GREAT BRITAIN News

Would you pass the Good Mother Test?


Nurseries and
the naughty step – where modern parenting is going wrong, according to
psychologist Oliver James

When Oliver James shuffles into the wood-paneled lobby of Oxford’s
smartest hotel, wearing an old green fisherman’s sweater, loose scarf
and worn corduroys, he does not look like a man who is about to have a
Mumsnet-type fatwa put upon him. With his high, pale domed forehead and
wispy long hair, he appears more a gentle, sunlit-starved don in need of
nourishment.
There is something rather fragile about James, mixed with a
diffident bookishness, which is a paradox given that he is one of
Britain’s most controversial and outspoken popular psychologists, a
self-confessed “bigoted taxi driver” who in the past has sounded off on
the radio, in newspaper columns, on the television, in his increasingly
bestselling books (Britain on the Couch, 1997; Affluenza, 2007, to name
but two) on anything from the narcissism of the ruling elite (Peter
Mandelson “built his whole identity around his relationship with his
mother and grandfather”; he also predicted that Brown suffered from
depression) to the emotional paucity of a greedy, aspirational society,
wrecked by Thatcherism and pathetically obsessed with wealth.
Today he is clutching a copy of his forthcoming book, How Not to
F*** Them Up, in which he has turned his psychological gaze on
middle-class mothers and the ways in which they – we – care for our
children aged 0-3. Back in 2002, he wrote They F*** You Up, a title
taken from the Larkin poem, in which he explored how it is parenting in
the early years, not genes, that makes us what we are, and can lead to
lifelong insecurity (40 per cent of all adults are insecure, he claims),
bad relationships, depression and violence. Now, he has honed his focus
and taken the thesis one step further, providing guidance for mothers
(only those wealthy enough to enjoy “choice” – poor ones don’t seem to
be included) on how to get it right, how to provide a good foundation
for happiness and emotional security. Get it wrong in this crucial
period, he warns in the book, through decisions taken, subconscious
miscalculations, through not knowing yourself or engaging in acts of
self-deception then, basically, to use his parlance, your children are
f***ed. And you are to blame.
In a modern society in which some degree of anxiety and guilt has
come to afflict nearly all mothers, women muddling through day by day
trying to live with their compromises, it takes a brave man – a man! –
to weigh into the debate and tell us how to do it better, offering by
way of incentive to try harder the specter of a generation of
emotionally damaged children. As if we didn’t feel bad enough already.

If the new book, based on scientific studies and interviews with 50
mothers found on the internet, some working, some not, has one clear
message, it is this: all babies and toddlers “need to be in the presence
of a responsive, loving adult at all times in order to thrive”, either
the mother or a mother substitute (the pecking order of substitutes is
this: father, granny, nanny, minder, day care). “They do not need a
teacher, they do not need friends, stimulation or education,” he writes.

Anything less can lead to insecure attachments, the inability to
form healthy relationships in later life, at work, with lovers, with
friends, right through to triggering mental illness and violence.
Nurseries are presented as pretty much the equivalent of setting your
child on the road to Prozac – “[It is] accepted by all scientific
authorities: some kinds of non-maternal care, particularly day care,
considerably increase the risk of the child becoming aggressive and
disobedient.” Women who think in terms of “stimulating, cognitive” based
care involving other babies and toddlers are misled. Controlled crying
methods, as advised by Gina Ford, stress the baby, even damage it –
“There is good evidence that strict sleep routines do lead to more
insecure, and to more irritable and fussy babies.” Disciplining methods
such as the naughty step, star charts and saying, “Don’t!” and
“Naughty!” run the risk of training your child “like a dog in a
laboratory”. “Calling them bad and naughty is completely inappropriate
at this age and only serves to make them feel unhappy, rather than
learning any useful lesson… Time-out and naughty steps give the message
that the child is unloved and leaves it to stew in its juices, liable to
feel abandoned and rejected, creating resentment and surly anger.”
Any stress in the last trimester of pregnancy, through work or life
demands, raises the stress hormone cortisol in the unborn child,
potentially affecting its behavior for a long time after birth. Women
who read inherent genetic characteristics into their “lively” baby such
as the need for interaction are self-deceiving and projecting their own
needs. If a toddler is having a hissy fit, it is because she is not
getting what she needs from “YOU!” (the young child, unable to make
sense of itself, is never to blame) and when pregnant mothers worry
about the forthcoming birth, what they are often really worrying about
is the mothering period that what will follow it. Oh, OK then.
