Psychobabbling

From PsychCentral.  Do these even need to be spelled out?  That’s depressing. 

1. Showing up late for the appointment.

2. Eating in front of the client.

3. Yawning or sleeping during session.

4. Inappropriate disclosures.

5. Being impossible to reach by phone or email.

6. Distracted by a phone, cell phone, computer or pet.

7. Expressing racial, sexual, musical, lifestyle and religious preferences.

8. Bringing your pet to the psychotherapy session.

9. Hugging and physical contact.

10. Inappropriate displays of wealth or dress.

11. Clock watching.

12. Excessive note-taking.

I’m curious about how the list was generated, whether from patient feedback or just this dude’s opinion.  Either way, watch the bling and keep fluffy at home. 

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Fantastic April Fool’s article from the Onion.  A bunch of people bought it too, maybe because it seems vaguely plausible (or were they in on the joke?) .

“NEW YORK—A new study published in The Journal Of Pediatric Medicine found that a shocking 98 percent of all infants suffer from bipolar disorder. “The majority of our subjects, regardless of size, sex, or race, exhibited extreme mood swings, often crying one minute and then giggling playfully the next,” the study’s author Dr. Steven Gregory told reporters. “Additionally we found that most babies had trouble concentrating during the day, often struggled to sleep at night, and could not be counted on to take care of themselves—all classic symptoms of manic depression.” Gregory added that nearly 100 percent of infants appear to suffer from the poor motor skills and impaired speech associated with Parkinson’s disease.”

This just points to how arbitrary diagnostic criteria can seem, and how relative this stuff is.

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My little dude has a new habit: waking up at 4:30am.  After weeks, nay months, of gloriously silent nights, he is up after last call and ready to party.  He has also concurrently developed separation anxiety, and for the first time gets markedly upset when his loved ones leave his sight.  I can’t help but think that these two things are related.  This is cool because it means that he is developing a sense of himself as separate from us, and is beginning to understand object permanency, that objects continue to exist even when they are not in sight.  He doesn’t understand yet that we’ll be coming back after we leave, so he freaks out.  But while his new found joy in peek-a-boo is hilarious, his early morning attempts to engage us, and his upset when we are not in his room with him indefinitely, is getting to be a real drag.  And it’s a fine line between reassuring him that we’re not abandoning him and joining the party at his crib.  Some suggestions I’ve found include giving him a security or transitional object for comfort (done - he’s not that into it), and putting him to bed earlier because he may be overtired (so far he’s not down with this, but we’ll keep trying).  I must say, I’ve never been so excited for daylight savings time to begin - 4 days and counting.

No Comments | In: personal, psychonerd, sleep | | #

Apparently, it matters.  In this study discussed in the New York Times today, mothers were found to talk and interact with their babies more frequently when they were pushing their babies around in strollers which faced in towards them, as opposed to facing forward.  This makes sense in that face-to-face positioning provides more opportunity for interaction, and the researcher suggests that this may have implications for language development, which is highly dependent on early parent-child communication.  The sample size was quite small, but this seems like a study worth replicating on a larger scale.   I also wonder about the benefits of facing out as well; would this encourage a greater sense of independence and curiosity in the world?

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I’ve been wondering lately about why some mothers  (who have the choice, many do not) chose to stay home with their young children and others return to work.   It seems to be a given in most (but certainly not all) families that the father will return to work, and that assumption is something which would be worth exploring further.  And of course there are lots of families that have two moms or two dads,  and gendered assumptions about the work-family balance take a particularly interesting form in these families (which is discussed in the article I included in this post).  But in families that consist of a mom and a dad, such as my own, I’ve been wondering whether there is any relationship between whether the mother decides to stay at home and the first child’s gender.  In thinking about my friends, certainly not a random sample, it seems that those who have a daughter first are more likely to stay at home.  I myself have a little dude, and I returned to work (which I wrote about in this post).

So I put my psychonerd hat on and found this study conducted at the University of Washington, which asks the question, “Why do some couples adopt a traditional gender-specialized division of labor following childbirth, while others continue to both work full time and purchase childcare services?”   Some interesting findings by Lundberg (2005), from her own research and from the studies she cites (see the article for her references):   

• The birth of a son increases the stablity of the parents’ relationship, relative to the birth of a daughter.
• Fathers spend more time with sons than with daughters.
• The birth of a boy significantly reduces the work hours of the father in the first 3 years (allowing for an increase in the work hours of mothers), relative to the birth of a girl, but this is the case only in families in which the mother is a college graduate. 
• In contrast, mothers of boys who are less educated work significantly less than mothers of girls. 

The findings of this study by Hiedemann, Joesch, & Rose (2004, in Social Science Quarterly) however, indicate that daughters are more likely to be involved in regular, non-relative child care between the ages of 3 and 6 years old.  It’s possible that these findings were based on a sample of families with less-educated mothers, if we are to understand them in relation to Lundberg’s study. 

In my search I found lots of articles about the effect of maternal employment on child development, but hardly any research on the decision about whether or not to return to work.    It certainly seems like something that deserves further exploration, for both mothers and fathers and the expectations about their rolls in the family and the workplace.

