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Blame the Mother, Never Mind about the Evidence
One after the other, three babies in the Folbigg family died before any had reached their first birthday. That was between 1989 and 1993. Then in 1997, their sister Laura also died. She was 18 months old. No-one knew how the four children had died….
Chapter Six: Concluding Remarks
Concluding Remarks reminds readers of the creativity and the power of humans as group members, whether young or old. Babies in Groups has undertaken to build hitherto-lacking pathways to connect new-borns with the group-immersed grownup, based on research which shows that the groupness of humans...
Chapter Four: Making Visible Ordinary Groupness
Making Visible Ordinary Groupness documents what happens when a high quality childcare service adopts a group-based approach to early education. The chapter emphasises how familiar it seems – if given the opportunity – that infants enjoy themselves together, play together, have emotional responses to each...
The Shifting Paradigm of Attachment Theory: From Parent to Early Childhood Educator
In recent decades, the potent echoes of John Bowlby’s attachment theory have permeated not only our understanding of infant-mother dynamics but have also intricately woven themselves into the fabric of early childhood education. With a clear transference of the traditional attachment narratives, the scrutinizing lens...
Impossible Standards: Making Educators into Substitute Mums
From the 1970s on, advocates of attachment theory have urged that attendance by very young children at centres for early childhood education will harm their development. They aim to encourage, shame or scare parents – meaning mothers – into caring for their young children at...
Chapter Five: Prisms and Multiplicities
Prisms and Multiplicities shows how ignoring group contexts in many traditions of psychotherapy can distort descriptions of what happens in therapy, with serious unintended consequences. For example, identifying mothers alone as the effective ‘environment’ for their babies, makes mothers the fulcrum of mental health and...
Chapter One: Changing Stories
Changing Stories assembles a variety of evidence for a group-based picture of human beginnings. Cross-cultural comparisons remind us that most babies around the world, and through history, have grown up within groups of kith and kin, not home-alone with a mother. Primate research aligns human...
Chapter Three: This Is Not Happening
This Is Not Happening shifts from describing infants in all-baby trios to the study of baby-only quartets. In so doing it takes up the challenge of moving beyond familiar cultural scripts which focus on individuals, couples, or ‘jealous’ threesomes. Extended vignettes show baby foursomes feature...
The Baby Vanishes: How the Infant in Infant-Mother Attachment Disappeared
‘What babies need’ was the focus for the observations which gave rise to the science of attachment. Babies need a secure one-to-one bond with their mums. Should they not form such a bond, they face a darkened future. John Bowlby was the man who made...