Most of us believe that the substitutes we provide for natural mothering are just as good as real mothering - that they are essentially the same. We also believe that the substitutes have made life easier and better for both mothers and children. Usually our comparisons are based on what we want to believe, rather than on fact because most of us have not had any experience with the real thing. Hardly any of us have ever seen a baby cared for in the natural way or have known a person who was cared for, in infancy and childhood, in the ways natural to our species. Consequently, we do not know what babies are really like. We only know what babies who don't have real mothers are like.

Babies and children are cared for differently in different cultures. This creates differences in how they develop and the kind of people they become. Although cultures vary in their views on how babies should be cared for, there is no difference between babies born in different societies. At birth all human babies are more similar than they are different. They have the same structure and biology. They begin life and develop in the same environment prior to birth, the womb world. They emerge into the world outside the womb with the same requirements necessary to continue to live and develop, requirements which they cannot satisfy on their own. They must continue to be nurtured after birth by an external nurturing source.

For the bulk of human time the nurturing source has been the natural mother. Mother and infant did not evolve separately, but together as part of the same process; the creation and development of a new human being. Humans have removed the necessity for the mother to be part of the process after the infant is born. But most mothers still are the chief care-takers of babies, even though their biological role has been altered or even eliminated. This change in the mother's role in the developmental process has changed how infants develop and has even altered their actual development. The infant must adapt, as he develops, to a nurturing source which is frequently absent rather than relying on one which is continually present. This causes an increase in development in relation to oneself and a decrease in development in relation to mother. There is an increase in reliance on oneself and objects to find security and satisfaction The infant with a fake mother must learn to delay gratification, tolerate frequent frustration, and be comfortable in prolonged periods of isolation.

Real mothers not only differ from fake mothers in how they respond to their babies, but also in how they see their role in relation to their babies. Real mothers make a total commitment to their babies; fake mothers make only a partial one. By nursing and being continuously present to their babies, real mothers do not sever their attachment to their babies after the umbilical cord is cut. The baby remains, as prior to birth, dependent on the mother for life and growth. Fake mothers sever their biological connection to their babies by not nursing and by establishing their physical separateness in both place and time. Others can assume their role allowing them to be absent from their babies. The baby experiences that mother is not always there.

Real mothers do not have to change who their babies are. They are there for their babies, and the mothers adapt to who their babies are. Fake mothers, by eliminating their biological connection to their babies, must make their babies adapt to who they are and to the modifications they have imposed on the natural nurturance process. Babies evolved to have real mothers - to not be separate from their mothers after birth. The fake mother, because she is separate from her baby, must make her baby live as separate from her. This is why babies of fake mothers cry a great deal and often have sleeping and feeding problems early in life whereas, babies with real mothers do not. Babies of fake mothers struggle against separateness, which is not their normal state.

How does the fake mother change her baby into something other than a real baby? By believing that her baby is wrong and by acting on this belief. This belief is supported by her culture and everyone around her, including experts on babies. Her immediate job is to make the baby right. The baby's need to be with his nurturing source, his mother, is perceived as abnormal, wrong, and bad. The mother's need to be separate, away from her baby, not present to it is not wrong or abnormal; the baby's need for her is. The baby must be trained; he must learn that he cannot always be with his mother. This is taught, not only through the living arrangements in which baby sleeps in his separate crib and in his separate room, but by the mother's emotional response to the baby's need to be with her. The demand, if not in keeping with the mother's schedule and life separate from the baby, is met with resistance, anger, and rejection.

The crying of the baby is also viewed as abnormal and wrong unless he is hungry or in pain. The baby's need to be with mother, his need for human presence and contact, is not considered legitimate. It is viewed as a need for attention which diminishes its authenticity and its importance. The focus is not on the mother's unwillingness to be with baby but on the baby's excessive need. The baby must learn to wait for attention, to wait for the proper time when it can be administered, just as he must wait for nourishment when he is fed on a schedule. Because the mother has chosen separateness from her baby and lives separate from him, she cannot understand baby's objection to being separate from her. The baby is accused and convicted of the crime of being excessively demanding. The mother either ignores the crying or responds to it with anger, punishment, or doses of sedatives. Eventually the baby is made right. He seldom cries.

Babies are born virtually helpless and are entirely dependent on other humans for security, satisfaction, and life. They have only one power: the power to elicit the emotion of tenderness in another human. Everything about a baby has been designed by nature to elicit tender feelings and a caring response. The baby's appearance, smallness, helplessness, and cry are supposed to make his mother take care of him, not ignore, abuse, or harm him.

In the natural world in which we evolved, a baby who was unable to elicit a tender and caring response from his mother would perish. In our world babies still do elicit the response of tenderness, but they can live without it. Our substitutes for mother allow a baby to live and develop even if the caretaker is not governed by tender feelings. We have replaced the emotional response with procedures, methods, objects, and ideas of right and wrong. Scheduled bottle feeding, as practiced in hospitals and by most fake mothers, has become a mechanical routine. The use of the bottle prop allows babies to feed themselves. Cribs, carriages, playpens, and other man-made objects minimize the time infants spend in their mothers' arms. But even more destructive to the development of a tender, nurturing attitude in mothers is the stated prohibition in our world against giving in to a baby's wish for mother's presence. The mother must struggle against her feelings of tenderness, lest she do something wrong like sleep with her baby or pick him up whenever he cries. It is not uncommon in our world for mothers who allow their tender feelings to take charge to keep it a secret. They do not allow others to know they sleep with their babies or that they are still nursing a baby at the age of two or three years, The negative attitude toward biological mothering is so strong in our society that the mother often keeps it a secret that she is a real mother and not a fake one.

The belief that a baby's need to continuously be with his mother is wrong and that going along with it is harmful has taken the heart out of mothering. By negating the essence of the mother-infant relationship, their oneness, we have made the care of babies a set of chores: feeding, diapering, putting baby to sleep, and providing attention, quality time, and love. We focus on doing the right or wrong thing in terms of baby's future, rather than on the present satisfaction for mother and baby in their nurturing union. Infant care has been made into a power struggle in which the mother must suppress her feelings of tenderness in order to change her baby into something he was not meant to be.

Once the baby gives up his need for tenderness and accepts life in separateness, he is no longer a human baby, he is something else. It is difficult to know what that something else is. Psychologists who have studied animal behavior know that animals which require parental care after birth can only develop social behavior appropriate to their species if they are cared for in the manner normal to their species. This means that animals raised in isolation or by an animal of another species or in ways that are unnatural to their species are, as adults, very strange animals. They turn out to be unsociable, anti-social and most often will not, or do not know how to, mate. If they do mate and have offspring, they will not care for them or will need assistance from humans to do so.

Among mammals, which includes humans, it is not simply the genetic makeup and biological structure with which the animal is born that makes it that kind of animal. The structure is necessary, but it is appropriate mothering which makes a mouse a mouse, a lion a lion, and a human a human. Without real mothering the animal may look like others of its species, but it has become something else, something unnatural, something different and less than it might have been.

Five: Fake Mothers

Seven: Are Mothers Necessary?