Maternal Love

Woman holding her child in her arms

The mother love is the attachment felt by a mother for her or her children. This feeling is often considered the engine of the attentions of the mother ensuring the physical and moral protection, and education of its children. Maternal love has raised questions about its nature, instinctive nature and its variability in different societies; questions of scientists and historians have attempted to respond with different approaches.

Scientific Approach

Mother Bedouin and his child

Because love is not a scientific concept, it is preferable to speak of maternal attachment rather than maternal love, without that real differences exist between what are these two names.

Scientists, primarily in the areas of medical research (especially neurobiology ) and ethology , studied and still studying the maternal bond, its origins, and its terms by recording the behavior of metabolism , and brain activity of mothers in situations involving their relationship with their child, as part of study protocols. It follows from these studies and empirical biological evidence of a particular attachment to the mother towards her child, for example to enable it to meet the instinctive needs of her infant.

Breastfeeding

The influence of a hormone, oxytocin , in the genesis of maternal behaviors, has been updated in several studies on humans and other mammals (the structure of oxytocin is the same in all mammals) This supports the theory of instinctiveness of these behaviors. A major vehicle of maternal bonding and its study is thus breastfeeding has been shown that this action may seem quite common and natural is in fact the theater complex psychological and biological processes mediated by this hormone to exact properties are still poorly understood. We know for example that during feeding, when the baby releases the nipple, a large dose of oxytocin is secreted by the hypothalamus which allows, thanks to the vasoconstrictor effects of this molecule, easier extraction of milk breast, but oxytocin also has an important action on the psychological mechanisms related to confidence, calm and therefore takes an important place in the affection of a mother to her child.

Historical Approaches

In 1960, in his book The Child and Family Life under the Ancien Regime, Philippe Aries initiates an approach history of childhood. Since then, French studies have been refined, particularly by using accurate records of births , baptisms , deaths , offered for nurses , and helped rebuild family compositions and manners, thanks to the registers of parishes held since at least the ^sixteenth century, but also data Literary and iconographic , official or private correspondence between officials of the State , public comments and legal texts and other sources of information for historians .

For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth ^century, many children of the nobility and gentry, and in all social strata in urban areas, were sent to nurse away from their parents and were treated with some negligence by the nurses "mercenaries", which increased the mortality significantly, so that some state officials, worried about the health and number of future workers, could write that parents were less concerned about their children than the health of their horses. In this context, mothers did not seem opposed to these treatments, no more sentimental than fathers. Of course, these comments are never more than generalities about the overwhelming majority of those surveyed .

In the eighteenth ^century began a decline in infant mortality, the reasons are not clearly identified. Perhaps a better hygiene and better food given to children, thanks to advances in medicine and the advice given by doctors about which we know they were heard (the world acquires medical authority in this field than in the ^nineteenth century). Perhaps greater attention given by parents, without the explanation of this change of attitude does unanimity among historians. This is the nineteenth ^century that the use of wet nurses was no longer fashionable, however, and the expressions of maternal love became widespread (the sentimental role of fathers in general seem much different) .

In light of these data, Philippe Aries , followed by Edward Shorter and Elisabeth Badinter , among others, believe that mother love is a feeling modern, socially constructed with the assistance of the State to respond to multiple interests. Elisabeth Badinter, a feminist, draws various conclusions such as the need to exonerate women, especially mothers, about the inadequacy of their true feelings with the idealized maternal love as generally presented, Badinter believes that women are not naturally more likely than the man of love and sacrifice his child for him, also in the light of recent studies ( XX ^century ) compared the behavior of fathers and mothers .

Other historians believe that the observed behavior "have their rationality and Quotes

• "The maternal instinct is divinely animal. The mother is no longer a woman, she is female. " Victor Hugo , Four and ninety-three
• "There is in the maternal feeling indescribable vastness that can not take anything away from other diseases. " Honore de Balzac , Memory Two Brides
• "Disposing and guilt for women, the myth of maternal instinct proved devastating for children, and especially for the son. "Elisabeth Badinter, XY - male identity

Notes

Bibliography

• History of childhood in the site (fee) of the Encyclopdia Universalis , article by Marie-France Morel.
• Elisabeth Badinter, L'Amour en plus: the story of maternal love ( ^seventeenth to the ^twentieth century ), 1980 ( ISBN 2253029440 ) .

External Links

• "My pregnancy, but not my baby" section of the daily Le Monde dated 30 June 2009.

• Women Portal

Leave a Reply