They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life (Revised and Updated Edition) by Oliver James

Author:Oliver James [James, Oliver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Self-Help & Counselling, Psychology, Child Psychology, Health, Family & Lifestyle, Psychology & Psychiatry, Social & Developmental Psychology, Child & Developmental
ISBN: 0747584788
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

A short history of childhood relationships

As anybody who has read Charles Dickens knows, it was the norm for children to be maltreated, by modern standards, even as late as Victorian times. Indeed, for great swathes of the population throughout history, the maltreatment which causes Wobbling in 85 per cent of cases was common. Does that mean that for much of its history the world was largely populated by Wobblers? The answer appears to be that this was not only the most common pattern of attachment for much of the last ten thousand years, but, surprisingly enough, that it was actually the healthiest: Wobbling was the best way to be.

By my reckoning, there have been three eras in the history of attachments. In the first, starting when our species came into being perhaps some 3 million years ago, mothers were usually accessible and responsive because they had the time and resources. Societies consisted of small groups of between thirty and a hundred nomadic hunter-gatherers. The men hunted when food was needed and available, whilst the women picked leaves, nuts and berries to supplement this diet. When they had used up the available wildlife and garnered the edible plants they simply moved to a new area, population density being very low.

Under these conditions there is every reason to suppose that childcare was usually responsive, primarily administered by the mother, and therefore that the population mostly had secure attachments. Support for this view comes from observing our closest animal relatives, monkeys and apes, whose nomadic pattern of life is not dissimilar. They form intense relationships with their offspring, and the precise manner in which a monkey is related to in infancy determines its pattern of attachment, passed down generations. In the wild, secure attachments may be the norm.

Human societies which resembled primordial ones and were observed by anthropologists in South America, Africa and Asia during the twentieth century also suggest that security may have been common. A very readable account of one is found in Jean Liedloff’s bestselling book The Continuum Concept, which describes how the infant is with the mother at all times, whether at night in bed or strapped to her during the day. Older offspring and relatives are available in abundance to help out with other children.

There is no sure scientific method to know whether such a portrait of our distant past is correct, but there is abundant evidence that from about 10,000 BC, in what I consider the second attachment era, life for infants and toddlers took a turn for the worse. Humans began to settle permanently in villages and to cultivate crops and husband livestock. Food surpluses from successful farming created the possibility of barter, of specialized trades (fisherman, basket weaver, blacksmith) and of money. Villages became towns, towns became cities and, as populations grew, resources became more scarce. Social classes and castes arose, with rich and poor, superior and inferior, powerful and powerless. Many mothers did not have the time, health or energy to devote to childcare

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