Medicine: MOTHER KNOWS BEST

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MANY topnotch psychologists and psychiatrists have been edging up to the revolutionary idea that perhaps they are not, after all, the Supreme Court in matters of child rearing: giving parents a rigid set of rules on how to raise their kids might be all wrong. At a Toronto mental-health congress in the last two weeks, this feeling reached a climax: mother and father know best.

The learned delegates stressed the need for more effective psychiatric help in cases where parents fail to accept and love a child or to help it develop a sense of individuality. But top authorities roundly denounced some of their own colleagues and non-professional pundits who had bullied parents into raising children "by the book." Outstanding views:

Dr. Gerald Caplan of the Harvard School of Public Health: "We are beginning to realize that there are no rigid prescriptions for successful personality development—as, for example, whether the child should be breast-fed or bottle-fed, given early or late toilet training, disciplined by spankings or not. These things have different meanings in different families. A healthy parent-child relationship is characterized by sensitivity to the child's individual needs at any particular moment [which may be] in the realm of freedom or control."

Dr. Karl S. Bernhardt of Toronto's Institute of Child Study: "The rapid changes in the nature of advice to parents about child rearing . . . have led some to question whether parent education is desirable at all . . . Parent education which made parents more comfortable with their children, which helped them to understand them better and accept them more adequately could be valuable . . . Parent education which focuses too narrowly on techniques could produce anxieties, feelings of guilt and tensions in parents."

Dr. Hilde Bruch, child psychiatrist at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and author of Don't Be Afraid of Your Child: "It seems to me the time has come to leave mother and child alone . . . Parents are the persons they are and they cannot be dealt with in an abstract or dictatorial way, like puppets . . .

"The outstanding common factor of the many different approaches is the recklessness with which they are recommended as the 'best' for the future development of 'a child,' without an effort having been made to verify these predictions. Yet they are presented to parents as scientific facts, often with the implied or open threat that any neglect might injure the child and result in neurosis in the dim and dis tant future. Many child-psychology theorists talk with the voice of an oracle predicting future doom . . .

"[Our] overeager compulsion to do something, and to do it fast, has led to ... a belief that there are absolute answers that can be applied to all children the world over.

Whatever solutions have been propagated as a new white magic, they relate at best to a non existent, generic abstraction called 'The Child.' but not to real children who grow up in families, with all their traditional restrictions and difficulties but also traditional emotional support."