A father is floating on his back in a swimming pool. His 6-year-old son appears from nowhere and pushes him under the water. The father sinks to the bottom and the boy treads on him. When the father rises to the surface, they laugh uproariously; this is one of their games. The boy also loves to play at punching his father in the stomach as hard as he possibly can, but only when he knows his dad is ready for it. His favourite way of showing affection first thing in the morning is playing ‘Jump on Daddy’s Tummy’. To outsiders it looks strange, to father and son it is highly amusing.
A mother pretends to go to sleep on the floor, her young daughter does the same several metres away. ‘Nighty-nighty,’ says the daughter; ‘Sleep tight,’ replies the mother. After ten seconds the girl says ‘Wakey-wakey.’ They repeat as necessary.
Most parents can report such exchanges with more or less joy in their voices. The challenge of parenthood is to make it as playful as this for as much of the time as possible. Not only does that foster emotional health in the child, it does so in the parent as well. Two things can stand in our way.
The first – as with everything – is what we bring from our own childhood. Either we repeat our experience, or we react against it. If we had a negative experience, neither tendency is usually conducive to playful, enjoyable parenting. If your own parents were severely punitive it is as unsatisfactory to be equally punitive with your own child as it is to react against your parents’ behaviour with unbounded permissiveness. What’s needed is for you to metabolize what was done to you, and out of that, to create something new, based on playful enjoyment.
The boy loves to play at punching his father in the stomach as hard as he possibly can . . . To outsiders it looks strange, to father and son it is highly amusing.
The second obstruction is that many of us could be with the wrong co-parent; the basis on which we have chosen our co-parent is nearly always badly flawed. A compatible, loving partner is not necessarily the same an ideal co-parent. As a result, it is not uncommon for parents to find themselves having to deal with the fact that their relationship is a mistake, something I’ll discuss in more detail in this chapter. Having first confronted this reality, we must take steps to understand our own situation, out of which playful enjoyment – and from this, emotional health – may emerge.
Motherhood
Whilst becoming a parent is a profound event for both genders, it tends to impact most forcefully on the woman. Motherhood poses the greatest single threat to a woman’s mental health. Yet for many it is also the beginning of a dramatic improvement in emotional health.
Over half of British mothers with small babies report feeling in a state of despair. Eighty per cent of those with a child under two say the child has created ‘immense strain’ in their relationship with their partner, and two thirds say becoming a mother has put them ‘completely off sex’. About 10 per cent suffer full-scale postnatal depression, some of them becoming psychotic (total loss of identity, incoherent confusion). Yet a significant proportion feel far more emotionally healthy and say that nothing in their life to date has meant as much to them as becoming a parent. It is a stark example of the fact that emotional and mental health do not necessarily overlap.
In interviewing over fifty British mothers of under-threes, I met many who told me that their baby had given them a new lease of life, and it was the same with fathers. Experiencing the 24-hour dependence of another human being seems to jog us out of our normal haze of worries about work, money and more or less trivial family battles. Suddenly those concerns seem petty. We move from the self-focused state we may have slipped into during the years before parenthood, to an urgent requirement to concern ourselves with the needs of another – and this change of focus can be extremely helpful for emotional health.
Yes, we may be exhausted. Yes, the mother may feel torn between her desire to pursue a career and the wish to be there for the baby. Yes, the father may feel anxious about being able to support his family, and find his eye wandering because his sex life has largely disappeared. Yet both parents often report that until the baby came along it was as if they and their world had been a fiction. Now everything starts to feel real again for the first time since their own childhood.
Whether this happens is, of course, hugely influenced by what happened in childhood. In general, about half of mothers tend to parent in the same way as their mother, while about half react against it, although both groups can both imitate and rebel at different times in their parenting. The arrival of a baby triggers deep memories of what it meant to be a baby oneself. It activates profound feelings we have of being neglected or responded to, based on how our carer treated us.
