Love at Goon Park (31 page)

It seems that the swish and swing of parent rocking baby, parent carrying baby, is needed to induce normal development. It's comparable to the way a little healthy stress pushes the brain to grow appropriately. Motion nudges the nervous system. It's forced, again, to respond to the body's sudden instability. The nerves settle into a kind of discipline, moving the baby's body when it needs to be moved and—equally important—holding it still when stillness is required. Those responsive nerves adjust the baby's balance. They send hands gripping tightly if mother almost drops him, arms flailing outward if the infant feels off balance. The mother (or father or caretaker) may not think of herself as helping the baby while she busily hustles the child around on errands. But she is. Without such movements, the nerves aren't so pushed into making the needed connections. On multiple levels, it seems, the developing nervous system craves stimulation.

Left alone, the infant's body itself will compensate for stillness with a kind of self-stimulation. Thus the baby monkey, alone with his
statue mother, has only himself to provide the necessary activity. Perhaps then, so the theory goes, it's a lack of motion that induces the rocking and the odd flapping of hands seen in the little monkeys raised with a cloth mom. The same self-directed behaviors are called “stereotypies” in children suffering from disorders such as autism. Those behaviors, too, seem to be linked to some stumble or unmet need in the developing nervous system. There are clearly other possibilities, obvious genetic ones, to induce such a stumble. Still, early research—such as Mason and Berkson's—and later research both suggest that even a little baby-rocking can be a very good thing and that the old rocking chair may be something that a doctor should prescribe.

At least, that was what Mason and Berkson started to consider as they watched their little monkeys respond happily to their restless surrogate mother. They also considered other, equally compelling possibilities. “It was a beautiful study but it was confounded by one thing,” Berkson says now. “As this surrogate mother moved around the cage, the baby would swing and jump and do all sorts of activities that the others didn't do.” A baby who had a statue-like mother could sometimes resemble a statue himself, but that didn't happen if the surrogates provided some action. Instead of just clinging and holding still, the babies seemed to respond, almost joyfully, by becoming active themselves.

The study thus leads to a circular kind of thought process. If motion is needed early in life to wire the nervous system correctly, who is the critical actor? Is it the mother, rocking the child? Or is it the child, moving in response to the mother's pacing and swinging? Or does it matter which? Perhaps, once again, this is all about interaction—motion by the mother induces responsive motion in the child. Bill Mason, now at UC-Davis, thinks it was the unexpected back-and-forth relationship that encouraged more healthy development in the little monkeys: “I've come to realize that the mobile surrogate was more like a real monkey than we had expected.” Mason suspects that just the extra wiggle “provided a
limited simulation of social interaction, which the stationary surrogate did not.”

It wasn't just that the mobile surrogate wobbled here and there around the cage; it was that the baby never knew
how
it was going to wobble. The mother might swing left and right, back and forth. That made the surrogate an unexpected kind of companion after all, and gave the element of surprise in mothering that Mason thought mattered. The swinging surrogate could withdraw without warning; it could swing round without warning and gently bop the infant on the head; its comings and goings required attention and adjustment. The monkeys could space out with cloth mom; she wasn't going anywhere at any time. Cloth mom was completely predictable. You didn't have to think about what she might do or how best to approach her. More or less, you could climb her the way you climbed a tree. But the mobile surrogate required strategy from the baby monkeys. They had to pay attention to jump on and receive a little contact comfort. They chased, pounced, wrestled. She encouraged their interest in having fun by being fun. Rough-and-tumble play was about three times more frequent in monkeys whose mother was mobile than in those living with the cloth mom. Mason and Berkson hadn't expected their traveling parent to be quite so interesting, but, as Mason said, “We had unwittingly created a social substitute.”

Of course, we all hope for more in childhood than the mechanics of good mothering. A warm wobbly stuffed dummy is hardly anyone's ideal of a mother. But what the mobile surrogate told Mason, at least, was that even a whisper of social interaction makes a difference when you happen to belong, as rhesus macaques do, and as we do, to a very social species. Evolution has not left us hopelessly vulnerable to the indifferent parent, the minimal mechanical mother. That a baby monkey can adapt relatively well to a swinging stuffed pillow of a mother is a reminder that we are designed for survival. We can, if need be, get by with remarkably little from the parent we have. Of course, we may only just get by.

Later, Mason would look further at the ways that a baby monkey can spin a social support network out of fragile threads. He came up with a wildly innovative, some also say peculiar, experiment.

It involved baby monkeys, hobbyhorses on wheels, and dogs. After all, dogs are also a social species and they and baby monkeys get along just fine in a buddy kind of way. They'll play together, sleep together, groom each other. But a female dog, caged with a small monkey, does not act in an especially protective way. The dog doesn't come running to a wail of monkey distress or break out in primate maternal behaviors. Mason calls dogs and monkeys “generalized” companions. His term is basically a scientific way of saying that dogs and monkeys can be friends. Still, a friend, even a shaggy member of another species, must be a whole lot better as a cage mate than a roll of terry cloth with a croquet-ball head. Friendship, by definition, is a give-and-take relationship. Mason decided to compare dog-raised monkeys with monkeys raised by an inanimate surrogate. But he still wanted something better than a plain old stationary cloth mom, and this led to the plastic hobbyhorses. They moved, or at least they rolled; and they were available for clinging. On each horse Mason carefully placed a softly padded saddle.

Six baby monkeys were placed with dogs; six with hobbyhorses. All the monkeys showed visible affection for their companions. They all grew up into competent animals. But they were very different in some very important ways. Mason watched these monkeys for four years, even after they had been moved into a bigger colony. Over and over, he found that the dog-raised monkeys were more engaged with other animals and more interested in the rest of the world.

