Whether it’s Britney or Lindsay, Let’s Once Again Blame Mothers
July 28, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
“Sometimes mothers can do no right” proclaims a July 29th New York Times article targeting Dina Lohan for the foibles, addictions, and recent arrest of her daughter, Lindsay Lohan.
Mother blame? Nothing new if you’re the mother of an autistic child.
Though widely discredited, the “refrigerator mother” theory of autism—-that children withdrew and retreated into themselves because of cold, emotionally “frigid” parents—-promulgated by self-proclaimed early childhood expert Bruno Bettelheim has left its mark on popular perceptions of autism. I sometimes wonder if remnants of this theory remain in the popular understanding of autism, and unconsciously fuel the insistence of many parents that some external, tangible agent (vaccines; thimerasol) caused a child to become autistic. Notes the New York Times:
Indeed, though statistics show that fathers are now more involved than ever in their children’s lives, the perception remains that mothers are ultimately responsible for their children’s behavior. Not to mention that experts say that since the 1980s, expectations of what a so-called “good mother” should do have grown.
“We have a long history in this culture of mother blame,” said Susan J. Douglas, an author of “The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women.” In World War II, women whose sons wouldn’t fight were condemned for tying them too closely with their apron strings. A host of illnesses, including autism, were once traced to mothers, often with dubious scientific proof.
And without mother blame, where would Freud be? “An ideal was set in place by pop psychologists and Freud that the big problems in American society could be traced to excessive mothering,” said Beryl Satter, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark. “Mothers who smothered their children with affection created unstable characters,” she said, and yet mothers who were withholding were perceived to have created problems as well.
Some media coverage of the recently published research about spontaneous genetic mutations and autism indeed “linked” autism to mothers.
Old myths can die a very hard death. Very hard, and very, very slow: Sigmund Freud (if not an awful lot of mothers that I know) should feel so fortunate.
What I took away from the research about spontaneous duplications or whatever it was, was that the “blame” goes on older women having daughters, those daughters are conceived from older eggs, more likely to have accumulated a mutation while in the grandmother’s abdomen all those years.
This is not about mother blame, it’s about the reality of mutations starting in a normal women, being passed to a basically normal carrier woman and that woman having a son or sons.
If there is “blame” and I don’t think there is, it’s blame on the older than typical grandmother.
I had one of those grandmothers, my mother gave birth to me, late-ish at around age 37. My mother was born when her mother was close to 40 also.
But the autism genes in my child seem to come from my father’s family and her father’s mother’s mother’s mother’s family.
It seemed to me that some media sources were wording their headlines on the “spontaneous genetic mutations” with an emphasis on mother’s contributions, perhaps for rhetorical effect (and ratings). If they had included the kind of explanations you provide, that kind of wording could have been foregone—thanks much.
I think, as ever, that there’s a massive difference between what the study actually says and what the media report. The media go for what will grab headlines/sell copies.
Brett pointed that out regarding a Fox News story.
Even a mild implication of blame, to a parent struggling to understand and absorb a child’s make-up, is a blow. And when the implication is specious, that blow to a parent’s confidence can cause material damage in seeking and using resources.
Interestingly, I think when we let go of the idea that mothers are responsible for everything we free ourselves up to do the stuff we really CAN do!
I think that there is a world of difference between spontaneous mutation, even if in the mother’s germ line, and the vein of thought ala Lohan/Spears which targets the current parenting skills of one parent vs. the other. I don’t take the first personally at all. The second is trickier…and indeed, we are at a time when moms are pressured to be “supermom” and as the story implies, given contradictory messages–be involved but not smothering, be an advocate but also a lady, offer opportunities, but don’t spoil or push…etc. For public questions, it becomes even a bigger hot button, because everyone can put in their 2 cents but not have access to the entire chain of events leading to the news item.
Isn’t the real issue what is seen societally as both parents roles in these questions and are the expectations realistic, and why? Families are not always 2-parent families, but at least initially, to have a child, there’s gotta be 2 parents. If a mom acted like a typical dad, would she still be a “good parent” and vice-versa?
In modern day parenting what are the expectations and contributions of society and agents outside of the family to creating or alleviating stressors and modelling behavior?
Huge, huge questions, and post-worthy….. There is a world of difference and what I was wondering here was the press’s presentation—simplication—of the genetic research into headlings about “autism linked to mothers.” I’m glad to be linked, genetically and in any way, to my son (how could one not be…..); the criticism of Lohan’s and Spears’s mothers points to, as you, other sorts of questions about parenting and societal expecations.
From my life with Charlie, I would have to say that being a parent if a lifelong, and very rich, education.