Studies of monkeys as well as humans show the extent to which the way we parent is affected by how we were cared for. Observed across generations, monkey daughters who were lovingly treated by a responsive mother usually treat their own babies in the same way. Animal studies are particularly revealing because it is possible to carry out intergenerational experiments with them, something that is impermissible with humans.
These studies show that the specific amount of care given is duplicated in the next generation. The amount of contact a daughter monkey has with her mother precisely predicts the amount that she bestows on her own daughter, and the same with the granddaughter. Of course, the similarity in mothering across generations could be simply a genetic inheritance – but this has been disproved. The amount of contact the new mother had with her mother has been compared with the average experienced by her and her sisters. The daughter’s subsequent mothering reflects her particular experience, rather than the average for her and her sisters.
Another theory is that a genetically difficult baby could make the mother uncaring. This was contradicted by a study of what are called highly-reactive infant monkeys, individuals that are very difficult to care for because they overreact to the slightest sound or movement. In a study that would be unethical if undertaken with humans, the monkeys were fostered out to either average mothers or exceptionally nurturing ones. The exceptionally nurtured highly-reactive babies grew up more socially well-adjusted than normal infants fostered by average mothers. Nurture was so influential, in other words, that it could turn a difficult infant into a superior adult. Furthermore, when the generation of offspring in the study grew up and themselves had infants, their parenting style, whether exceptionally nurturing or average, precisely mirrored the kind of care they had received as infants.
What goes for monkeys does not always go for humans. In this case, it does so only up to a point. In general, it is true that studies of humans show that parents who had good early care tend to provide it themselves, and vice versa. However, where humans differ is that they have language, and this gives them the capacity for self-consciousness, which in turn creates the possibility of volition. Some mothers reflect on their own experience and decide to act differently themselves, something a monkey cannot do.
For example, from early infancy, Gillian, a 52-year-old journalist, was left by her mother to scream. Her mother was firmly of the view that babies need to be ‘shown who is boss’. If you gave in to them, the ‘little rascals would twist you round their little fingers’. The result was a nervy, mildly depressed Gillian, who became a jumpy adult. However, when motherhood came along, she suddenly underwent a big change. She became confident, calm and assured, absolutely determined at all costs not to repeat her mother’s mistakes. A monkey cannot decide to act differently from its mother, but a human can. Gillian tuned into each of her three offspring, careful to leave several years between each in order to do so, and succeeded in giving them a very solid start. Playful enjoyment abounded in the succeeding years. Alas, it is not always so simple. If only we humans merely needed to decide to be different in order to do so.
Like Gillian’s mother, Julia’s was coldly neglectful. Additionally, she was only able to see Julia as a vehicle for her own unfulfilled aspirations. A stellar career as a corporate lawyer resulted. Julia also enjoyed sexual relationships with a long succession of men, tending to want her independence and reluctant to settle down. Finding herself in her late thirties, she decided to have children and got together with a rather glamorous younger man. But when babies arrived, she found herself torn into pieces by conflicting desires, of which the strongest was to give her children the love she never had. However, her addiction to career success made this hard to achieve. She found it impossible to stay at home and care for the children because she needed the antidepressant effect of daily workplace status and battles. Yet she also found it impossible to employ adequate substitute care. Even though she could afford a nanny, somehow the ones she picked were always lacking in the responsiveness and empathy essential for babies and toddlers. Ironically, the nannies she chose ended up giving her children the same experience of neglect that her mother had provided. Never having been loved herself, she did not have enough insight – a key element of emotional health – to recognize those nannies who would be different from her mother. She imagined a good nanny would be one who was going to be ‘educative’ and ‘efficient’, whereas love matters far more. There was precious little space for play and enjoyment for anyone.
Exceptionally nurtured highly-reactive baby monkeys grew up more socially well-adjusted.
The story illustrates that it is not always enough to decide to give your children a different experience; you may find it hard to put your wishes into practice because you have competing impulses. A crucial issue is which branches a woman has been following prior to motherhood, in terms of her attitude to her femininity, career and maternal identity.
