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

[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.