I admit to James, as he settles himself into a sofa, that despite
his avowals in the introduction of not wishing to provoke a “tsunami of
apprehension in the reader”, his book had precisely this effect on me.
He looks crestfallen.
“God knows I am nervous about this book,” he says quietly. “People
have been asking me to write it for a long time, and always my response
was the same: What right do I have to write it being a man? Secondly,
why raise all these difficult questions for women who are anyway
struggling with the extremely difficult job of trying to work it out and
who are probably engaged with these questions anyway? Why do I have to
create all these problems for them and then back them up with science?”
Quite. He sighs.
He changed his mind, he says, because, ultimately, he felt strongly
about his message that young children need one-on-one care, regardless
of who is providing it. It is a passionately held, well-argued belief
and he insists this is his only prejudice. The new book is directed at
mothers only because mothers end up doing most of the work and most of
the worrying, something he hopes will change. “The idea that only women
worry about this stuff is ridiculous. Men are going to have to start
doing it too. I know lots of men who actually love looking after their
children and love being involved with them and if they were given a bit
more incentive and put under a bit more pressure by their wives and
partners, they would do more. So that is the starting point.”
James admits that he has a friend who checks all his books for his
“tone”, getting rid of anything that might hoist him by his own petard.
Well, you should also have got her to cut the bit at the beginning, I
say, the bit where you explain your methods and then write to the female
reader, “Off you go!” “Oh dear,” he says. “She’ll kick herself for
missing that.”
Using solid scientific research, mostly based on the theories of a
British psychoanalyst and psychologist called Joan Raphael-Leff, James
divides mothers of small children into three categories – the organizer,
the hugger and the flexi-mum. How well you respond to your baby depends
on how well you understand yourself. The organizer is the kind of
mother to adopt Gina Ford, to want the baby to adapt to her, the hugger
is totally baby-focused to the exclusion of others and the flexi-mum,
roughly half of mothers, a combination of the two and the most likely to
escape depression. James tries hard to refrain from presenting a
“right” and “wrong” way, although he does state the “hugger” is probably
best equipped to meet the needs of the under-threes. All the
stereotypes – because, let’s be honest, that is what they are – have
pros and cons. As a father, how would James himself like to be
stereotyped like that?
“As long as it was based on reality, I wouldn’t mind,” he replies.
(The categories are recognisable, and when I run them past a random
collection of mothers, they all agree.)
The key to successful mothering, James says, is to work out which
one you are, by looking at how you feel as well as the baggage of your
childhood, and make sure your baby is looked after accordingly. There’s
no point pretending you are a hugger when babies bore you. Nor should
you drive yourself back to work just because subconsciously you feel
your own parents have pushed you all your life to “achieve”. If you
suspect you are damaged by your childhood, his advice is to get proper
psychoanalysis specializing in early attachment to avoid passing it on.
In the current climate, who can justify that expense? “I agree that is a
very real difficulty with some of the advice I give in the book, but if
you want to know what I think might be the best thing to do if you are
going to do anything, that would be it.
“The last thing I want to do is create more trouble for a group of
people – mothers – whom I care passionately about and want the best
for,” he continues with obvious and genuine emotion. “I really don’t
want to make life more difficult. I’m really trying to make it easier.”
But what about this vociferous abhorrence of nurseries, which I tell
him many women will find very threatening and upsetting, especially if
they have opted for this choice. And what can be wrong with the naughty
step when you’ve got a wilful, puce-faced toddler thrashing around in
the manner of a mini dictator? “Well, obviously it’s better than
smacking, but I’m just against this idea of ‘taming the beast in the
nursery’, this step-by-step discipline guide that can solve it all.”
A large part of his resistance to the idea of day care is how it has
been co-opted by Labor to try to get women back to work in badly paid,
unrewarding jobs. “Why can’t they help women in other ways?” he asks.
“Or do what Austria does and provide women with the choice of the
average wage for two years so they can pay somebody, such as a nanny or
minder, properly or do it themselves? If they bail out the banks for
£168 billion, why the f*** can’t they make it easier for mothers?”
