Hello Amy
These sites might be informative:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/Erik-Erikson.html
http://www.vtaide.com/png/ERIK1-4.htm
Very best wishes,
Mary
The mother-child bond is a paradigm observed in studies of rats. It has been found that there is a critical window soon after birth in which adaptation of socioemotive stability takes place (for humans, 0-8 months after birth). It was shown among rats that, beyond their critical window of time-sensitive development, the offspring of the attentive mother were longitudinally stable even after being swapped to a non-caring mother. In contrast, the offspring of the non-caring mother were found to have pervasive problems even after their mother was swapped with the caring mother.
Another study of Russian children in a failed orphanage had found that a vast number of the children had grown up with the pervasively problematic anti-social disorders and behavior--a behavior that is largely rejected by culturally universal social sanctioning behavior. By virtue of that, it is possible that the mother-child bonding behavior in social species is an adaptation which addresses that very adaptive problem.
Beyond that, I would venture to say that the overall model unfortunately doesn't apply to parenting. That no universal parenting methodology evolved explains Draconian mother-on-mother conflict/gossip about parenting techniques.
Erikson implies a number of conditions to be fulfilled by parents, like (1) a necessity to develop to meet the challenge of a new stage of a child (2) prepare conditions for making child at least "twice-born", (3) learn necessity to enable "moratorium" in development, etc. So altogether it is an issue of the quality of reading this model. I have inserted a number of criticisms concerning image of Eriksonian model in various manuals of psychology in my recent book (in Polish), entitled: "VERSUS. On structural duality of developmental stages in the life cycle ecology in a psychodynamic model by Erikson" (Impuls, Cracow, 2015, pp. 427).
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Psychology
- Social Psychology