Love at Goon Park (43 page)

One of the more interesting twists on “the right mother” or parent or guardian comes from Steve Suomi's research. Suomi was one of Harry's favorite graduate students. A stocky, fair-haired man, he brought to research the kind of single-minded intensity that Harry possessed himself and admired in others. Suomi considered a lifetime career at Wisconsin, after Harry had retired. He held a faculty position at the university for twelve years before the National Institutes of Health “made an offer I couldn't refuse” in the early 1980s. He still works at NIH, where he studies both monkeys and humans in his job as director of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology in Poolesville, Maryland.

Suomi's study raised a deceptively simple question: Is the biological mother always the best mother for the baby? To evaluate parenting styles, he compared biological monkey mothers to foster monkey mothers. He chose with care. The foster mothers were “supermoms,” picked for their nurturing style and—perhaps as a result of that style—their securely attached offspring. The comparison mothers were not rejecting or abusive. They were just a little less
interested in their children, less devoted. The children in their care, though, were identical in nature. Both sets of mothers had to care for some high-maintenance babies, unusually nervous and jittery little monkeys.

The little monkeys simply did best with the most loving mother. Under tender loving care, the jumpy little monkeys grew visibly less stressed and, eventually, into nurturers themselves. “Those high reactive kids, reared by supermoms, now have kids of their own,” Suomi says. “And they are supermoms themselves. It appears to be a nongenetic means of transferring behavior to next generation.”

The little monkeys with their less engaged mothers did not show such a dramatic temperament change. The NIH researchers intensified the study. They selectively bred for highly charged monkeys. Those monkeys had super-charged children. Again, those infants were either kept with their high-intensity parent or placed with a loving foster parent. In this study, you could watch the nervous parent create the nervous child. The high-stress parents weren't unkind. They were just so jangled and distracted that it was difficult for them to really concentrate on the child. They were absorbed by jumping and responding and fretting. And so, it turned out, were their children. They were unnerved by the slightest change. They clung desperately to their mothers, apparently even afraid of inching away to explore. If the scientists provided new toys, altered the dinner menu, changed anything, the babies appeared instantly threatened. The cage would explode in a cacophony of alarm screeches—mother and child echoing each other in dismay. The difference in the foster families, thus, was almost deafening by contrast. There was plenty of conversation but not much screeching. There was no evidence that these babies had been nervous little infants when they were born. They grew up calmer, this time mirroring their foster mothers' personalities. The infants acquired other benefits from growing away from the natural nest. The cross-fostered monkeys were often adventurous little animals. They explored with energy, made friends easily. They were unruffled by small
changes. Foster mother and child alike remained unfazed if served oranges rather than apples for dinner.

To frame the experiment in Bowlby's theory, the fostered infants also appeared to be unusually securely attached. When the monkeys were six months old, the scientists experimentally separated them from their foster mothers. The little animals were definitely stressed. They devised a coping strategy, though. They recruited friends. And they kept those friends—it appeared that they were just likeable monkeys. The babies raised by their own nervous and preoccupied mothers were—not surprisingly, if you think about it—insecurely attached. They were timid with others. Their shyness made them unusually slow to befriend others. They were more traumatized by separation. And they tended to live separately. The nervous monkeys raised by nervous monkeys tended to become loners. Social contacts were too much. They often dropped to the bottom of the monkey hierarchy.

Suomi tracked the young monkeys from both groups until they became parents themselves. The nervous little monkeys grew into nervous mothers, continuing the cycle. Despite being born with that same antsy biochemistry, the cross-fostered monkeys parented like their sweet-natured foster mothers. Clearly, the benefits of affection and kindness rippled right through to the next generation. Suomi's study, in part, provided another reminder that genes are not destiny. It reinforced that lesson from Harry's lab—that the mother we are born with is not always the mother we need. And again it supported Bowlby's belief that the best lives have a secure base at the center. “Whereas insecure early attachments tend to make monkeys more reactive and impulsive, unusually secure attachment seems to have essentially the opposite effect,” Suomi wrote. He was talking about the monkeys in his study only, of course, but it's safe to say that both John Bowlby and Harry Harlow would have been comfortable in applying that lesson to the rest of us.

There are several reminders in that elegant NIH experiment: that we need not grow up to be our mothers; that we may not want to;
that it's not easy to change. And that it may be unfair to load all our expectations and needs onto one parent, anyway. With the best intentions in the world, one person may not be able—or intended—to give a child everything he or she needs. The extended family, even the right child care provider may be exactly what's needed.

The perils of depending too much on the one, the only relationship, are beautifully illuminated in yet another primate experiment by another one of Harry's former graduate students, Leonard Rosenblum of SUNY-Brooklyn. Rosenblum compared pigtail and bonnet macaques. Bonnet babies grow up in a kind of bubbling community of friendly females. Although the mother cares for them, they are also enveloped by the other adult females who help raise them. In the words of Rosenblum, the bonnet infants are both mothered and “aunted.” Pigtails are mother-raised only. Their watchful female parents keep them very close to home. If Rosenblum took mother out of the home cage, both pigtail and bonnet babies wailed with fear and loss. But the bonnets then quickly went to their “aunts” as a coping strategy. A little pigtail had no one to seek for comfort. The baby would call for his mother. The small monkey would then lapse into depression, hunch over, refuse even to look at other monkeys. Watching baby pigtails, you could wish them a few of those aunts.

