Good Mothers are nurturing. They suckle, groom, and protect. Bad Mothers lose interest in satisfying the demands of their children and go off and do their own thing.
Yeah yeah, nothing we haven’t heard before.
But now Science! has proof that Bad Mothers have something seriously wrong with them. They’re not just weird and self-absorbed, they’ve actually got a mental illness, for chrissakes.
By comparing the good mothers to their less attentive relatives, the group has found that negligent parenting seems to have both genetic and non-genetic influences, and may be linked to dysregulation of the brain signaling chemical dopamine…
Child neglect has devastating consequences, Auger says, and the natural occurrence of maternal neglect within this mouse strain offers a powerful opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of maternal neglect…
Next, Auger says, “We hope to understand in greater detail the basis of naturally occurring neglect and provide treatment paradigms to these animals to restore natural maternal care of offspring.”
Let’s hope that shit’s treatable! Cuz lowered knows there’s nothing worse than a mother who refuses to suckle and groom her own damn kids while babydaddy is out re-planting his seed/being listened to/drinking Pabst with the boys.
Why I’m so pissed off about this article right now;
1) The immediate editorial judgment of what is good and what is bad when referring to the behavior of mice.
2) The glaring lack of comparison data on father mice, despite repeated use of the word “parent” and “parenting”.
3) The inference that mice behavior is completely transferable to human behavior without question, even though humans, ya know, use verbal language and have complex political and cultural structures and stuff.
4) The assumption that Bad mothering may benefit from “treatment paradigms,” which will inevitably be offered by ginormous pharmaceutical companies as a solution to the problem of women who work and women who date women and any woman who doesn’t feel up to providing constant, unappreciated care to another human being entirely dependent on her for survival and the ability to form healthy relationships as an adult.
5) The not-so-inferred-but-totally-stated idea that “good” mothering is what is natural and deviations are unnatural, as in fully against the irrefutable laws of nature that humans have no choice but to abide by.
Okay, any Science! project that tells me what Mother Nature herself has decided for me based on some assumed but yet to be proven ability to make babies simply REEKS of patriarchy ball sack. These kinds of seemingly innocuous and supposedly well-intentioned studies about women (let’s save the children!) are what make up the substantial body of work that keeps us out of the way so that men can carry on with the business of being fully realized human beings.
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April 17, 2008 at 9:15 am
Megan
I’m curious what kind of natural community order these mice have. If we stop seeing them in terms of western cultures ‘isolated family units’, and remember that if a gene survives (and survives prolifically) then it is frequently helpful to at least some situations, then might we not infer from the prevalence of the ‘neglectful mother’ mouse and the ability of the ‘good mother’ mouse to successfully raise foster babies that maybe there are female mice who are cut out for things other than mothering, and that it better serves the mouse community for motheringly inclined mice to raise more babies than their own so that the not motheringly inclined mice can do other productive mousely things?
No proof, of course. I just don’t get why genetics and darwinist thought always rules out the community. It always comes down to ‘good mothers make babies live and bad mothers make babies die therefore those bad mothers are unnatural.’
April 17, 2008 at 9:57 am
Dizzy
Excellent point Megan. I hadn’t thought of it that way.
April 17, 2008 at 2:17 pm
carol
Hmm, why do we need to medicalize it? I would think evolution would solve the problem. “bad” mothers wouldn’t manage to successfully raise children, so the gene dies out.
Oh, wait, that didn’t work yet? then maybe that’s not the damn problem….
April 18, 2008 at 8:37 pm
sigh
jeebus christo on a cracker, they want to define us into submission again (or is it still). not. going. to . happen. keep reading the shitty science for us. bad mother! bad mother!
“These kinds of seemingly innocuous and supposedly well-intentioned studies about women (let’s save the children!) are what make up the substantial body of work that keeps us out of the way so that men can carry on with the business of being fully realized human beings.”
Exactly!