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

[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.