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Authors: Deborah Blum

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BOOK: Love at Goon Park
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The one thing that made cloth mom sound so appealing at first—her never pushing baby away—turned out to be one of her eventual liabilities. If you turn that passive acceptance around, it meant she never encouraged her child to let go, never gave him—you may see this coming—that gentle push out into the rest of the world. In this light, Harry reconsidered Konrad Lorenz and his adoring flock of goslings. Lorenz's famous imprinting work with the graylag geese had shown that the youngsters were dedicated to the mother who first hovered over them. If the goose wasn't there (having been removed by the scientists) and Lorenz was, well then, the goslings followed Lorenz with compulsive dedication. There are still wonderful photos of Lorenz, upright and gray-bearded, marching through a meadow, trailing goslings behind him like beads on a string. Lorenz called this dedicated behavior “imprinting,” suggesting that the mother is imprinted, like words set into stone, into the baby's consciousness. John Bowlby was a friend of Lorenz's and an admirer of his work; that hard-wired connection between mother and child was a touchstone piece of evidence in the building of attachment theory.
And yet, at some point, a gosling must be able to stretch that connection. Eventually, waddling, flying, climbing, and walking away from your mother is also a survival instinct. Even a bird needs to grow up, find its own mate, build a nest, and raise its own family. Or, in Harry's still poetic view of it:
How does an infant break away
To be a goose himself some day?
Psychologists had long considered that all of us—goose or child—require some independence. Babies need total acceptance, but as they grow, too close and cuddly a nest is not necessarily a good thing. New York psychiatrist David Levy, whose work would eventually help support attachment theory, also spent time trying to determine when a child should stand on his own. His 1943 book
, Maternal Overprotection,
sometimes reads like an ominous Brothers Grimm tale of mothers who hedge their children in and surround them, like that wall of thorns around Sleeping Beauty's mythical castle. Levy's book contains twenty case studies, every one a lesson in the destructive effects of denying your child room to grow. Levy tracked one gentle sixteen-year-old boy whose mother always went to the movies with him and explained all the action so that his mind wouldn't be “poisoned” by the wrong ideas. Another mother told Levy candidly that she hoped to keep her son “her baby” until he was at least thirty-five.
Some of those homebound children simply obeyed maternal orders, growing ever more withdrawn and deferential. Other children beat against the walls of their cells. One fourteen-year-old boy, whose mother wouldn't let him play with other children, or play chess, or even read detective novels, took to deliberately tracking mud through the house, cutting holes in his clothes, and screaming at his parents and siblings. All twenty of the children in his study, Levy noted, had extraordinary difficulty in making friends. They were loners, and Levy believed their mothers had turned them into misfits.
The question for Harry Harlow was whether the ever-available cloth mom exerted a similar warping influence. She wasn't a perfect parallel to Levy's suffocating parents. She never held the children back, trapped them with her. They could leave whenever they wanted. She just never encouraged them to take those first steps away.
Harry did eventually see some parallels with Levy's overprotecting mothers. Cloth mom, he said, by being so passively acceptant never
nudges her charges toward other relationships and “thereby never encourages independence in her infant and [affectionate] relationships with other infants and children. The normal state of complete dependency is prolonged until it hinders normal development.” The question still remained, of course, of how exactly to promote healthy independence. Should mother or child let go first? Should the mother softly hint the child toward others? Or does the child need to push for herself, open those still-fuzzy gosling wings, tread air for a while? And when? Is there a right time to fly, an equally right time to be gathered back into the nest?
Everything out of Harry's lab, and elsewhere in primate research, says this is a delicate moment of negotiation, all timing and small steps. Robert Hinde, Bowlby's good colleague at Oxford, saw it almost as a dance: When a child is very young, the mother works hard to pull the child close for her own safety. But as the child grows, is less vulnerable, the mother becomes a little less protective. She takes a step or so back. Then the baby's first response is to move toward mother. Hinde reported that small monkeys would begin calling more, nestling tighter. If the mother kept pulling back—mother monkeys would now cuff an older child who pulled too hard on her fur—the youngster would learn to seek comfort elsewhere. She might scoot over to other young animals, play longer away from home. Eventually, she would have strengthened those friendly relationships as well, broadening her base of support.
