I thought this article went well with some of my most recent posts. I came upon this article at Keri's blog. Thank you SO much for sharing it Keri....it has me doing a GREAT amount of pondering and praying today! I am going to post the article directly in my blog, since it is my only post for today. You can also find it here.
The death of motherhood
By MELANIE GILL, Daily Mail Last updated at 09:32am on 20th July 2006
Melanie Gill is a forensic child psychologist who specialises in treating dysfunctional families in Brighton. Last week she was invited to address the Centre for Social Justice conference on youth crime, at which David Cameron made his plea to empathise with 'hoodies'.
Here, she explains that the true reason for such teenage delinquency is that society has devalued parenthood...
You do not need to be the victim of a street mugging to live in fear of so-called 'hoodies'. As a child psychologist working in Brighton, supposedly one of the country's more affluent cities, I find it impossible not to be disturbed at the growing incidence of teen gangs who seem seem to think robbery and violent assault is a form of recreation.
The result has been an explosion in juvenile violence, which has increased at a shocking rate over recent decades. Since 1991, the number of serious violent offences has gone up from roughly 16,000 a year to almost 45,000. Overall, violent crime has increased 25-fold since the Fifties.
Young men make up the greatest proportion of dangerous offenders, and newspapers are full of stories about teenage murderers, rapists, burglars and vandals. It is absurd to pretend, as do some commentators and criminologists, that rising crime is just a figment of our overworked imaginations, exacerbated by a hysterical Press or a sense of nostalgia for a time when bobbies patrolled the streets and a real sense of community still existed.
The truth is that less than half-a-century ago we did have probably the most peaceable, crime-free society the Western world has ever seen. But we can hardly say the same today, when the shadow of fear is so prevalent and when the fabric of our social structure seems to be deteriorating so quickly.
In this atmosphere of fragmentation, the cry for more punitive action against offenders is perfectly understandable. Yes, we send record numbers (including juveniles) to prison, but that is because we have a crime rate which would have been unthinkable in the immediate post-war era.
Those who have experienced violent mugging, rape, assault or burglary need to feel secure and that the perpetrators will be dealt with seriously. But I believe the cycle of crime and punishment can never be the long-term answer to our problems.
If we are to make our society safer, we have to address the causes of so many young people's alienation. It is this belief that lay behind the much-derided comments last week from Tory leader David Cameron about the need to try to understand hoodies rather than condemn them.
Some of Cameron's language may have left him open to ridicule, but as a fellow speaker at the conference, I believe his approach was correct. Our society demands that young offenders be taught a harsh lesson, that they be forced to take responsibility for their own anti-social behaviour, but the truth is that - outside Hollywood films, such as The Omen - children are not born evil.
They are the products of their environment, and in modern Britain, we have got that environment disastrously wrong. Dogmatic feminists may not like me for saying this, but my role as a psychologist working with families has shown me that the fashionable, modernist determination to ignore the importance of motherhood has helped to create emotionally inadequate, bewildered and angry, young people who vent their distress in violence and abuse, or slide into depression and self-harm.
Children who have never known genuine, unconditional love, who have been brought up in a home without boundaries or discipline, who have no experience of nurturing relationships, who have been psychologically abandoned by their mother since their earliest years will invariably grow into emotionally broken adults.
From the early Victorian age until the late Sixties, rates of crime, including everything from murder to juvenile delinquency, remained remarkably stable.
"The gentleness of English civilisation is its most marked characteristic," wrote the great socialist author George Orwell at the height of the war - words that today seem utterly hollow.
It is no coincidence that the phenomenal increase in crime over the past 40 years has occurred alongside the triumph of feminist ideology, which has heralded the collapse of the traditional family, the destruction of the concept of motherhood, the obliteration of morality and an aggressive emphasis on careerism and consumerism rather than child-rearing.
Struggle
So-called liberation for women has left young mothers struggling desperately to balance life and home, and under so much pressure that they can no longer fulfil either role properly.
The focus on work has, of course, enabled many women - including myself - to enjoy fulfilling careers. But the pendulum has surely swung too far.
What is happening now is that, thanks to a mix of political and financial pressures, mothers are being forced into the career marketplace long before they are ready to leave their children - and before their children are ready to be left.
It is nothing short of grotesque that some women are going back into jobs just six weeks after giving birth, abandoning their offspring to the care of a stranger in a nursery or childcare centre.
A host of reputable scientific surveys show that this physical neglect of children by their own mothers is doing untold psychological and neurological damage. Babies are born with their brains only partially formed, and we now know that they need the direct stimulus of their mothers' attention to develop properly.
Bonding with a child is not just a matter of empathetic reassurance. It is also vital for the beneficial growth of a baby's brain cells and instinctive reflexes.
Infants' sensitivity to their environment is phenomenal. I recently watched with astonishment a film in which a newly-born baby could be seen imitating the movements of her mother.
If an infant is touched with love, its head gently stroked, its eyes gazed at adoringly, it will develop in its brain a template for reciprocal love. But if it is treated cruelly or abandoned, it will build a template for anger and suspicion.
