Phobos And Deimos, Child Psychology And Adult Mythology

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

About the prejudices associated with prolonged (longer than a year, sometimes much more than a year) breastfeeding.

To begin with, within child psychology, most of the concepts associated with breastfeeding are psychoanalytic.

The main feature of all psychoanalytic concepts is not just their lack of confirmation by any research, but also their fundamental non-confirmation.

If anyone has read Popper, psychoanalysis is not falsified; theoretical constructions are made in such a way that, in principle, they cannot be refuted, and, consequently, cannot be confirmed.

Let's start with the timing.

Why is the sacred period of "normal" feeding considered to be one year, and not ten months or one and a half years?

The fact is that the pioneer of theorizing on the topic of hepatitis B, Dr. Freud, who did not observe real babies, but reconstructed the events of childhood in the process of interpreting the psychodynamic phenomena of his adult patients, believed that it was up to one year old that the child was on the so-called. oral stage of psychosexual development.

At this very stage, sucking is the main developmental activity.

After a year, the child must move to a new stage - anal, and solve the problems of potty training. Freud believed that excessive satisfaction of the desire to suckle the breast can lead to passivity, dependence in relationships, etc. These myths are broadcast to this day.

By the way, other psychoanalysts had a different idea of when to stop feeding: Melanie Klein believed that six months was enough, Françoise Dolto and Winnicott talked about 9 months. All these terms, in general, are sucked from the finger, this is pure theorizing.

By the way, Dolto believed that feeding after 9 months could lead to mental retardation. She did this at a time when, even in the USSR, it was well known that mental retardation causes either extensive damage to the cerebral cortex, or prolonged and severe deprivation - as happens in children who grew up with animals.

Alas, Dolto was not interested in such particulars.

As a specialist in this particular area, I can tell you for sure that breastfeeding, even before retirement, can in no way cause mental retardation or speech retardation. Their reasons are completely different.

Now - about all the horrors that await children who are not excommunicated in time.

Myth one: long-term breastfeeding causes developmental delay in the baby.

For example, Dolto has the idea that in order for a child to develop symbolic communication (speech), he must be weaned, since feeding is a bodily communication, not symbolic. Dolto goes so far as to assert that “children with psychopathology are always those who were weaned unsuccessfully by their mothers” (what a heresy, forgive me, but it was already the 80s, you could have taken an interest in real children with psychopathology) …

What is the peculiarity of these stages? Most importantly, they are speculative. No, points at 1 year old and at 3 years old are really some kind of "milestones" in the development of the child. But there is no evidence that sucking is most important for a child under one year old, and from one to three years old - potty training (so that potty training would be the leading activity at an early age? Except in a very strange family, to say the least) …

As the fundamental principles of development, both Dolto, Freud, and Klein put forward something absolutely speculative, not to say absurd.

The harsh reality: breastfed babies develop a little faster, they have better developed articulatory muscles (due to a special type of sucking), they have a higher IQ on average.

Myth two: there is something of incest in long-term feeding.

Another source of the myth is the sexualization of the breast in principle. It should be noted that erogenous zones, except for the genitals, are culturally specific, and the breast is something sexual not in all cultures. Thus, we have a perverse logic: we declare that the breast is an erogenous zone, something connected with sex, and since the child sucks it, this is sex.

If we declared the dimple on the back of the head under the pigtail as a taboo zone, as in one tribe, the life of our children would be easier.

Reality: When a child eats, he eats (and also communicates), rather than having sex. He is not yet aware that in this culture it was decided to hide the chest, and not the dimple in the back of the head. Don't confuse cultural conventions with reality. Breasts were created by nature to feed babies.

The third myth: there is "nothing" in milk after a year.

Reality: milk after a year has a much higher nutritional value than cow's milk and products from it, which are recommended for baby food.

The fourth myth: children grow up to be infantile from long-term feeding.

Reality: to begin with - no one can really explain what infantilism is. In general, an infantile person is someone that I personally do not like (apparently). And to say about a three-year-old that he is childish is a complete absurdity: childishness is childishness, and at the age of three it is strange not to behave like a child.

With regards to the "experience of frustration": in general, it is known that roaming is not useful, but harmful, and that this does not lead to "allocation of one's own I", but mainly leads to delayed development, poor weight gain and other manifestations of unhappiness. Good or bad for a child a situation when all his desires are immediately satisfied, and if good / bad, until / from what age is an open question, but the reality in life is that it is simply physically impossible for a child to satisfy all his desires immediately, especially after a year … Of course, no one has studied this about the effect of feeding on functioning in adulthood, and it is hardly possible. So all this remains unfounded.

The fifth myth: after a year, only mom needs feeding.

