Hana "Nara"’s Reviews > The Emotionally Absent Mother: How to Recognize and Heal the Invisible Effects of Childhood Emotional Neglect > Status Update

The Good Mother helps the child assess what he or she can handle, what is maybe a little too much, and how to back off from that; she calibrates the task to the child’s abilities.

It was the expected life course for a woman to marry and have a family, whether this was her natural inclination or not. The result of this (then and now) is that women become mothers who are not really suited to the job. They would have been more comfortable doing something else, perhaps living a career life or being a social dilettante. Caring for children wasn’t “their thing.” Men could get away with this.

There is a felt difference for a child between the mother who is working two jobs and coming home exhausted and the mother who is busy talking on the phone, laughing with her friends. Then it becomes, “I’m too busy for you. You aren’t important to me.”

In the pairs of mothers and their adult children that I have seen, mothers who cared for their children out of obligation are then cared for in their elderly years by their adult children out of a similar obligation.

In essence, a baby of a dissociated woman may follow her into the state of dissociation, sometimes taking on the mother’s sense of wooden-ness and numbing.

Studies have shown that a mother’s satisfaction is a key variable in determining how well her children do. A mother who stays home because she is “supposed to,” even though it makes her depressed and cranky, is no asset.

You perhaps have heard of failure to thrive (FTT) syndrome, which was discovered years ago in orphanages. The babies whose bassinets were at the end of the line withered and died at a much higher rate than those near the front of the line, even though all were being fed.

To develop naturally, we need to grow at our own pace. In fact, forced
growth, pressured growth, is often distorted growth. To eventually grow
beyond childhood, we first need support for being a child.

Of course we need our parents to cheer us on and value our growing independence and mastery, but too often for the undermothered there has been more support for this side of development than for these innate characteristics of being a child. There is often more interest in our outgrowing early childhood needs than there is in meeting these needs.