Remember Maria / by John G. Howells.

  • Howells, John G.
Date:
1974
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Remember Maria / by John G. Howells. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    46 REMEMBER MARIA The founders of future families, it seems, spend the major part of their time in the family. It is strikingly apparent that the home is the prédominent milieu of a child. In the first five years it amounts to 93.56 per cent of relating time including sleep; it is less in children over five (84.60 per cent) and for the whole ten years amount to 89.18 per cent of relating time. Thus we have to look for the causes of good emotional health or psychonosis (neurosis) in the heart of the family. The above studies underline also the importance of siblings. They contribute a large amount of relating time, almost as great as the mother. The child in One Boy's Day had no siblings but if children in the home use relating to the same degree as peers outside (the hi^est concentration of care in the above investigation), then their impact on one another must be a major factor in family life. Parents claim recognition of their contribution to children; siblings are less able to ask for theirs. We cannot omit the same careful evaluation of their contribution to family life. At a new birth in the family the feelings of any existing children are immediately engaged. Psychoanalysts have gone on record to maintain that the first two years of a child's hfe is not a period that calls for participation by fathers. The facts published here disprove this contention. Fathers are involved in conception, a positive and essential contribution. They share the anticipation or strain of pregnancy; increasingly they wish to share the joy of the moment of birth. They are full participants from the moment of birth and communicate as freely as mother. Fathers deserve more consideration. For a long time mother has been given her proper place as an important influence in the care of children. Unjustly, father's place has been played down — especially by the experts, strangely enough. A special section here will be devoted to the contribution the father makes in the care of children; it will restore the balance and show him as an equal partner alongside the mother. Both parents, and others, are carers of children and all of them, if they can love, can contribute to their successful upbringing. FATHERING Introduction Fathering is an element in family life as distinct as mothering. Yet legal enactions, social policy and art forms in Western culture, although not in all cultures, neglect fathering in comparison to mothering. The neglect of fathering is at its greatest in contemporary child psychiatry and psychology. In fact the father can be a major influence in health or pathology. Maria, after all, lived with her stepfather as well as with her