Talk:Monotropy
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Please note Rutter's reference to fathers with the exclamation mark at the end!KingsleyMiller (talk) 10:30, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Higher Education: Don's delight Dr Raj Persaud on Maternal Deprivation Reassessed -the book that changed his life
The Guardian (Manchester); Jan 21, 1997; DR RAJ PERSAUD; p. 002
THE book which had the most profound impact on all our lives is often a publication we may not even be aware of - for it must be the literature which our parents consumed as we grew up - anxiously seeking guidance on how to bring up sane children.
The child psychologist your parents religiously followed in print has, decades later, been proved entirely wrong! Even if our parents did not read popular tomes such as John Bowlby's 'Can I leave my baby?', published in 1958, this eminent British psychoanalyst shaped the way a generation of parents related to their offspring.
He was interpreted as insisting that continuity and closeness of maternal care were the only certain ways of preventing adolescent and adult psychological disturbance. The inevitable conclusion was that mothers should not go out to work. All mothers who wanted a career or a life outside of childcare worried about comments like Bowlby's: 'Mother-love in infancy and childhood is as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health.' Then came the book which argued the primary care-giver need not be the mother, nor were her absences always hazardous - Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, published in 1972 by Sir Michael Rutter, Professor of Child Psychiatry at London University's Institute of Psychiatry. It is difficult for us to recall, before Putter's book, what a struggle it was for women to break free from the notion that spending some time away from their children inevitably resulted in 'deprivation'.
My mother left us for a year to finish her PhD in Britain, when my brother and I were both under 10. It is Putter's book which ensured she never felt guilty for temporarily leaving us, and which ensures that, today, my wife continues to pursue her career as an eye-surgeon, as well as having children. By challenging what we believe constitutes good parenting. Maternal Deprivation Reassessed has changed not just my life, but all our lives.
Dr Raj Persaud is consultant psychiatrist at The Maudsley Postgraduate Psychiatric Teaching Hospital, University of London.
To order any book mentioned in Guardian Education, call 0500 600102
KingsleyMiller (talk) 08:53, 26 April 2008 (UTC)