The bond between the specific mother and baby, though, provided the background music to this dance. If the mother was never very supportive, what you might call a John B. Watson–approved monkey who pushed the baby away from the beginning—then the little infant didn't want to go elsewhere. The young monkey didn't feel secure enough to risk the next relationship. Harry began to see a sequence in this, a surprisingly strict order. First, the baby needed to believe solidly in that relationship with his mother, to be securely attached. If he didn't feel that kind of solid support, it was much harder for him to turn easily to other animals. There was an obvious
common sense conclusion, Harry thought, to the construction of this chain of relationships. If the first one failed you, it was much harder to forge the next. So the little monkeys stayed close to home, trying to mend their link to mother, failing to build the links to others.
Leonard Rosenblum, after he had graduated from Wisconsin, did some studies that beautifully illuminated this idea. He used another species of monkey—rhesus are not the only macaque species, after all, and cousins of all shapes surround them: crab-eating macaques, bonnet macaques, pigtail macaques, lion-tailed macaques, Barbary macaques, Japanese macaques. Macaques in shades of gray and brown and silver-gray and flaming gold, tree-climbers, water lovers, foragers, homebodies. Sweet-tempered macaques and evil-natured ones, good mothers and indifferent. Pigtail macaques tend to be exceptionally affectionate mothers. Bonnets are far less focused in their offspring. And what Rosenblum found was that pigtail macaque babies, cuddled and fussed over and protected, found it easier to move on to other relationships. But the bonnet babies were continually trying to repair to the home front. They were clingier. Instead of the independence you might have once expected from being pushed outward, they hovered near home longer. So here you had an apparent paradox: To create an independent child, you needed to allow the baby to be dependent.
And then you had to know when to let that baby go. At one point, recognizing cloth mom's failures, Harry wondered whether pairing baby monkeys together would answer their need for a real relationship. But babies, remember, are made to cling and hold on and gain comfort from a security figure. So what the scientists ended up with was not two secure monkeys but two monkeys who wouldn't let go of each other. Harry explained it like this: “The clinging together for contact comfort overwhelms the babies. They don't know when to stop ... they haven't even enough sense without mother to know when to start playing.”
The infants wouldn't reject each other at any stage of development. They were almost worse than cloth mom. At least she didn't
keep a stranglehold on her baby. “Harry discovered that if you rear two infants together, it's almost as bad as total isolation,” says Jim Sackett, now at the University of Washington in Seattle. “They develop a tight clinging behavior and it looks cute, but if you separate them they go to pieces. It's deadly for later socialization. Nobody in their right mind, who knew Harry's work, would raise rhesus babies in pairs. Adults in pairs, yes. Infants, no.”
So the list of mother mechanics gets longer here: warmth, motion, affection, and now enough sense to know when to hold tight and when to nudge a child away. Psychologist Irwin Bernstein, at the University of Georgia, calls such behaviors—a sense of timing in relationships, an awareness of when to hold tight and when to let go—“social intelligence”; he notes that back in the 1960s, when Harry first started talking about this, it was not a topic on psychology's radar screen. “It was Harry's genius to recognize that the baby monkeys were abnormal emotionally and that it was ‘social intelligence' that they lacked,” Bernstein says. “This was not an area much investigated in the middle of the twentieth century.”
The mother-child bond, on the other hand, now had everyone's attention. Psychologists were riveted by the notion of mother love, contact comfort, and attachment theory. Now, as Steve Suomi dryly notes, there was a “relative preoccupation with mother-infant relationships by those in the mainstream of child psychology and psychiatry.” Thus the explosion of work that so inundated the editors of
The Competent Infant.
It was going to take a little time for psychologists, in general, to see the mother-child relationship in the wide-field context of “social intelligence.”
