Mother and child disunion: don't take a mother's love for granted

Science News, March 20, 2004 by Bruce Bower

Around 1930, northern Taiwanese women began to raise the majority of their daughters, and the demand for "little daughters-in-law" receded, Wolf notes. Young people had long complained about being pushed together too early in minor marriages, and social changes, such as expanded primary education and wage-paying job opportunities, that followed Japanese occupation a generation earlier, had greatly eroded parents' authority over their children, Wolf says.

TIES THAT BOND In the realm of lost mother love, Taiwan isn't unique. From the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, "European women also gave their children away with no more--it seems to me even less--reason" than Taiwanese did, Wolf holds.

Historical documents and travelers' accounts describe a popular northern European practice of sending boys and girls, at about age 7, to live in other people's houses to perform menial labor as apprentices until adulthood. In many European cities, women--and not just aristocrats--often sent their babies and young children to be raised in foundling hospitals or by wet nurses in the country. This practice may have been more likely for mothers who never provided significant child care and who therefore may have left their maternal sentiments untapped, Wolf conjectures.

In contrast, the Taiwanese evidence shows that women who did nurse and protect their daughters for at least several months still gave them away. If a mother's love for a daughter had kicked in, it usually wasn't strong enough to outweigh her practical concerns.

Wolf's take on the limits of motherly love has attracted skepticism. Cross-cultural studies indicate that most women harbor a fundamental desire to protect their children, says psychologist Carol George of Mills College in Oakland, Calif. That propensity, sculpted by natural selection, is flexible enough to be suppressed in times of duress or threat when a woman is convinced that she's powerless to protect her babies, George proposes.

Mothers who have limited resources and also regard a child as extremely difficult to raise or unlikely to produce grandchildren--because of factors such as illness--are most likely to resort to adoption, child abuse, and even child killing, George theorizes.

Fears about their families' economic futures and the loss of influence over their sons, she says, could have caused Taiwanese mothers to conceal or suppress maternal sentiments for daughters they had cared for.

In Wolf's Taiwan sample, in-laws of childbearing women might also have been the ones orchestrating the minor marriages, contends Min-Tao Hsu of Taiwan's Kaohsiung Medical School. She has interviewed many elderly women who spoke of having resigned themselves to giving away daughters whom they loved because of incessant pressures from in-laws. It was, as some of these mothers told Hsu, "the choice of no choice."

It's also possible that Wolf documented a misguided caregiving strategy that evaporated in Taiwan because it wasn't "evolutionarily sensible," comments psychologist Jude Cassidy of the University of Maryland in College Park. A system of minor marriages that reduced couples' fertility by causing them to think of each other as siblings may have simply been a short-lived oddity, she says.