Nurseries, he says scornfully, have a 40 per cent turnover of staff and
are often badly run, with untrained carers and poor child/worker ratios,
“despite what they claim”.
Get him on New Labor politicians and Labor Sure Start scheme and
insults spew forth – “jumped-up prick” and “f***ing bollocks”; “What
the f*** do they know? They know nothing.” But cut through this taxi
driver rant, and it is obvious that James is truly on the side of women
and creating a society in which parenting and the issues it raises are
shared between both partners.
It is telling that James came to fatherhood late. He is 56 now and
was 48 when he had his first child, a girl, now 8, followed by a boy,
aged 5. He is clearly an adoring father, living in rural harmony in
Oxfordshire. His wife, the Oxbridge-educated former journalist Clare
Garner, does not work at the moment. Is she a hugger? Are you a hugger
at home?
“I promised her I wouldn’t talk about the children or her
mothering,” he says. But that’s a cop-out. “It’s not fair on her,” he
says. “I respect that.” I get the impression you favor the hugging
approach? “Why?” he says. Because of your tone. He laughs. “Look, I am
56 and I bring to my experience certain prejudices of a man of my
generation. I did think I had to be the breadwinner.
“I suppose the only thing that gives me any integrity in this book
is that I do understand the science and that I work from home and I’ve
been very much involved with the care of my own children… I suppose I
can say this to you although I’ve never really made it public, but in
1986 I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and two years before my
daughter was born it got worse, which did limit how much I could
physically do to help.”
Luckily, the MS has remained at a stable level. He can’t walk round a
golf course, he says, nor could he look after the children full-time
all the time, but he has done it for short periods in the past, enough
to see “the enormity of the demands that are being made on you if you
are a parent looking after a child”.
He is not remotely anti-working mothers, he stresses. He points to
the many examples in the book of women for whom it would be disastrous
to stay at home, not only for them but for their baby. “I am not very
good at dissembling. I truly believe that for some women work is
essential. It is part of their identity. My mother was a classic case in
point. She wanted to be a hugger but was actually a not very good flexi
who was depressed a lot of the time.”
Ah yes, James’s mother, now dead, whose failing of James in his
infancy looms large in How Not to F*** Them Up. If ever there was a
shrink to prove the cliché that all shrinks are f***** up, James is it.
In fact, James has spent the last 40 years of his life “doing a lot of
work on himself”. It is no surprise to learn that he reached the
conclusion that his mother was largely to blame.
Oliver James comes from a family of four children born to
London-based psychoanalysts. Both his mother, Lydia Jacobs, and his
father, Dr Martin James, were respected clinicians in their time. Both
had difficult, although privileged, childhoods. His father was one of
seven, including six competitive brothers – “The level of nastiness
between those brothers was considerable” – and his mother was brought up
by servants, mainly an illiterate Tasmanian nanny, who, while
infinitely better than Lydia’s cold and distant mother, was prone to
hitting the little girl. Determined to buck the pitfalls of her own
childhood, when James’s mother had her three girls and one boy in quick
succession – “an act of absolute insanity given what she was like, but
they had this weird idea that a happy family was a big family” – she
refused to employ help. Through psychoanalysis, she tried to right the
wrongs of her own past (her mother ended up in a mental hospital, her
father committed suicide when she was 14 and her favourite brother did
the same two years before James was born). “The pyschoanalysis was crap
back then,” James admits. “They probably droned on about her wanting to
shag her father and kill her mother. It didn’t do nearly enough.”
His mother did not have the emotional equipment to deal with her
young family. She was mildly depressed and would slump at the kitchen
table, exhausted. “Her mood was one of resignation, with an undertow of
anger.” A cousin revealed to James that his mother often left him
screaming in his pram at the bottom of the garden of their home in St
John’s Wood. As a result, what he calls his “electrochemical thermostat”
was set in “angry”, “risk-taking” and “sad” modes. As he grew older,
his mother would often resort to violence in an attempt to tame his
aggression. He left various prep schools for an assortment of nasty
attacks on other boys – including breaking one’s arm. He bragged and was
spoiled. His parents oscillated between liberal permissiveness – “play”
was important (as it is to James vis-à-vis his own children) – and
conventional discipline. His youngest sister, Lucy, was his only ally
and he remains close to her. At 16, with him looking as if he was going
to fail all his exams, despite being at Eton, his father sat him down
with a glass of Pimm’s on the Thames and outlined his choices. He could
leave school and get a job mending railway tracks, or work hard and aim
for Cambridge. James never looked back. It was, he says, his father who
saved him from himself. “I couldn’t have done it without him.” James got
to Cambridge to read social anthropology and then did an MA in child
development at Nottingham. Throughout his twenties, he lived in the
family home, and in fact his broadcasting career, which began with a
six-part documentary Men on Violence, followed by Room 113 in which he
grilled celebrities, did not take off until he was 34.