But, as Suomi points out, a monkey colony almost forces the broader panorama of relationships upon you. The whole community is there, in effect, and if you put mothers and infants, juveniles and other adults together you see a society a tumble with small monkeys knocking each other over, chasing, exploring, arguing, zipping back and forth from friends to family to friends. There was no way to watch monkeys and believe that one relationship alone was enough.
You needed social skills on a far bigger scale to survive. For one thing, Harry said, “Monkey groups can spot a stranger a mile away, and if the stranger does not recognize its predicament and display the appropriate submissive behaviors, it is almost certain to be threatened, repeatedly attacked, repelled and perhaps even killed. Knowing one's friends has enormous adaptive import, even among nonhuman primates.”
In rhesus society, with its rigid top-to-bottom hierarchy, knowing your friends, their place, your place, adds up to a basic formula for survival. No one is born with that knowledge, and yet, from very early on, a child needs to know where he fits. If social intelligence has to be taught, the suggestion is that every child—human or monkey—requires a dedicated teacher. “Monkeys are not honeybees,” said Harry, and preprogrammed responses are not going to get them through life. “The best rhesus monkey genes in the world do not guarantee that the individual possessing them will be socially competent,” as Suomi puts it. It's that absolute requirement for social intelligence that also helps explain why cloth mother—who knew nothing and could teach nothing—in the end turned out to be such a bad surrogate.
When mothers delicately shift their children into other relationships, they also shift them into new levels of social learning. As Harry pointed out, there's a simple name for the next phase in building relationships. It's called play and it's one reason why it is so important that parents encourage their children to form friendships with peers. When does play with peers become a major part of social life? In monkeys, it begins at about three or four months—comparable to a human toddler of two years. Watching the lively macaques, it was clear to Harry that to play well, a whole new set of social skills was required. Game playing between peers, obviously, doesn't look much like a mother-child relationship. But in the Wisconsin lab then—and in experiments that continue today—observers were often startled by how closely childhood play could resemble adult interactions. The parallel was strong enough, as Harry
speculated, to suggest that play is a kind of “prototype” for adult interactions, a test run for the future.
Monkey play at his lab tended to go in two primary directions. One was “rough and tumble play”—what Harry described as a monkey wrestling match—with lots of rolling and scraping and almost no injury. This is between friends, after all, so no one pounds all that hard. The alternate favorite game was something similar to what we call “tag” and scientists call “approach-avoidance play”—chasing, running away, very little actual physical contact. At one level of observation, you could watch monkeys do this and see a wonderfully rowdy time. At another level, you could see a really terrific way to pick up a few fundamental life skills.
In rough-and-tumble play, a child learns judgment—how far to push without getting hurt, who is going to take the game too seriously, when to back off, when to push forward. Tag, too, lets you judge speed, interest, who's going to run, who might decide to stand back, who's a good sport or a bad loser. And both games teach you another equally important life lesson: pleasure in the company of others.
As the monkeys grow older and play harder, they get better at sending and at reading the kind of messages that we call nonverbal communication. Peers tend to reinforce behaviors—reciprocating when they like an activity, ignoring or turning away when they don't. So during play, you can also learn what makes your friends leave and how to coax them back. Most of us want them back. Rhesus macaques and their human cousins aren't built to be loners. Reconciliation, among other skills, matters. We do best, live longest and happiest, when the social net stretches firmly beneath us and we, in turn, serve as strands in the adjoining nets that protect our friends and family.
The Harlow lab put the idea of a complex social network to the test in a study devised by Peggy Harlow. In the midst of the mother love studies, Peggy had been thinking about family itself, the basic support system of home—mother, father, and children, all together. To do that with the rhesus—not a monogamous species in any way—
she had to find a way to keep the father at home. Her “nuclear family apparatus” had nothing to do with natural rhesus society, in which females care for the young and fathers move on to other, less needy company. Peggy's apparatus was designed to ask something of rhesus macaques that they never gave—permanence, togetherness in parenting, a stable home, and what Harry jokingly called “blissful monogamy.”
BOOK: Love at Goon Park
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