In Britain, the studies of psychologist and psychoanalyst Joan Raphael-Leff reveal that women have three main patterns of response to a baby. The Hugger is filled with prenatal fantasies of what the baby will be like when it is born, and subsequently sees it as her job to adapt to the baby. She may sleep with it in the bed, will want to breastfeed for as long as possible, and adores the snuggly feeling of living in a little bubble with her newborn, often staying in bed with it for the first week. She is the least likely kind of mother to return to work while the child is under three. The Organizer is the opposite. She has had few or no thoughts about what kind of person the foetus is, and after the birth, sees it as her job to help the uncivilized creature acquire independence and to learn how to fit into the needs of the family as soon as possible. She imposes routines in the name of helping the baby to sleep and eat at times which fit into her life. She is much more likely to return to work, often finding the baby dull company. In Britain these two groups each represent about a quarter of mothers (in other nations the proportions differ; in America, for example, Organizers are more common). The remaining half of British mothers are Fleximums, a mixture of the other two kinds. The Fleximum may adopt some routines, whilst also adapting to the baby’s wishes in other respects. She is aiming for a win–win situation, a pattern which will enable both her and the baby to feel content. Part-time work may appeal, especially if it can be done from home.
None of these groups is likely to be more emotionally healthy than the others, for each approach can have its problems. The commonest is if the woman is forced by circumstances, or by impulses arising from her relationship with her mother, to adopt patterns which feel wrong. For example, the emotional health of a Hugger suffers if financial pressures require her to work full-time. If an Organizer tries to act like a Hugger (perhaps reacting against her mother) but cannot enjoy being ‘stuck’ at home, she may become depressed. A Fleximum who tries to please everyone but ends up pleasing no one is not going to enjoy emotional health. What is vital is that each woman interrogates her history and present feelings, and uses that knowledge to create the right regime for her and her baby.
Insight and playfulness
Serena was always a studious girl, who enjoyed her time at school. Her mother provided stable, affectionate care and her father was an impressive achiever. However, she felt shocked and let down by him when he went off with a younger woman when she was seventeen. Having been told that she had to put work before boys she was furious at his hypocrisy, and decided it was time to let rip, embarking on a wild affair with a sexy older man. This did not stop her from getting to a top university and into a highly paid job in financial services. Although she enjoyed herself to the full during her twenties in a series of exciting relationships, in her early thirties she was quite deliberate in her choice of husband. With cold calculation, she recognized that her sexual allure would decline as she got older, and she married. She was also aware that the odds of any child she had being born with abnormalities – and of not being able to conceive a child at all – rise rapidly after the mid thirties. The man she chose was not a philanderer, he was a cerebral high-achiever in her field. She admired and loved him but was not ‘in love’ with him; he was nowhere near as sexy as some of her previous lovers. As the babies came, she was clever enough to identify a niche in her field, which allowed her to work part time. The nanny she employed to substitute for her when she was not there was also wisely chosen: she told me she did not want one who would be constantly taking her children to meet others, or would seek to ‘educate’ and ‘stimulate’ them. She had grasped that all small children need is the constant attention of a loving and responsive adult (and this person does not have to be a biological parent). The outcome is playful, jolly children and a playful, jolly Serena.
Another triumphant example of a mother who was insightful enough to avoid repeating her past is Penny. She lives in the present, alert to what is happening here and now. At school, she never cared how well she did and, although she passed few exams, she does not see herself as in any way inferior to her more highly qualified peers. She was someone who always wanted to be a mother, and ‘did jobs’ until that point, rather than having a career. Tremendous adversities accompanied motherhood. She had twins, putting enormous pressure on her (unsurprisingly, mothers of twins are at higher risk of depression). She suffered a serious physical illness during their early years, and again when she went on to have two more children. Her husband provided minimal support, heading off to work before the children were up, and returning only after they were asleep. Yet none of this mattered. Although a Hugger by inclination, Penny was forced by circumstances to be a Fleximum in the way she cared for her children.
