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from Parenting & Family
Is This Diversity, Or Tragedy?
Children as Victims of their Parents' Choices
By Dale O'Leary
Buying Mother
A child was created by surrogate motherhood for two homosexual
men who had decided they wanted to have a family. "Daddy" and
his partner Don, twenty years younger, had arranged an artificial
insemination with a woman who agreed to reliquish her parental
rights in exchange for health care and financial compensation.
Researcher Barbara Eisold describes some of the child's trauma in
an article entitled "Recreating Mother." (1).
Lacking a mother of his own, the child, Nick, was cared for by
a hired nanny. He began attending school when he was only two.
When he was 2 1/2, the nanny was abruptly fired and replaced. The
replacement was also fired, and a third nanny hired. Then the men
adopted a second child.
At age 4 1/2, Nick began acting out and was sent to a female
child psychologist--the fifth mother-substitute hired by his
fathers. Nick lived in a world where "mommies" were hired and fired, so
he fantasized about buying a new mother.
The therapist described his desperate struggle to understand
family relationships. "Nick was often beside himself with anxiety.
He wanted desperately to be liked by other children and by
[his teacher]. He had trouble waiting, and was not certain about
what would make him likable."
The Evidence: Mother-Hunger May Be Innate
Eisold asks: "How do we explain why this child, the son of a
male couple, seemed to need to construct a woman -- "Mother" --
with whom he could play the role of a loving boy/man? How did such
an idea enter his mind? What inspired his intensity on the subject?"
And she wondered how the boy's psychological construction of
the missing, longed-for mother affected his gender-identity
development.
Eisold sees some normal, programmed developmental forces at work
in a boy who has no mother: if he has none, he will need to
make one. This must be part of what it means to be human:
children need both mothers and fathers.
Mother-Hunger is Seen by Deconstructionists as
"Gender Bias" Created by Society
But her article is critiqued in the same journal by Karen
Saakvitne (2), who insists Eisold is applying cultural biases about
gender, sexual orientation, attachment, and separation to this
child's longing for a mother. Saakvitne sees the child's need for
a mother, and his need to make sense of the world he has been
forced to live in, as something imposed on him by a society filled
with mere assumptions and biases about gender. She faults Eisold
for accepting those biases.
Although the social-constructionist sees gender as something
created by society, a great body of evidence reveals that children
do best in homes with both mothers and fathers. Such exposure
helps the child to fully develop his own sexual identity and to relate
to persons of both sexes in the real world. New research on the way
in which the brain functions makes clear that this need for a
close relationship with persons of both sexes is not a mere social
preference, but a response to the biological imperative (3).
Mom and Dad Are Not Interchangeable
Henry Biller has studied parent-child interaction and compared
his findings with other work in the field (4). He says:
Differences between the mother and father can be very
stimulating to the infant, even those that might appear quite
superficial to the adult. Even if the father and mother
behave in generally similar ways, they provide contrasting images
for the infant. The father is usually larger than the mother,
his voice is deeper, his clothes are not the same, and he
moves and reacts differently...The infant also learns that
different people can be expected to fulfill different needs. For
example, the infant may prefer the mother when hungry or tired, and the father when
seeking stimulation of more active play.
The infant who receives verbal as well as physical
stimulation from both mother and father profits from
the experience...Mothers and fathers, in addition to having
distinctive sounding voices,have different verbal styles
when communicating to infants and children as well as to
other adults. Such differences provide the infant with an
important source of stimulation and learning (p. 12).
Because some of my initial findings suggested that father
absence during the first few years of life might inhibit
certain aspects of the child's development, I began to observe
more closely parent-infant relationships in various types of
two-parent families. I discovered that when they are involved
with infants, father tend to be more physically active with
them than mothers are, playing more vigorously. This seems to
be not only because fathers may be less concerned with
their children's fragility, especially if they have sons, but
also because they themselves
have more of a need for physically stimulating activities
(p. 12).
It was also apparent that infants with involved fathers
formed strong paternal attachments--and were usually at a
developmental advantage, compared to those who had close
relationships only with their mothers...
Involved fathers are more likely to stimulate the infant
to explore and investigate new objects, whereas mothers tend
to engage their infants in relatively prestructured and
predictable activities (p. 13).
In the second year of life, the boys began to demonstrate
more interest in interaction with their fathers, although the
girls did not display any consistent preferences.
In fact, by the end of the second year, all except one of the boys seemed
to have a stronger paternal than maternal attachment
[emphasis added]...(p. 14).
Infants who have two positively involved parents tend to
be more curious and eager to explore than those who do not have
a close relationship with their fathers... Well-fathered
infants are more secure and trusting in branching out in their
explorations, and they may be
somewhat more advanced in crawling, climbing and
manipulating objects (p. 15).
Advocates of gay marriage and adoption have admitted that it
may be better for a child to have two parents than one, but argue that
the sex of the two parents is irrelevant--two men or two women,
they say, are just as good (or better) than opposite-sexed parents.
But Biller discusses research which appears to refute that claim,
in which teenage unwed mothers were studied:
Developmental psychology researcher Norma Radin and
her colleagues(Radin, Oyserman, and Benn, 1991) have
collected especially provocative evidence concerning the special
significance of paternal involvement for infants and
toddlers. They studied grandparent/ grandchild relationships in
predominantly working-class households in which adolescent
unwed mothers were living with one or both of their parents.
Overall, young children who had positively involved
grandfathers displayed more competent behavior than those
with relatively uninvolved grandfathers or absent
grandfathers. Although other researchers
have sometimes noted the contribution of the grandmother
to the development of the child living in a single-mother
family, Radin reported no clear-cut
impact, suggesting a redundancy between the two forms of
maternal influence [italics added].
On the other hand, the grandfather's nurturance seemed to
contribute in several ways to the young child's adaptability.
His observed nurturance was associated with infants being
more responsive to maternal requests, and with the cognitive
competence of two-year-olds. Furthermore, relatively high
grandfather involvement in child care was related to observations
of less fear, anger and distress being displayed by
one-year-olds, especially boys (Biller 1993).
Removed from their fathers, it seems evident that children suffer.
Although some of that suffering will be observed by researchers
in childhood, we might speculate that more suffering will be seen
in an interior sense of loss that will hamper the person's ability
to form secure and intimate attachments in adulthood.
References:
(1) Eisold, B., 1998, "Recreating mother: The consolidation of
'heterosexual' gender identification in the young son of
homosexual men," American J. of Orthopsychiatry
68,3:433-442.
(2) Saakvitne, K., 1998, "Recreating mother: A commentary on
the case analysis," American J. of Orthopsychiatry
68,3:443-446.
(3) Saakvitne, K., 1998, "Recreating mother: A commentary on
the case analysis," American J. of Orthopsychiatry
68,3:443-446.
(4) Biller, H. (1993) Fathers and Families: Paternal Factors
in Child Development, Westport, CT: Auburn House.
Updated: 2 September 2008
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