In her book
Mother Nature,
California anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy builds an image of the good mother very different from that 1950s lonely but devoted nurturer. The mother Hrdy has in mind is also fiercely protective of the child, of course, but sometimes she is just plain fierce. Hrdy would have us get rid of that milky Madonna stereotype. She reminds us that mothers are still women with passion, and ambitions, and, yes, interests beyond the child. And as long as we are getting rid of stereotypes, Hrdy points out, there's no reason to assume that human beings should function like pigtail macaques, each mother solely responsible for her young. Why shouldn't we be like bonnet macaques, connecting in that more giving
community of aunts or uncles or cousins or grandparents? Why should we cast the social support net so very narrowly?

Harvard child psychologist Ed Tronick also wonders about the one-on-one bond, what Tronick calls a monotropic relationship. He and his colleagues studied Efe pygmy infants as a way of exploring other parenting arrangements. An Efe baby, for at least the first four months, spends more than half of her time with adults other than her mother. Friendly adults cycle through the baby's life. There may be five helpers an hour, depending on who has time to share. The resulting bonds appear to be almost communal. Babies clearly recognize their mothers and fathers, but they may also attach to several adults. Adults, in turn, may form close bonds with several babies other than their own. Hrdy calls this kind of shared care “allomothering.” Her view of allomothering encompasses both the natural tribal version and the twentieth-century modern American version, which can be paid day care, done well, done properly, with affection and stability.

“It's an experiment that we've got running,” says Meredith Small, author of
Our Babies, Our Selves.
“We have nonrelatives with the kids. It's okay if they become like an extended family. The really important issue is not whether the toddler is learning colors and how to read at age three, but does that teacher hug your kid?” If we aren't going to return to the closely linked extended family, re-create ourselves in the Efe model, perhaps we need to make sure that our day care centers are more like families than tidily ordered schools. Craig and Sharon Ramey, at the University of Alabama, have tested superintensity preschool programs for children, mostly children from disadvantaged families who are likely to have highly distracted parents. Consistently, the children in those programs thrive. Ramey suggests that his prototype day cares—one to three ratio, lots of hugging and touching—are designed to mimic the extended family nature of human evolution. “Whether it's a child in the inner city kept inside for safety or whether it's an only child on a suburban two acres, the
effect is the same,” Ramey says. “We have to find ways of countering the isolation of the family.”

We might also, in these more modern times, consider further emphasizing the role of the father. For all that he was an unlikely champion of heart-to-heart fathering, Harry Harlow saw that possibility in his research. He was one of the first, wrote psychologist Joseph Notterman in
The Evolution of Psychology,
“to recognize the liberating function” of those shared abilities and the father's ability to “thereby share in the development of infant love.” Harry wasn't a natural champion. He studied rhesus macaques, after all, a mother-centric species if ever one existed. But there's nothing that says that solo mothering is a bred-in-the-bone primate characteristic. It's not even a consistent macaque trait, if one considers those well-aunted bonnets.

Bill Mason and Sally Mendoza, at the University of California-Davis, have done some remarkable work with the South American titi monkey—as gorgeous a ball of fluff as ever perched on a tree branch—and found that titi females bond mainly to their mates. The females are not noticeably maternal. When titis have children, the males take responsibility for about 80 percent of the childcare. The father is the nurturing one, the caregiver. If the scientists lift the mother from the family temporarily, the baby shows a bare flicker of stress response. But if they take out the dad? The infant monkey's cortisol rises like mercury on a hot day. Still, even titis confirm Harry's famous point that we don't merely love the warm body that feeds us. The titi mother nurses her baby for the first few months, as in any lactating species. It's the dad who holds and carries the child. And it's the dad who is beloved.

Chuck Snowdon, now head of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin, has been working with another South American species, the cotton top tamarin. Cotton tops are tiny, darkeyed monkeys with white-tufted heads. They live in extended families that are not only closely related but also fully engaged in supporting each other. Tamarins form a social network that relies on
each member to share in childcare duties. How do the babies fare under this team-handling approach? Brilliantly, it turns out.

Among the cotton tops, mother, father, aunts, and older brothers and sisters all pitch in to raise the infant. Mother is the milk provider, but the baby attaches to the member of the family who spends most time with him. “When you look at all the caretakers—mother, father, oldest brother—when the baby is scared, he runs to the one who does the most nurturing,” Snowden says. Because they are wafted around in the group, the infants also receive a steady diet of attention. And if the mother turns out to be a not-very-good mother, bored and restless, the father or a brother will take over more of the baby duties. “So basically, what's happening is one member of a family is compensating for the behavior of another,” Snowdon says. As in other species, there are mothers from whom, given a choice, a baby might want to be slightly separated. “There are restricting mothers, there are laissez-faire mothers,” Snowdon explains. “But if we look in our family of tamarins, the multiple caretakers buffer the effect the mother has. So if you were unlucky enough to have a weird mother, you'd be buffered. Of course, if you had a brilliant mother, that would be buffered some, too.”

As Harry's work showed all too clearly, and as some of us know all too well, there's no guarantee that you won't end up with a weird mother or a bored mother or even a monster mother. “If you're going to work with love,” Harry said, “you're going to have to work with all of its aspects.” One of the risks of the one-on-one attachment is that you could end up with a brass-spike mother and no one else to hold you. As Snowdon points out, there's a tradeoff. If you share in several caretakers, you may miss the advantage of getting the total attention of the world's best mother. But you are never as vulnerable to the spiked parent. “Maybe we're moving back toward more cooperative child rearing,” he says, “and my belief is that this is better.”

And maybe we are moving in that direction—or at least some of us are. One of the questions that arises, as one considers the variations in parenting across the primate world, is whether we humans
are able to choose the direction. Are we such a flexible primate species that we can pick and choose among the best strategies of our monkey relatives? Or, like them, do we follow an inherent species pattern, intensively mothering like the pigtail macaque, delicately sharing out the responsibilities like the cotton top tamarin? How much room is there to negotiate one's way to becoming the best mother possible? Or to avoid becoming the worst one?