Her emotional health had its roots in a rock-solid relationship with both her mother and her grandmother. They supported her throughout her travails. Her father had been a drunken scoundrel who left her mother when she was small, but to everyone’s surprise he became a tremendously playful and buoyant figure for his grandchildren, providing fun and games and indulgence that Penny was often too overstretched to offer. Critical was her capacity for insight, the element of emotional health I explored in Chapter One. She is not an intellectual person, given neither to theorizing nor to introspective navel-gazing. Yet she worked out that she needed to avoid repeating her mother’s mistakes in her choice of partner. During her teens and twenties she had relationships with a series of lovable rogues. There came a point when she realized that she was merely repeating her mother’s mistakes, and very deliberately sought out someone who, though less glamorous, arousing and wealthy than some of her other suitors, was reliable. Whereas her mother had led a louche and permissive sexual life, Penny decided to avoid that. This brings us to the second main challenge of parenting: learning to make the best of the bad job that is the average couple.
Your co-parent
Unlike Penny, nearly all of us choose our co-parent using incorrect criteria. On first meeting, it is extremely rare that either party gives serious consideration to whether the other is the right person with whom to embark on the project of having children. Nearly always, we originally choose our mate on the basis of sexual desire and status. In a rational world, these criteria would never be primary.
Of course, for a baby to result, both parties do need to want to have sex with the other. But the fact that a woman wears a short skirt of a particular cut and fabric, which reveals legs of a particular thickness and texture, and that these factors in turn appeal to specific desires in a man that go back to his childhood, is hardly the basis for deciding whether she is going to do a good job of collaborating as a parent. Likewise, the fact that a man made you laugh or that you noticed he had nice hands or a pleasing bum when you first met, is not a basis for shared parenthood. Equally unhelpful is the extent to which we are influenced by the prospective partner’s wealth or success or popularity. It would be unwise to select your car primarily on the basis of its colour, or your career because of the kind of clothing it requires. What someone looks like, or their superficial charm, is not the basis for finding the right person for cooperating in the care of children. The challenge is for both partners to accept that they have made this mistake and find ways to make it fruitful.
A critical distortion is the extent to which we have been influenced in this choice by the traits of our opposite-sexed parent. The first proof of this came from a cunning study done in 1980 in Hawaii, where there are many mixed-race marriages. A thousand men and women were identified who came from mixed parentage. In two thirds of cases, their first marriage had been to a partner of the same ethnic origin as their opposite-sexed parent. In two thirds of cases a woman married a man of the same skin-colour as her father, likewise sons with their mothers and wives. The particularly clever aspect of this study is that all the sample had divorced and remarried. Sure enough, in two thirds of cases their second partners were also of the same ethnicity as the opposite-sexed parent. This is powerful evidence that how our mum or dad looks determines our choice of who we shack up with (and, perhaps, also that we do not learn from our mistakes).
Romauld et Juliette (1989): These characters are the exception, but studies show that we are more likely to pick partners with the same appearance of our opposite-sexed parent.
Subsequent studies have revealed that we are more likely to pick partners with the hair- and eye-colour of our opposite-sexed parent, likewise when it comes to their smell. But it also extends to whether or not we were emotionally close to that parent. Sure enough, both women and men who were close to their opposite-sexed parent are even more likely to choose mates who resemble them. A particularly telling study used a sample of adopted girls. Only if they had been close to their adoptive dad did they end up married to a man who looked like him. This proved it was all about nurture, and could have nothing to do with nature. In another study, of forty-nine women, the precise dimensions of their fathers’ faces were mapped out scientifically (distance between eyes, size of nose and so on). The women were then shown pictures of fifteen men’s faces and asked to select the one they found most attractive. If they had a positive relationship with their dad, they were significantly more likely to pick out the face which resembled his in its dimensions.
The fact that the past is such a huge influence makes it likely that you select someone as a co-parent who you would not have chosen if approaching the matter rationally. For those who had emotionally healthy opposite-sexed parents it works fine, but for most of us that was not the case, and therefore the consequent dilemma is stark: stick it out with this person, or split up and move on.
