IN DEFENCE OF MOTHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 210, 2 July 1943, Page 14

IN DEFENCE OF

MOTHERS

By One Who Isnt

HEN guns are blazing we don’t hear crackers. So when the bombs were exploding in Pearl Harbour no one noticed that something was happening in a printing house in Binghampton, N.Y., that would in due course send ripples round the world. Or almost no one. If the New Zealand Country Library Service had not heard something the rest of us would have slept on too. But there were ears to the ground in the Library; or it may have been eyes on the sky or a nose tilted into the wind. I don’t know how they become aware of world-shaking books; all I know is that Dr. Leo Kanner’s "In Defence of Mothers: or How to Bring up Children in Spite of the More Zealous Psychologists" left the Vail-Ballou Press the week of Pearl Harbour, and reached New Zealand within six months. Now anyone who applies through the right channels may get it-once the twenty thousand other applicants who have applied first have been served. In short, it is a book that every independent parent should read; but since so few will get a chance of reading it before they are grandparents at least, here are a few samples. to go on with:

OU have heard of those mothers who spend their time trying to prevent something in their child-ren-colds, malnutrition, capriciousness, walking on wet grass. Dr. Kanner has heard of them too: "You have heard of the many mothers who must prevent constipation. They go after the bowels with laxatives and special diets from above, with suppositories and enemas from below. Fierce battles are fought daily. The child’s stools are watched with sacerdotal solemnity. The attention of a whole

family converges on a chamber pot. And what is the result? The intestines never get a chance to develop their own regular routine. Constipation is forced upon them by the methods intended to avert it." That might have been written at Rawene. And take this as a picture of a home in which everybody rules but father: "Picture, if you can, Home Sweet Home with its inhabitants engaged in a war to the finish between a little bully and oné or more big bullies. No strategy is wasted in that battle. The belligerents line up their allies, try to win them over to their side. The enfant terrible uses heavy artillery. He

can yell, vomit, thrust himself on. the floor, upset his glass of milk, refuse entry to his food at one end and exit to his bowel contents at the other end. The elders, known for their nice company manners, forget them in the heat of battle. They parry every blow. They hit, threaten, lock in the closet, pour food into one end and enemas into the other. The contestants have one weapon in common; their lungs. It is a case of: I

holler, you — holler; he, she or it hollers; we holler; you holler; they holler. You may add the past and future tenses. But the walls of Jericho dc not collapse from all the noise. Neither party ever wins this exquisite struggle =? hegemony. an all-round purvival of the fits. Never mind what becomes of those youngsters in the future. Some emerge unscathed. Others do not. But think of the turmoil,

hubbub, and silly antics in an otherwise civilised home! "| Don’t Believe It!" Have you ever met one, of those mothers who say, "Of course I don’t believe it, but still . . ." and then look anxiously into space? The baby has been born with a caul, or with teeth; it has cut its teeth wide apart; it has seen itself in the mirror. The mother refuses to believe that it will therefore be lucky or unlucky or become a great traveller. It is all nonsense, she keeps telling you, all superstition. But . .. Well, what is Dr. Kanner’s "but"? "But Nature’s proverbial horror of a vacuum has provided substitutes. ew superstitions have taken the place of the old. These would have no truck with folklore. They claim nobler parentage. They consider and introduce themselves as the offspring of science... "Sometimes this sort of fallacy has even crept into reputable scientific literature. The Germans, who of late have been prolific in the superstitious exploitation of heredity for wicked political purposes, have outdone everybody else in this respect. A German psychologist bas insisted on the inheritance of fear! Can’t you just visualise the little chomosomes king in their pants?" The Fatal Years And you know, too, about those fatal years which, when you reach them, dom-

inate you for the rest of your lifethe years beyond which effort is useless? If you have not been "too old at forty" you have certainly been too far gone in sin at some younger age — smoking or eating chocolates or biting your nails or drinking ginger beer-to have had any hope of escape. Well, Dr. Kanner has heard of you, too: "The belief that some one item fixes a person’s lot in life for him is one of the things which the old and new superstitions have in common. What are growth, training, ability, opportunity, the thousand and one big and little experiences as compared with a forbear’s foibles, a trivial incident during the mother’s pregnancy, or the position of the planets at the hour of birth? Heredity,

pre-natal influences, constellations are relied upon to fix the course of events from the beginning. And if they don’t do the trick, there are many other ‘fixers’ to fall back on. Age is one of those fixers. The yarn runs as follows: when a child reaches the age of six, seven, eight or nine years (pick your own number; there are different versions), then his habits are fixed for better or for worse. There is nothing you can do about

it afterwards. Nobody knows when, where and why this superstition made its first appearance. It is of fairly recent vintage. It likes to present itself as a quotation from some book or article on child rearing. But to date biblioraphic research has ailed to verify this claim." Billy’s Complaint And if you were a doctor and were consulted by Mrs. Jones, what disease

