An infant without an emotional bond with a caretaker cannot survive. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to know what language humans would speak if they were allowed to develop that language on their own without hearing any other. Would it be an ancient language, contemporary one, or that of the parents? He ordered nurses caring for a group of infants not to speak to them. Of course, prohibiting verbal engagement led the nurses to withdraw from all but essential physical care, there was no emotional interplay at all. The caretakers would otherwise have found it too difficult to maintain the silence and resist the infants seductive ability to capture their attention. What was the native tongue spoken by these children as they grew up? We will never know. They all died.
Rene Spitz observed a similar outcome in his classic studies. A group of children reared in an immaculately clean nursery in an unnamed South American country were compared with a similar cohort of youngsters raised by their own prison-incarcerated mothers. The former group had clean clothing and bedding and good food but lacked any emotional connection. Sorely overloaded with work, the nurses had no time to play, soothe, or cuddle their charges. They had only enough time to change, feed, and clean one infant before hurrying on to the next.
The prison-raised group had filthy surroundings, poor food, and more physical discomfort but plenty of emotional connection with their own mothers and other women in the prison. In measuring and photographing these two groups, it became painfully evident how rapidly they had diverged in growth and development. The nursery group at each major stage six, 12, and 18 months were cachectic and underdeveloped; these children failed to thrive. The prison-raised kids were robust and healthy.
A sickening, contemporary example of this same phenomenon was brought into our homes after the fall of the Soviet regime via TV footage of children in Romanian and Russian orphanages who lacked bonding with any caring attendants. These children were profoundly stunted in every way. Carlson and Earls showed that these orphanage children had severe neurological and endocrinological abnormalities that may prove irreversible. This kind of damage was also seen in monkeys raised in isolation. Nelson and Bloom demonstrated that these animals suffered disturbed behavior and neuroanatomical injury in the regions of the brain that are responsible for emotional regulation.
Harry Harlows early experiments proved how desperately infant monkeys needed to have contact comfort. They would preferentially opt for terrycloth-covered wire forms of mothers rather than cold, bare wire surrogates. This is remarkable because the bare-wired forms dispensed food. Both groups, however, showed severe damage, an inability to function in normal peer groups, difficulty mating, and, if they produced offspring, failure to nurture their infants.
Copyright (c) 2010 Sheldon Kardener
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