As already described in Chapter Three, the evidence shows that not only is separation usually very harmful to children, it is all too often of no benefit to the adults either. In most cases, it is much better for each partner to do their best to sort themselves out, rather than imagining that the grass will be greener in another field. Without insight, the odds are that you will merely repeat the same mistake again in your choice of the next partner, resulting in another break-up. Only when you have dug very deep inside yourself should you conclude that the madness or badness of your partner is grounds for a separation. Of course, such cases do exist.
Caroline is a 45-year-old mother whose parents divorced when she was small, following her father’s infidelities. She is still in touch with this moody, tyrannical man, but has come to accept that he will never be a half-decent father to her. Luckily, her mother was loving and quietly supportive, and Caroline did well in her education and subsequently in her career. She married an ambitious, successful businessman, whom she believed would offer the security that her father had not, and she herself gave up work to care for their children. Living in a world of rich corporate executives, she was increasingly regarded as an adjunct to her husband. The lives of these executives revolved around huge expenditure on possessions and holidays, while the wives used conspicuous consumption as the marker of their status. She felt desperately lonely: her husband no longer took her seriously, and she was very bored. For a time she dealt with this by joining a religious cult, which stole some of their money. At the same time, she discovered that her husband had been visiting prostitutes throughout their married life, and that this was the norm among his peers. On discovering this, as she put it to me,
something in me snapped, or woke up. What the hell was I doing with this revolting person? How had I let myself drift so far from what I cared about? I had to get out. It took me three more years to pluck up the courage to leave. I knew that leaving is incredibly painful, rarely the right thing. It was a nightmare process emotionally, but I am still glad I did. I have all but disinfected myself of the world that had such a grip on me. I met and married my old school sweetheart, who was entirely unlike my first husband. My children and I are so happy, so carefree now. We laugh and love so much.
Crucial for this happy ending was Caroline’s ability to understand how her own childhood had caused her to pick her first husband, and that she did not just leap out of the proverbial frying pan into another marital fire. Instead of simply deeming her husband mad or bad, she paused for three years, looked into herself and by doing so was able to make a good decision when it came to seeking a new partner.
How to generate playfulness in parenting
As we have seen, parenting poses two main challenges. The first is understanding how our reactions to our children are a response to how we were cared for. Only when this is clear to us can we do something about it – and unlike monkeys, we do have that option. The second challenge is to admit the extent to which we might have made a mistake in our choice of co-parent: almost everyone does. Having admitted this, instead of blaming everything on the other parent, you have to accept that a mistake has been made and start making the best of it (or, if really necessary, start again with someone else, as Caroline did). That also means carefully observing any tendency to wrongly identify the traits of your parents in your partner, at the same time as acknowledging the ways in which your partner is a duplicate of your opposite-sexed parent. Having done so, you can begin to carve out a relationship based on what the two of you are really like, and find ways in which you can enjoy each other, generating playfulness in your parenting, getting on the same side, and fostering mutual emotional health. A marital therapist who really understands this – perhaps with a background in what is known as transactional psychology (see the Transpersonal Therapy website) – can be very helpful. This newfound way of looking at your co-parent can become a platform for enjoying parenthood and offering your own children a pleasing model for their lives.
Parents may be reading this book with an increasingly heavy heart, because they are aware that the care they have provided has created problems for their offspring. If so, do not despair. If you have a child with problems (aged three years to puberty) – problems that might be as insignificant as shyness, or as big as continual gloominess – there is a simple method I have developed for resetting the child’s emotional thermostat, called Love Bombing. This involves arranging focused, one-to-one time with your child, perhaps on a weekend away, to develop playfulness, vivacity and love – I have given more detail in the Homework section.
That we repeat the past is inevitable. But never forget that some of that repetition is hugely beneficial to our emotional health. For instance, mothers who are loved become loving mothers themselves. Whilst it is true that we do, inevitably, mess our children up to some degree, that is not the whole story.