Having a surrogate mother with a
comforting touch is half the equation. Movement and touch together
can fend off the crippling emotional and behavioral effects of S-SAD
Syndrome.
Dr. James W. Prescott, PhD, is a
developmental psychologist who developed many of the principles that
govern our work at Tiger Touch.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS:
Maternal Care - Care given to an infant by its mother or someone
acting as a caretaker.
Surrogate Mother
- Anything that takes on some of the role of a real mother. The cloth-covered "mother" in Mason and Berkson's
experiments was a source of warmth and softness which could hold a baby bottle.
S-SAD Syndrome
- Problems caused by a lack of touch and movement during infancy. They range
from fear of social interaction and odd, repeating behaviors like head-banging,
to violent outbursts and the inability to pair or to raise offspring. The
whole name is "Somato - Sensory Affectional Deprivation Syndrome" which literally
means "symptoms caused by a lack of loving touch."
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NATURE HATES A VACUUM:
The worst type of maternal care is
none at all. In primate laboratories
where newborns are separated from their mothers at birth, there is minimal
physical body contact with human attendants or other young primates. The
young are left to feed themselves from a bottle. These terrible conditions result in many
kinds of emotional and social problems such as depression and toe sucking as infants, self-mutilation during adolescence
and adulthood, and adults who are excessively violent, with poor
pairing and maternal skills. Such mother-deprived
infants grow up unable to give normal maternal care to their own infants. Life
threatening abuse and neglect of offspring often make it impossible to leave
young with abnormal mothers.
ISOLATION AND "S-SAD SYNDROME":
Infants raised in isolation suffer
from social deprivation and sensory deprivation. Work done in the early
1960s claimed that social deprivation--the lack of companionship--was
responsible for the majority of damage to isolated infants.
Dr. James W. Prescott, whose work made this article possible, strongly
disagreed. He knew of a great many
laboratory observations that pointed to the other conclusion: a lack of touch and
movement during infancy results disturbed social, pairing, and parental behaviors in
adulthood. Prescott referred to this pattern of illness as S-SAD Syndrome
(short for "Somato - Sensory Affectional Deprivation Syndrome").
The most important work that supports Dr.
Prescott's ideas was done by Dr. William Mason and Dr. Gershon Berkson.
These researchers raided infant monkeys in single cages but within sight and
hearing of other infant monkeys. These monkeys could socialize with other
animals in the room in every way but body touch and movement. If social
deprivation had been the major problem with isolated infants, they should have
been free from S-SAD symptoms. This was not the case.
They raised another group of monkeys with a surrogate mother to cling to,
similar to having a teddy bear as a companion. It didn't look very
motherly--a Clorox bottle with a fur rug wrapped around it, with a pie pan
bolted on the bottom of the bottle that the infant monkey could sit on.
The monkeys clung to it they way they would have held to their mother
(right).
Half of the surrogate mothers were made so they could not be moved about.
The other half were made so they could be swung from side to side, or raised and
lowered by levers. So half of the monkeys were moved about by
their surrogate mothers, and the other half were not.
As you might imagine, the monkeys raised with the
swinging surrogates had been exposed to touch and movement and did not develop
S-SAD Syndrome. The monkeys raised with the non-moving surrogates had some
of the behavioral disorders such as thumb sucking, but did not develop the full
S-SAD Syndrome because they had something soft to touch and cuddle. |