“I was an extremely late developer.”
He had seven years of bad psychoanalysis between the ages of 30 and
37, before finding an analyst who started to get to the bottom of his
childhood. In November 2006, by now the father of two children with both
his parents dead, James underwent the Hoffman Process, an eight-day
residential “rollercoaster” which forces you back into your past. “Just
in that one week, I realized that, ‘Yes, of course I was a bad boy but
it wasn’t my f***ing fault!’ My parents were very muddled and had caused
me to be like this. The lovely thing about going through this process
is that it takes you on so that you can also see it from your parents’
point of view. Once you understand that, you feel nothing but love or
sorrow or whatever. I very much got to that point.”
James’s story is the perfect illustration of his thesis – a mother
who failed to recognize her limitations, who as a consequence damaged
her children. But does asking people to look to their childhoods to
explain their shortcomings not encourage our popular culture of
complaint? Maybe he was just a nasty little boy? His sisters seem to
have come off more lightly. “I’m not in favour of people just going
round slagging off their parents,” he says, “but it is helpful to
understand what happened to you in your early years and how this has
affected the choices and personality traits you have as an adult. But I
agree there is a certain kind of bad therapy that can lead people to
say, ‘It’s my genes’, or to avoid responsibility.”
James is working away on his next book, Love Bombing, which explores
proven techniques of how parents can reverse any damage, perceived or
real, done to their children. This is mostly through practical
techniques such as one-on-one time with a child up to the age of 11,
including weekends away and “special time”, combined with bombing the
child with love and affection. “The effects are amazing,” he says. He
sighs. “I wish I could bring that book out tomorrow. Now that is a book I
think could really help a lot of people.”
The good mother test – how do you score?
Don’t make your child apologize or put them into nursery: the new
rules for modern parents, according to Oliver James
Avoid day care
There seems little doubt that day care raises cortisol levels [the
fight-flight stress hormone]. While disrupted cortisol levels may be
associated with many problems, including depression and fearfulness,
there is considerable evidence they also affect aggression and good
conduct. If so, when children raised in day care are compared with ones
raised at home, they should be more aggressive.
The NICHD study, which followed 1,000 children from early childhood,
found that the more time a child spent in non-maternal care (most of it
day care), the more disharmonious was its relationship with its mother
when with her. The findings were similar for problem behaviors
involving aggression and disobedience. The more time the child was in
non-maternal care of any kind during its first five years, the greater
their difficultness in three key respects:
Assertiveness: they talked too much, bragged or boasted and argued a
lot.
Disobedience: they talked out of turn, were disobedient at school,
defiantly talked back at school staff and disrupted discipline.
Aggression: they got into many fights, were prone to cruelty,
bullying or meanness, they physically attacked others and they destroyed
their own possessions.
Don’t leave them alone for long
Prolonged separation from parents has been shown to have caused
long-term depression and insecurity in large samples of adults who were
evacuated during the Second World War when measured decades later. In
one sample, there was a higher likelihood of adult depression if the
evacuation occurred aged 4 to 6 years old rather than at age 13. In
another, depression was nearly twice as common in evacuees compared with
children not separated, or ones with their mothers but not with
fathers, absent due to military work. In a final study, those evacuated
between the ages of 4 and 6 years showed much higher likelihood of
insecure attachment (54 per cent), compared to those not evacuated (32
per cent), the younger the age of evacuation, the greater the
insecurity.
Other findings indicate that extended or repeated separation from
the mother in itself causes long-term emotional problems in adulthood, in
particular, borderline personality disorder. This was so even after
other factors were controlled, and the longer and earlier the
separation, the greater the risk of developing this problem. Day care
entails repeated and more or less prolonged separation from mother. It
would not be surprising if it has similar, albeit less severe, long-term
effects.
