Maternal Deprivation Reassessed

Maternal Deprivation Reassessed is Michael Rutter's review, written two decades after the idea of maternal deprivation first entered debate, of the evidence on what mothering contributes to normal psychological development and what follows when it is absent. Rutter examines the qualities of care a child needs for normal development, then considers separately the short-term and the long-term effects of what had been gathered together under the single heading of maternal deprivation. His reassessment concludes that lack, loss and distortion of child care do have a very important effect on psychological development, and that while some of the earlier views require modification in the light of later evidence, the basic proposition has received substantial support. His principal argument is that the term maternal deprivation covers a wide range of quite different experiences, which have quite different effects on development, and that treating them as a single phenomenon obscures more than it explains. What is needed instead, he argues, is a more precise description of the different aspects of poor care and of the different kinds of poor outcome, so that particular experiences can be matched to the particular effects they produce.

Written from the public record for the book.

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• Michael Rutter