1 Comment | In: gender, psychonerd, research, work/family balance | | #

Dr. Heather over at Baby Shrink has a great new post about Attachment Parenting, and how to understand it in terms of the progression of infant development.  Her point is that though attachment is the foundation of emotional development, there is a need to appreciate the evolving balance between closeness and independence as children mature, and that AP sometimes may not fully appreciate this duality:

“Movement away from the parent requires a means of communicating over distance with that parent: When you crawl across the room, it’s nice to be able to say ‘Doggie!’ and to point at the doggie, to get your parents’ attention. Communication becomes more necessary when the child can move away from the parent. And communication is a symbolic way of continuing attachment. We can tell older babies I love you! And their ability to understand abstract communication helps them to feel the love, without being physically held. It’s not that physical comfort is no longer necessary, but rather, the baby now has a new, more advanced way to be attached; through communication. And that allows the baby to become more independent, and venture out, away from the parent…

… How is this different from Attachment Parenting? Yeah, I know that AP understands and appreciates the nature of ‘attachment’ — they used it in the name of the approach, after all. And I’m totally with them on the use of AP principles, but only with very young infants, and only when that infant is constitutionally amenable to the intense physical contact of AP. As I said in my previous post, AP comments very little on those infants who simply do better with a little time and space on their own; a little less handling — and little ‘breaks’ from being ‘attached’ all the time. Many of my readers have babies whose sensory systems simply could not handle all that attachment, and are so much happier with a little ‘breathing room’. And as infants become toddlers, they crave less and less dependence — and more and more independence. And we, as parents, need to walk that tightrope of ‘Rapprochement‘ with them.”

Really hits the nail on the head, if you ask me.

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Here’s a cute article about raising a mama’s boy from Babble.  On a more serious note in the piece, the author quotes a psychologist who has written several books on the topic:

“ ’Because they have never been boys themselves, mothers project a great deal of their own experiences with men onto their sons,’ says Michael Thompson, Ph.D., author of It’s a Boy!: Understanding Your Son’s Development from Birth to Age 18 and the New York Times best seller, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. ‘If they look at their sons and see in them a loving grandfather, father or brother it is tremendously positive, but if they view an ex-husband or an abusive boyfriend, it can be quite the opposite. We all project our biggest disappointments and greatest happiness on the opposite gender.’ “

I think this goes both ways; mothers and father project lots of stuff onto their children of either sex, and our expectations of what it means to be a boy or a girl are hoisted on our kids even before their born.  But maybe we’re not doomed to repeat our past relationships in our present entirely, with a little insignt and humility that is.  Or if it’s really bad, therapy.  But I’m biased, of course. 

And I’m not sure if I agree that we project our biggest disappointments and greatest happiness on children of the opposite gender; some would argue that the ways we identify with our children of our same gender are even more powerful because our feelings about ourselves, which are nearly impossible to be objective about, are projected onto them.  Sounds familliar…  oh yeah, this was the topic of my dissertation:

Abstract:  This study was an investigation of the influence of child gender on mothers’ representations of their child and of themselves in relation to their child, based on Nancy Chodorow’s theory that boys and girls develop distinct object representations as a result of the different ways their mothers care for and relate to them.  Interviews of 33 mothers, in which they were asked to describe themselves and their children, were qualitatively analyzed with attention to themes of sameness and difference, and statistically analyzed using the Differentiation-Relatedness scale, an empirically validated measure of separation and individuation, to evaluate whether mothers’ representations of their children and the relationship between them differ as a function of their child’s gender. The results lend some support for the idea that mothers identify with their daughters, and represent them as less separate from themselves.  Additionally, the importance of the influence of family members outside of the mother-child dyad, in particular fathers and siblings, on mothers’ self and other representations was bolstered. 

So we project onto both sons and daughters, just in different ways.  I just looked at mothers in my study, but would love to know more about fathers’ experiences with their children as well.

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A friend sent this Face Memory Test to me, pretty cool.   Apparently you’re not supposed to do as well if you’re tired, but I got 95% on both and I have a 4 month old.  It’s good to know I still have some of my faculties.

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Another list from PsyBlog.  Some of these seem a bit manipulative, but I guess it’s ok as long as your intentions are pure.  What was that again about paving the road to hell? 

My favorite is that self-disclosure can improve interpersonal connection, though I guess even this could be used towards nefarious ends.  As a wise somebody once said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you.  But the take home message of the importance of trust and openness is a good one nonetheless.

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Developmental psychologists love stage theories.  Although I’ve learned about and even taught these theories, they haven’t come to life as much as they will as I parent my little dude.  So I’m going to go through the ones that stand out to me, to elaborate where he is in his development according to each theorist:

Freud: My dude is in the oral phase of psychosexual development, which is characterized by a focus on the mouth as the center of sensation and taking in the world, evidenced by the importance of sucking and eating and the tendency to put things in one’s mouth to explore their characteristics.  This phase lasts until 18 months, so he’ll be here for a while.

Mahler: According to her theory of separation-individuation, until about his 5th month, the dude will be in the normal symbiotic phase, in which he does not understand himself as a separate being from me.  By his 9th month or so, he will progress through the hatching subphase towards separation and individuation,  characterized by his increased alertness and studying of the environment alternating with checking back with me. who serves as an orienting focus. 

Piaget: Until around 2 years of age, the dude will be in the sensorimotor phase of cognitive development, in which he uses his senses and motor abilities to take in and make sense of his immediate surroundings, which constitute his entire world.  At the end of this phase, he will start to develop the understanding of object permanence, that things continue to exist even when they are out of sight. 

Erikson: Throughout his infancy, the dude will be in the trust versus mistrust stage of psychosocial development, during which his relationship with the social world will involve the development of a sense of trust in himself, in others, and in the relationship between the two.  Although an experience of trust is important to establish, a bit of mistrust can translate well into a healthy sense of skepticism as he goes out into the world.

We’ve got a bit of time until the dude approaches the next stages of most of these theories, but it will be interesting to keep these in mind as he develops over the next few years and I hope to revisit this again as he grows.

1 Comment | In: personal, psychonerd, theory | | #