would you detect in Billy? Here are the symptoms: "The Jones family sits down to a quiet meal. Soup is served. Billy declares, ‘I don’t want any soup.’ Father says sharply, ‘Are you fussing about your food again?’ Mother pleads, tenderly. ‘Now be a good boy Billy, and eat your soup. You want to grow up and be a strong man, don’t you?’ Billy is in a bargaining mood. ‘If I eat my soup, do I have to eat my carrots, too?’ Mother is a diplomat. ‘We'll see about that later. Now eat your soup.’ Billy seemingly yields. He cautiously dips the tip of his tongue into the spoon and withdraws it quickly with an expression as if he had tasted the strongest brand of vinegar in existence. Mother tries another form of strategy. She invites Billy to a speed contest, to see who will finish the soup first. After two spoonfuls, Billy announces that he is all filled up. Mother remembers previous tactics. Would her darling have one more spoon for his mother? Billy obliges... Now just one more for daddy? And one for Cousin’ George? No, he won’t take one for Cousin George. So Mother starts telling him a story. Then she preceiens him an ice-cream cone. Meanwhile ather has lost his patience and becomes irritable. Mother gives up in despair. The same procedure begins all over again as the next course appears on the table.’ No matter what you think,’ Billy’s complaint is anorexia-food capricious(Continued on next page)

An American Expert Cuts Loose |

(Continued from previous page) ness. His mother has read it in a book, and Mother always knows best. Now she is worried: "There thust be some cause for Billy’s poor appetite. And that cause must be hidden somewhere in his body. Could it be that his stomach is too small to accommodate even a little bit of food? Is it possible that even. that miniature stomach has gone on shrinking from lack of occupation? Is there wrong with his glands? Mother does not exactly know which glands, but she knows that ‘the glands’ have been blamed for pat o> rage from Hitler’s moustache to her t sister’s prodigious circumference." Wouldn't you be worried if your darling would not take one spoonful more for you, or for his daddy, or for Santa

Claus, or for Little Red Riding Hood, or even for Mr. Churchill? "Stories are told, the piano is played, bells are rung, Father makes funny faces, Mother wrings her hands in desperation, while Auntie advises to leave the child alone. Special food is prepared in accordance with the child’s demands. But all these methods of appeasement are futile. Our hero whines, screams, fights, criticises each dish, extorts promises and nickels, gags, vomits, or acts as if he were going to vomit, and thoroughly enjoys the whole performance." But Dr. Kanner is not worried. He is

ribald: "Haven’t you ever left some food on the late in a restaurant? How would you have if the waiter had urged you to finish it, to take just one more bite for the pro-prietor,-one for the chef, and one for the love o’ Mike? Think of that when next you want to force your child to eat his daily bread." Touches and Verges As he proceeds he becomes more ri-bald-almost rude: "An over-solicitous parent usually has a diagnosis for every little complaint. But she does not even need an _ honest-to-goodness diagnosis. Medical slang has supplied her with touches and verges. A touch, according to the best-informed dictionaries, is a ‘light attack, as of a disease’; being ‘on the verge’ means being almost but not quite there. What if the doctor has assured the mother that Johnny, does not have bronchitis, pneumonia, or rheumatism? Well, then, he has a touch of bronchitis, pneumonia or rheumatism. The family worries as much about the touch as it would about the real thing. There is even a story about a woman who entered a physician’s office wondering whether she had a touch of pregnancy. If it isn’t'a touch, it’s a verge. Betty isn’t breaking down, thank Heaven! But things are bad enough. Poor Betty is on the verge of a breakdown. Physicians ought to broadcast at least three times every day that there are no such things as touches and verges."

But so far you have.heard nothing. Until you read what Dr. Kanner has to say about the Ego, and the Id, and the Super-ego, and the G.G.U., you don’t know how far an American psychologist can go. Listen: "The individual Unconscious has His roots in the still greater collective, universal Unconscious. When certain biologic occurrences contrive to usher a new human life into uterine being, his private Unconscious splits itself off from the Great Mass and joins Himself to the baby-to-be, staying with him until death do them part..Thus, and thus only, can it be explained why the students of the Unconscious find the same kind of symbolism at work in the minds of the Bronxians, the Harlan Countians, the Lapps, the Ainus, and the Zulus. Thus only can

you fathom the reason why people the world over say, ‘God bless youl’ to their sneezing buddies." Of course Homo Simplex knows nothing of these mysteries, "The ignorant fellow, not even suspecting the Great Presence within him, imagines that he makes his choices and decisions. He does not know that the Great God _ Unconsciousness (G.G.U.) from the depths of mental thicket, chooses and decides for him,. causes him to remember and forget, guides his pen when he writes, is responsible for his puns, selects his mate, determines whether he should prefer vanilla or

chocolate ice cream. If he makes a wrong choice it is because of the Id, the villain in the plot, "a notoriously greedy pleasure seeker, representing the instinctive drives." And our only defence against the Id is the Superego: ‘Like most heroes, the Superego is stern and forbidding. He stands for no mischief. He checks the doings of the Id. He is, to quote one who knows, ‘the highest mental evolution attainable by man, and consists of a precipitate of all prohibitions and inhibitions, all the rules of conduct which are impressed on the child by his parents and by parental substitutes.’ " In short, we have come now to psychoanalysis, and if you want to know what psycho-analysis is, according to Dr.

Leo Kanner, you will not find out on this page. If you find out from Dr. Kanner himself, well and good. But it is to be hoped that you are tough, and that laughing does not hurt you,