On being a Cloth Monkey

What the hell is a cloth monkey and what does it have to do with mommyblogging?



My blog, and something like my philosophy of parenting, is based some of the most famous psychological experiments of all time on the nature of parent-child attachment. Harry Harlow, a notoriously cold fish, wanted to know if monkeys needed their moms for much more than food. So he took a bunch of baby macaques and divided them up. The infant monkeys were put with two monkey mothers, one made of wire, with bottle nipples attached to feed them and one made of cloth, but without attached feeding nipples.

And they weren't even cute -- look at that scary cloth monkey mama!

At the time, the scientific theory behind mother-infant bonding predicted that the wire monkey would be the preferred mother, as "she" would have the food. And women of the day were told not to coddle their babies (i.e. hold them) as it would spoil them.

The infant monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to hang out with the cloth monkey moms.

So that upended some of the goofball ideas that infants are little Machiavellis. But Harlow wasn't done.

As a follow-up, Harlow put infant macaques with either a cloth monkey surrogate or a wire one. The ones with the wire mothers exhibited signs of distress, even though they gained weight at the same rate as the ones with cloth moms. And even more, after the study was officially over, they just weren't right in the head.

This is to say, all it takes to be a good macaque mom is just showing up and being snuggly. And while human infants have a much broader range of needs, I'm pretty sure that showing up and being snuggly is pretty much the foundation of being a good parent -- even if you don't have a whole lot more to provide at the time.

There are a million choices moms (and dads, but let's face it, moms in particular) have to make based on what is right for their families and lives, and there are a million cranks who want to judge those choices. This is not a place for those crankypants. Your method of raising your kid is the best for you and your family, not necessarily mine or theirs (unless, you know, you're a child molester or abuser, but the audience I'm intending this for are, like me, well-meaning people).

This blog is about how you don't have to be perfect to do well, because we don't live in a perfect world, we aren't perfect people, and honestly, when it comes down to it, we don't want our kids to be perfect as much as we want them to be interesting anyway.