In one test, he put the monkeys into a box with peepholes in the side. It was not like a Butler box. The monkeys didn't have to do anything to see out. There were peepholes, open and available for the looking. The animals just had to be interested in the possibilities outside. If they did put their eyes up to the peepholes, they'd see a picture. The dog-raised monkeys were simply fascinated by the chance to see something new. If Mason changed the picture, they would
crowd the peephole and curiously study the differences. The other monkeys tended to hang back. They were a little nervous, a little uncertain about that outer world. If Mason gave the animals a puzzle to solve, the same pattern developed. It was the dog-befriended animals that exuberantly tackled the problem. The monkeys raised with the hobbyhorses tended to quit if the puzzle was too difficult. It worried them. They'd go back and comfort themselves by holding onto their hobbyhorse again.

The difference, Mason argues, is that wonderful underrated opportunity to interact heartily with your companion: fight, play, share food, hog the bed space—even the shoving match matters, the constant back and forth as one player influences the other. “Stationary surrogates and hobbyhorses surely provide few opportunities for the developing individual to experience the fact that his behavior has effects on the environment,” Mason says. Maybe more important, if you successfully snag the last piece of cake, if your bedmate gives you that extra inch or so of space, you learn that you can, sometimes, exert control over your environment. “Inert mother substitutes make no demands, occasion no surprises,” as Mason says, and thus teach us nothing about managing our surroundings and, occasionally, ourselves. You need not pay attention to them, but it is in paying attention to others that we acquire social skills, learn the “fabric of social interaction.”

Harry also came to realize that a cloth mother's impenetrably passive nature made her a hopeless parent. She might be as cuddly as a fleece, but fluffy availability was never going to be enough. And it wasn't just that cloth mom didn't hug back. It was all the other things she didn't do: She didn't teach, direct, or steer the baby toward others. From cloth mom, the baby really learned more isolation, separation from others. “Growing up to be a monkey is an intricate process involving both ties of feeling toward other monkeys and the learning of monkey behavior patterns,” Harry said in a newspaper interview. Real living breathing mothers, he added, were not yet dispensable. Not for monkeys—or for their human cousins.

Because we are social animals, it seems that one companion serves to connect us with another. And it's worth remembering that rhesus macaques are definitively social animals. In the wild, or in cages that are large enough, they spend their lives in big, tumbling, interactive troops. They play games, they schmooze each other, they groom each other. The females help care for each other's children; the males plot and form alliances, triumph together and sulk together, according to the results. A troop is strictly structured, organized by hierarchy, by social awareness, by street smarts about who's a friend and whose back really, really needs to be scratched.

By comparison, surrogate-reared animals are like alien monkeys from the planet nowhere. The cloth-mother-raised babies didn't engage in any of that all-important schmoozing. They didn't play with other monkeys; they didn't swing into the usual spring mating season. They had no idea what to do with other monkeys—as friends, as enemies, as potential mates, as casual companions. No one had showed them the social ropes and they simply couldn't find them without help. “The surrogate mother can meet the infant monkey's need for an object of affection,” Harry said. “But it cannot teach the infant to groom itself or others, as the real mother does. Nor can it replace the mother and the other members of the monkey group, young and old, in providing the variety of social rules that the young monkey needs to make its way in the monkey world.”

The original concept of his surrogate mother was still grounded in that sterilized notion of a healthy baby—clean, fed, warm, disease free, isolated from harm. Once again that had been proved incomplete at best and destructive at worst. “Harry originally thought he could be a better mother than the monkeys were,” Levine says. “And he was wrong.” Harry hadn't stepped all the way back to the complete Watsonian model of maternal indifference. He knew that touch and affection mattered. What he hadn't appreciated was that this matter of mothering was so complicated. But Harry was learning fast. He and his students continued in their attempts to dissect motherhood, not just what made a good parent, but what elements
made the cloth mother such a bad one. What exactly were they seeing in this collapse of the surrogate-raised monkeys? Was it an insecure attachment? A failure of maternal responsiveness? A lack of social education?

The Wisconsin researchers would reach an all-of-the-above kind of answer. Love, Harry would eventually argue, was not built of one relationship but many. Our love lives, all of them, forge links in a healthy chain of normal development: maternal love, infant love, paternal love, friendship, partnership—one connecting to the next and then the next. The early attachment is the first link of that chain, the start of our ability to connect with others.

Now cloth mom wasn't all awful. She was always there and she was never rejecting, much as any mother of a very small child needs to be. Becoming a parent means that patience becomes an ever-elastic attribute, stretching farther and farther as needed—and that will be much farther than a novice parent first appreciates. No matter how much a baby wakes up in the night or throws up all over her mother or screams in her father's face, most of us know that our job is to answer the cry, clean up the mess, comfort away the scream without anger. We learn to walk away, to take our exhausted frustration out on, preferably, the nearest inanimate object. And babies all need that rock-solid acceptance as well, Harry insisted. Even monkeys know this. Rhesus mothers almost never punish a baby monkey in the first three months of his life, no matter how he tugs or pulls or makes his mother's life uncomfortable. Cloth mother was perfect in meeting this particular challenge. She never slapped, never rejected.

And yet, Harry also came to believe that one of the most important things that the mother must do, not at first, but soon enough, is to nudge the child away. There were two problems, as he saw it, with good old cloth mom. One was that she didn't groom, or talk, or make faces, or directly and indirectly cue the baby for relationships with others. And the other was that she didn't cut him loose to engage in those relationships. The mother needs, absolutely, to be there for
baby, but she needs to show him how to be there for others. In a social species, Harry said, one relationship is never enough. We build a world of connections. We weave them—contacts and friendships and family and loves—into something that we lightly call “a support network,” and which is really the safety net that catches us as we balance our way along the high wire act of every day life and from which all of us occasionally fall.