Conference 2018

The MAHM conference is an annual event, usually held in central London. This is where members come to hear inspirational speakers, have tea and lunch, stay for the AGM and be re-inspired about their roles as mothers. It is also a chance to meet other members ‘in real life’ and find what unites us is so much more than what makes us different.

The packed conference opened with a couple of brief presentations from ‘Career Break People’ and ‘MummyLinks’. Emily Tredget spoke about her own experience of becoming a mother, when she suffered from PND after a history of top grades, top university and stellar career to discover that none of these had prepared her for the experience of motherhood. So she started ‘Mummy Links’ to put women in touch with each other for mutual support.

The First Speaker

“Children don’t recognise ‘quality time’, they just want their mummies.”

The journalist and award-winning author, Allison Pearson, opened her speech by quoting the forthcoming David Attenborough BBC series, Dynasties, which asserts that in the animal kingdom, the females are more useful than the males because they hold all the wisdom while the males just charge around fighting and fornicating – not like us humans, then!

Her talk was entitled ‘A Mother’s Worth’ and she contrasted her own experience of mothering, aged 35, to that of her mother, who was 24 when she had her, but of course Allison wanted to cut a different path from her mother’s, on principle, so she went back to work when her first baby was four months old and employed a nanny, whose salary ate up nearly all her earnings.

But Allison soon found that ‘having it all ‘ soon turned into ‘doing it all’ and that she desperately needed time to herself. ‘Wine o’clock’ suddenly became more pressing as she found herself ‘running a small country called Home.’ Allison found that this Brave New World of female emancipation and equality at work was all very well, but she kept on thinking, ‘But what about the children? How are they faring?’ Children don’t recognise ‘quality time’, they just want their mummies.

She was horrified by reports of children starting at primary school lacking all sorts of basic skills, including not knowing their own names. Obesity was becoming an increasing problem for children fed on ready-meals rather than fresh food being cooked from scratch. (Diana Dean expanded on this theme in her talk, explaining some of the hormonal links between obesity and lack of loving attention.)

The Press come down heavily on stay-at-home mothers with images of 50s-style mums in pinnies and hairnets emptying twin-tubs and baking fairy cakes: difficult to fight this false stereotype. And what about language development, with infants being cared for by largely undereducated young women, some for whom English is not their mother tongue, who prefer to chat to their chums either on smartphones or in person rather than making conversation with a very small person in a buggy. Allison told us how her own mother used to sing all the songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein round the house, with the result that she became word-perfect in them all!

Although surveys reveal that most mothers would prefer to be at home with their youngsters, this is now a possibility only for the very rich or very poor: a luxury. But the effects of poor early childrearing will stay for a very long time, viz the A&E departments being filled with casualties from stabbings.

Allison ended her lively and stimulating – often funny – talk by quoting WB Yeats: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

Strong words indeed, but let’s hope Mothers At Home Matter will have some small influence in stemming the tide of ‘anarchy’.

The Second Speaker

WATCh?’s Research Director, Diana Dean, followed this talk with a hard-headed backup to Allison’s themes, giving the science behind the emotion.

In ‘What I Have Learned About Infant Stress and Its Consequences’, she explained that her interest had been piqued in the early 80s, when the children at a Mother and Baby group she had been running changed over the course of 14 years, and she wondered why. When the group started, there was a happy, relaxed atmosphere and plenty of chat and interaction, with a range of different personalities among the children, from the very shy to the positively bullying.

However, over time as more and mothers went back to work, the ambience changed as mothers were replaced by au pairs, nannies, childminders and family members. The atmosphere became less convivial and the children seemed to polarise into two camps: the very quiet, often thumbsuckers (mainly female) and the extroverts throwing their weight about (usually male).

With the support of her medical scientist husband, Diana set about researching – before the era of Google – why this should be and came up with startling results. She found that the way a child was talked to affected the hippocampus: A mother speaking more gently to her child than a paid worker, and engaging in more eye contact will make the hippocampus light up. Equally, the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex are directly sensitive to parental interaction, especially the mother’s voice.

Diana also found that although children appeared to have ‘settled’ at day care after a period of time, swabs of saliva taken at the end of the day showed high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which directly affects the immune system. This was demonstrated especially among young boys, who seem to suffer separation anxiety from the mother more keenly than little girls. Diana quoted throughout her talk from the scientific studies that prove this, particularly the work of Allan Schore on boys.

Home-reared children do not have such high levels of cortisol in their systems. Young children cannot manage stress before the age of 3, apart from thumb-sucking, so others have to manage it for them, and only the mother’s voice can release endorphins to calm a crying baby. Although the emphasis nowadays is on getting fathers to help with childcare, there is evidence that only Mum will do at times of high stress. Diana mentioned a test by which men and women were woken by different noises and it was found that the number one noise to wake a sleeping woman was a baby’s cry, whereas a man’s number one wake-up call was the sound of a car alarm! So men are protectors and providers, while women are chiefly carers and soothers of their young.

If stress is not managed in early childhood, the effects may drag on into adolescence, with high anxiety levels in girls and violence in boys. Diana told us that persistent early life stress and maternal separation can alter metabolic rates, leading to obesity and possible addictions. In severe cases, the child’s DNA can be affected and may even be passed down to future generations: a sobering thought.

Sally Greenhill, What About The Children?

This was written for our Spring 2019 Newsletter.