Maternal deprivation theory Flashcards
What was the maternal deprivation theory?
Bowlby argued that when children are deprived of an attachment figure during the critical period they suffer psychological damage.
What is deprivation?
When a child doesn’t have an attachment figure.
Or when a child is separated from their attachment figure during the critical period.
What are the symptoms of children who have suffered maternal deprivation?
Impaired cognitive development- low IQ, poor language and attention.
Impaired emotional development- Difficulty forming relationships and controlling emotions in the future.
Impaired behavioural development- Delinquency
What are the three stages a child goes through when they are deprived from a caregiver in the maternal deprivation hypothesis?
Protest- They become angry about being abandoned by their caregiver.
Despair- Children become sad and refuse to be comforted.
Detachment- Children reject their main caregiver when reunited with them.
What did Rutter state about privation and deprivation?
He argued that there was a distinction between deprivation and privation when it comes to an attachment figure.
He claimed that privation caused far more serious long term effects than deprivation.
What is privation?
When a child never experienced an attachment bond to begin with.
Studies supporting MD theory: bowlby and Robertson.
Conducted a case study on a little boy called John. He was separated from his mother for 9 days while she was in hospital.
They found that John experienced the three stages of (protest, despair, detachment)
Months later John still wouldn’t display affection to his mother, leading Bowlby to conclude that the separation had lasting long-term negative effects on John.
Evaluation of Bowlby and Robertson’s study.
- Because it is a case study we can’t be sure that the results will generalise to other children.
- Confounding variables may have affected John’s behaviour- other children in the nursery bullied him.
This means that we can’t establish a causal relationship between separation and distress.
Studies supporting the MD theory: 44 thieves.
Bowlby conducted a set of interviews with children in his clinic, comparing 44 thieves to a control group of 44 children who weren’t criminals.
Bowlby found that 14 of the 44 thieves were affectionless psychopaths and 12 of these had experienced prolonged separation from their mothers in the first 2 years of their life.
Compared to only 5% in the control group.
Only 2 ppts of the control group had experienced separation.
Bowlby concluded that early separation/deprivation caused affectionless psychopaths.
Evaluation of the 44 thieves study.
- Interviews may be unreliable and lack objectivity. Because they relied on the teenagers having an accurate memory of their early childhood.
- Participants may have been influenced by investigator effects which could make them respond to demand characteristics .
- The study lacked control over important extraneous variables that could have led the teenagers into a life of crime e.g. family conflict.
Evaluation of Bowlby’s maternal deprivation theory.
- His theory says that the effects of deprivation are irreversible. However klouchova conducted a case study on a pair of twins who experienced severe deprivation and abuse until the age of 7.
The twins recovered. This indicated that the effect of deprivation can be reversed. - when children experience long-term deprivation, there are usually other confounding variables that could cause the psychological damage. ( poverty and abuse)- This makes it hard to establish a causal relationship between deprivation and psychological damage.
- Rutter argued that Bowlby’s theory of maternal derivation is oversimplified and doesn’t explain that privation has more serious long-term effects than deprivation.
Studies on the effects of privation- Hodgers and Tizard
Carried out a natural experiment involving 65 institutionalised children.
They found that the children who experienced privation and remained in the institution or were returned to their biological parents, experienced impaired emotional development.
but the children who were adopted early didn’t develop psychological damage.
this suggests that the negative effects of privation can be reversed.
Studies on the effects of privation- Romanian orphan study.
Rutter conducted a longitudinal natural experiment comparing Romanian orphans to British orphans. All of whome had been adopted by British families.
Rutter found that the British children showed good emotional and cognitive development even if they were adopted after 6 months.
The Romanian orphans who were adopted before they were 6 months old showed good emotional development. But the Romanian orphans who were adopted after 6 months had long-term emotional and cognitive impairment.
Rutter concluded that the effects of privation can be reserved, even if the privation is severe, so long the children are taken into loving homes from a young age.
The longer the children experience privation, the worse their long-term outcomes are.
Evaluation of Rutter’s research.
- Attrition in longitudinal studies
- Families might have displayed social desirability bias in their interviews. - Could mean that Rutter underestimated the effects of privation.
- Children were not randomly allocated to families, meaning that the more sociable children were adopted.
What are the three main attachment styles that children show?
Secure
Insecure avoidant
Insecure resistant