Never use the naughty step
Contrary to claims for naughty step methods, when used on such young
children it actually often results in repetition of the undesired
behaviour, rather than successful management. If you are not careful,
you are just creating a guaranteed method for your toddler to wind you
up. If they do eventually modify their behavior what is the lesson they
have learned? That might is right and that they need to be more devious
to avoid being coerced. As a parent of a child of this age, you need to realize that if things go pear-shaped it is actually always your fault,
in the sense that if you keep a close enough eye on them you can prevent
atrocities. Inevitably it’s sometimes going to go wrong, but do not
assume the child is willfully trying to annoy you. Calling them bad and
naughty is inappropriate at this age and only serves to make them feel
unhappy, rather than learning any useful lesson. The unhappier they are,
the more they are likely to go around upsetting other kids, trying to
offload their anger or misery on to others, as adults do in offices (or
partners at home).
Avoid stress during pregnancy
One study revealed a strong independent impact of high levels of
stress in the last three months of the pregnancy (known as the third
trimester), including measurement of cortisol, the fight-flight stress
hormone. Even when the children had reached the age of 10, there was
still an effect if the mother had been stressed in the third trimester.
The high levels of cortisol are passed through the placenta to the fetus and when it is born, it is already liable to have abnormal
cortisol levels. This is still the case at the age of 10, expressed in
such problems as anxiety, attention deficits, hyperactivity and behavioral problems.
Don’t blame it on their genes
There are strong grounds for parents to avoid assuming their child
has a genetically caused trait that cannot be changed.
Further, it suggests it is best not to assume that your baby or
toddler is deliberately, willfully, intentionally seeking to behave badly
(based on this unchangeable trait) because you are more likely to react
angrily and with frustration if you think they are trying to wind you
up, and you are at greater risk of responding with harsh, aggressive and
even abusive parenting behavior.
As countless studies have proven, it is that kind of parenting (and
not genes) which actually causes children to become aggressive, hostile,
violent and to have attention deficits.
Never expect them to say sorry
Whether it’s sorry, or important please and thank yous, you should
not expect them to manage a proper understanding much before 3. When so
small, they usually feel completely justified in having lashed out at
another child, even though it was their fault, and was unprovoked.
At this age, it is expecting too much for them to understand the
wider context and their responsibility within it and if they do lash
out, in a sense it is always your fault. The lashing out will be
happening because they are tired, or hungry, or envious of a sibling,
and although the victim is guiltless, so is this perpetrator: it would
not have happened if you had kept a better eye on the situation, which,
of course, we cannot be expected to do at all times.
It is for this reason that it really can make sense for you to be
making the apology, and doing so to the appalled other parent. Not only
is this the truth, it provides a good exemplar to your child.
Some might think that it is namby-pamby craziness to do this, that
you are merely teaching your child never to be responsible for their misbehavior.
In fact, you are acting as a good model and, if fully explained, it
helps them to grasp that they are surrounded by a fine-grained web of
social obligations when in the company of others.
Ban strict routines
The great thing to remember is that babies are satiable, that once
they are fed, or get some sleep, or are given a hug, the need is met.
They are not like many adults in this regard. There is a great deal of
evidence that very strict routines do not lead to so-called contented
babies.
It is true that, on the whole, babies whose mothers go to them when
they cry in the night or who co-sleep are less likely to sleep through
the night. However, there is also good evidence that strict sleep
routines do lead to more insecure, and to more irritable and fussy,
babies.
While you may be scared that “indulging” them will be just the first
step towards a clingy, greedy, needy, selfish toddler and to a child
who cannot obey rules at school, the very opposite is the case. It is
the babies whose needs have been met who become the secure, calm,
satisfied children and productive schoolchildren, and adults – the ones
you might say were spoiled and indulged as babies.
Don’t let them snack on sweets
In a sample of 12,500 British children born after 2000, the ones
whose mothers worked full-time were more likely to be consuming
sweetened drinks, and snacking on sweets and crisps between meals.
They were less likely to be eating three portions of fruit a day.
The mothers’ sheer lack of time was thought to be likely to be a major
reason for this.
The connection between sweet-eating and violence was shown in a
large nationally representative British sample followed from their
births in 1970.
It found that men who had eaten confectionery daily when aged 10
were significantly more likely to be violent at age 34. The researchers
showed that this was more than just a correlation.