Respect Sat 14th Jan

Yesterday and today the government's respect agenda was in the news, most discussion relating to teenage behaviour, though taking in child and adult. Talk of what is meant by respect did not encompass its psychological components. Respect for others must flow from self-respect, which encompasses self-esteem and self-discipline, that is self-control. Self-esteem requires self-worth, but valuing oneself grows from being valued and that takes us back to the first year of life. To love oneself one must have been loved as a baby, to value oneself one must have been valued as a baby. I am not repeating myself, to be loved and to be valued of two different things. Too many babies today are loved, more or less, but not valued. Psychotherapists are very clear on the importance of being loved just for who we are not for what we do; but no one has grasped the importance of being equally valued for what we do, or rather for our function if I can put it like that. At this stage I must go back to the evolutionary situation if I am to make you understand what I'm talking about.

In chapters 9 and 10 I have described the relationship of mother and infant as one of mutual care and support, though clearly a very asymmetrical one. For example, as social animals we derive comfort and support from companionship even without a realistic basis for this; I remember feeling quite safe lost in a strange city as a child because I had a friend with me, the same age of course and equally lost. So one "function" of an infant for its mother is to provide that level of comfort and support that exists when we are not alone. (Just think of comfort and support provided for elderly people by a pet). But the extreme vulnerability of the bipedal mother required more from her infant as I have detailed elsewhere, and all this is denied to modern more affluent babies. The experience from birth of being regularly separated from mother provides an ingrained foundational experience of being value-less, because mother functions without the baby: the baby is not necessary to the mother. In the same way, a lot of self-respect comes from achievement and involves self-discipline; on the Pleistocene savanna the infant was continuously required to exercise self-discipline or self-control in support of a mother working hard at survival. (A fruitful area of research might be to study the personalities of adults who grew up from infancy with disabled mothers which I would expect to confirm what I have found with clients reared by loving mothers in externally stressful circumstances, a very positive effect!). Self-discipline is a term for adults not babies, but I use it to make clear the developmental link between the adult ability and the baby's repeated exercise of its survival based instinctual responses to signals from the mother's body, responses which support her e.g. sleeping when she is walking in search of food.

A fair number of younger adults today had first year of life experiences involving either regular separation from mother, or a claustrophobic excess of care that results from life at home with a mother with only household tasks to distract her. Parkinson's law, in the forefront of the public mind when I was in my early 20s, seems to have disappeared from consciousness but remains profoundly true: work expands to fill the time available and the work of baby care is no exception. Babies cannot naturally be that much trouble or the species would have been dead as the dodo before it ever became sapient. Read Margaret Mead' s Growing up in New Guinea to find out that babies can learn not to disturb mothers bead work, spread out on the floor, as they learn to crawl. In other words they acquire self-discipline long before we consider it possible.

The solution to the modern issue of respect is Working Babies! By that I mean babies that go to work with their mothers: babies in the office, at the supermarket checkout, in the factory, on location! Impossible I hear you cry. Just as women in many work places were once impossible, just as disabled people in many workplaces were once impossible, just so impossible is the baby in a workplace. By bringing babies out of the ghetto and back into the mainstream of normal life fulfilling their normal function as part of the dyad, that is as the purpose, joy, and support of their working mothers, we will be showing respect for the needs of babies, which is to be with their mother, and letting them build their natural foundation of self-respect, self-worth, self-discipline that could lead to a happy, productive and socially integrated adulthood. I'm quite sure that the cost of adapting working conditions and facilities to accommodate babies would be offset by the increased productivity, reduction in sick leave etc etc.