me to tears on the spot.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating.

[hotelbearsf.livejournal.com]

I'm in PS for part of the week - give a shout!