Reality: it's not moms running after the baby, swinging their boobs. As a rule, a child asks for breast - and often protests if it is not given. I wonder if anyone will doubt that the child really wants an apple if he comes up to his mother and says "give me an apple"? Breast milk after a year is a serious source of nutrients, vitamins, immunoglobulins and other benefits. If something is useful to a child and he wants it, it is very stupid not to give it to him. In general, here we can talk about total distrust in relation to the child. Pay attention to this twist: the child does not just not know what is good for him; he cannot even know what exactly he wants. It is not so much the benefits of feeding for the child that are denied, as his subjective experience. "You don't really want that." I do not believe that any child's wishes should be immediately satisfied. But it is absurd to deny the very fact of their existence. By doing this, an adult does not bring up a child - he defends himself from his fears: fear of being a bad mother, fear of the very fact of the child's existence of desires, of his own will. Let's face it, if the baby is not weaned, he will most likely continue to feed well beyond the first year. Why? Because he wants it. Mom may want a lot about the child (for example, so that he immediately teaches me to go to the potty, patiently wait for something and not yell when he is being dressed). Usually, if the mother wants something, but the child does not, the child makes it clear his reluctance. Here feeding from a spoon, especially in the amounts prescribed by the norms, is really not always necessary for children. And that's when the mother often runs after the child with a plate of porridge. Why doesn't anyone protest, one wonders?

Myth six: a child cannot refuse to feed himself, because he does not yet know that it is possible to live without a breast.

Reality: a lot of children after a year have the experience of being laid without a breast - by a dad, nanny or grandparents; children after a year, as a rule, eat solid food, many with a good appetite. Thinking that they don’t give up their breasts because they don’t know how great it is to live without it is like thinking that people don’t give up caviar just because they don’t know how great it is to eat barley and don’t want to move. from a large house to a room in the basement because they do not know that they are not free from their imposed mansion.

A child after a year may well live without a breast. He just doesn't want to (and does the right thing).

The seventh myth: the mother feeds the child because of her selfishness: she wants to bind the child to herself or it is so convenient for her, and this is bad.

Let's start by saying that there is some contradiction in talking about feeding after a year. Some opponents argue that this is very painful for the mother and labor-intensive, others - that the mother makes her life easier in this way: so that, therefore, the child is not taught to fall asleep separately (otherwise he, of course, will ask for a boob before retirement), so as not to take him I'm going for walks with me, so as not to engage in super-developmental activities with him - my mother shoves his boob.

In general, first you need to decide whether it facilitates or complicates feeding the mother's life:)

Is it bad to want to make your life easier? In my opinion, no. In my opinion, in a situation of some chronic lack of energy that mothers of young children have, especially if the child is not the only one or the mother is working, you need to use any way to make your job easier, regardless of whether the grandmothers like it on the bench.

In general, the rhetoric about selfishness is a separate song. Going to work early, for example, or having a candlelit dinner with your husband is “good” selfishness, and feeding is “bad” selfishness. Which selfishness is acceptable and which is not is a purely conventional question and depends on the opinion of the reference group.

Further: the mother feeds in order to tie the child to her. I have little to say about this, because, in my opinion, a child of an early age and without breastfeeding is very dependent on adults and is strongly attached to his parents, primarily, as a rule, to his mother. This is the age norm. As for the child's ability to stay with unfamiliar adults, which for some unknown reason is called "independence", then, in my experience, infants are no different from non-infants in this regard. Whether the ability to be without a mother at 2 has any intrinsic value - I'm not sure if it has anything to do with what is called maturity and independence in adulthood - a very dubious question. At the moment, everything that is on this topic has been written with a pitchfork on the water.

And all this is even more doubtful against the background of very specific data on the nutritional value of breast milk. When a mother feeds her child with any other healthy food, for example, apples, carrots and beef, we do not assume that she is doing this out of a desire to assert herself as a good mother or other selfish reasons. It is most logical to assume that since 1. milk is useful, 2. mother knows about it, then mother feeds the child with healthy milk precisely because it is useful.

Myth Eight: Feeding at night is a way to avoid sex with your husband.

Reality: it is not feeding that interferes with personal life, but fatigue. Yes, night feeds can be exhausting (however, not all babies who are not fed after a year sleep well). But actually feeding and sleeping together can only interfere if the marital bed is the only plane in the apartment where you can have sex. And there are many ways to avoid sex when you want to avoid it.

Most importantly: there is no "psychologists have established" in relation to prolonged feeding. There is practically no psychological research on this topic. All there is is pure theorizing and someone's personal observations, the results of which, even if true in a particular case, cannot be generalized to the entire population. That is, if a child comes to a psychologist with problems, and these problems are somehow related to feeding, this does not tell us anything about all other nursing children, because parents who have no problems with children do not go to a psychologist and cannot become a subject. observation.

The approach of helping specialists (doctors, psychologists) to feeding often reminds me of an old programmer's anecdote about the algorithm for boiling water. Problem conditions: there is a kettle, a tap and a stove, you need to boil the water. Solution: open the tap, pour water into the kettle, boil. The conditions of the problem change: the water has already been poured. What to do? Answer: pour out the water, reducing the problem to the previous one. I have a clear feeling that psychologists and doctors want to remove feeding somewhere, just so that the conditions of the problem become clearer to them. That is, not for the good of the child or family, but to simplify the mental work for oneself. As a proof link, I give a link to this page: Those who are especially meticulous can go to references, there are references to articles, mainly published in academic medical journals, and read primary sources.