When the monstrous regime of Ceausescu fell in Romania and the Western Press gained access to the country's orphanages, there was outrage at the appalling neglect the children had endured.
Subsequent scans revealed large neurological holes in these chil-dren's brains, directly caused by the lack of attention they had received in their short lives.
Yet it would be wrong to think such abuses are confined to a totalitarian state. They are happening in Britain today, thanks to our ultra-feminised culture.
Childcare for the under-threes has become one of the great growth industries in modern Britain, as women return to the workplace sooner and sooner after giving birth. But it is storing up untold damage for the future as the bonding process lies in ruins.
Loss of confidence
The worrying demise of motherhood is reflected in other ways. At the clinic I have set up, I meet parents who lack the most basic child-rearing skills. Some mothers, including those from educated, middle-class backgrounds, are so lacking in confidence that they ring up the doctor in the most trivial circumstances, describing, say, a verruca or a splinter as 'an emergency'.
The judgment that used to be handed down the generations or imbued by experience seems to have disappeared.
In my work, I see a great deal of maternal anger from women who cannot cope with the modern pressures of life or the chaos of their dysfunctional families.
This creates children who are psychologically damaged. Confronted with their mother's rage, they either fight back or retreat. In retreat, they never learn empathy, which fuels the rise in personality disorders.
This lack of familial stability is only compounded by the failure to establish boundaries of what is acceptable behaviour in a child. Too many parents are unwilling to provide nurturing discipline for their children.
This can be because they have swallowed some post-Sixties politically correct doctrine which holds that any form of discipline or punishment is wrong.
It can be because such parents feel guilty about being away from home and have taken up the spurious concept of 'quality time', in which over-indulgence becomes a substitute for genuine love and the discipline that goes with it.
Please don't misunderstand me. This is not an attack on women, who are these days placed in the impossible position of having to work harder than ever to help support their families, while also juggling their role as homemaker and principal care-giver.
It is simply a plea for us to reconsider the vital importance of parenting in creating a stable society.
Raising a child is hard work. It takes time and cannot be shoehorned into a few minutes at either end of the day. And ideally, it takes both a mother and a father.
But traditional fatherhood is disappearing as rapidly as motherhood. One of the most malign consequences of the social revolution since the late Sixties is the belief that fathers are utterly unnecessary in the child-rearing process.
So instead of having one loving, reliable, masculine figure in the home, children have to get used to a succession of fleeting boyfriends, lovers and stepfathers with whom they have no biological connection.
As a result, children have no understanding of the meaning of stable relationships, nor do they find it easy to accept authority.
Even more disturbingly, I'm afraid that this vast army of sexual acquaintances has led to the disturbing growth in child abuse.
We live in terror of predatory paedophiles snatching our children at random off the streets, but in reality 95 per cent of child victims know their assailant. This is a depressing picture, but there are changes that can be made to reverse the decline.
For a start, we need to accept that there is a genuine problem, rather than pretending we are living in some post-feminist paradise.
Recently, I spoke to one of the country's children's commissioners and asked him what was being done about the increasing number of children who are themselves guilty of sexual assaults on more vulnerable victims.
He denied there was a problem. Explaining that he preferred to use the term 'inappropriate relationships', he maintained that offending rates had not increased over the past ten years. Such attitudes are downright dangerous.
We could also give more support to schools and social services to run intervention programmes to steer potential young offenders away from crime before they are involved in anything serious.
We could take other measures such as encouraging mothers to stay in hospital for longer after they have given birth, so they avoid post-natal depression and can bond better with their children.
But by far the most important change would be to reverse the pressure on mothers to go back to work before their children have even reached the age of three.
The entire thrust of current state policy is to provide incentives for working mothers, through initiatives such as the New Deal, tax credits and childcare subsidies.
We should be moving in exactly the opposite direction, using the tax and benefits system to cherish motherhood and family life. If society is to recover, we need loving family relationships far more than working mothers.
We are sitting on a timebomb. Society has to change fundamentally and address its failings in order to save our future generations.
14 people have commented on this story so far. Tell us what you think below.
Here's a sample of the latest comments published. You can click view all to read all comments that readers have sent in.
It is unfortunate, but this topic is difficult to discuss without people viewing any objective discussion of the facts as a condemnation of their lifestyle. It is unfortunate that we live in socities that make it difficult to have one working parent and that value an individual's work contribution over their contribution to the family, but the bottom line is that children respond best to a parent as their primary caregiver. At least that is what various studies tell us.
- Phil C., Chicago, USA
Thank you for this interesting article. I am a stay-at-home, homeschooling, mother of 6. I have a wonderful husband who understands his role in helping raise our children. I am amazed at how well children grow up when they are in a stable loving environment from the time they are infants. My kids are very well behaved and relate well to other children and adults. They know basic manners and communicate well with everyone. They are happy and healthy. Thanks for getting the word out and supplying some professional expertise in this matter.
Motherhood and Fatherhood are JOBS and should be looked at as such.
- A. Bonnette, Warren, OH USA
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