Outline and Evaluate the Research Into Privation

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Outline and evaluate the research into privation. Privation is the term given to the inability to form attachments as a result of complete lack of emotional care, especially during the first few years of a child’s life. This can happen for many different reasons, a child may be neglected by parents who do not love them (example being a mother suffering from post natal depression who finds it hard to form a bond with her child, and may give it what it needs to survive with regards to feeding and cleaning, but disregard it’s emotional needs such as holding and comforting the child when upset). It could happen if a child is completely abandoned at birth, is abused by the parents or if a child behaves undesirably (ie, excessive crying with no way of comforting it) the mother or carer (in cases of adopted children) may find it so hard to cope that they have the child put into care. This could lead to a child being repeatedly moved from family to family, preventing it from forming an attachment to one specific carer. Bowlby would have thought that all of the above scenarios would cause harm to a child’s social and emotional development, and would cause difficulties in the child’s future, relationship wise and it’s mental health, as he believed ‘mother love in infants is as important for mental health as vitamins are for physical health, and if an infant is separated from the mother, it might be at risk of behavioural disorder. Much research has gone into privation and children under institutional care, with Hodges and Tizard’s being the leading one. Their aim was to investigate the effects of early privation, by studying 65 children who had either come from dysfunctional families (where the child had been subjected to abuse or neglect) or had never had parents, and had therefore been institutionalised at a very early age (less than 4 months old). While in the
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