Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
Mothers Day … the reciprocation of love
“Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing”
Positive and negative relationship patterns
Negative about the other: UK; and USA
“The myth of perfect motherhood”
Mothers “making the world better”
MOTHERHOOD: how is it for you?
“The wilting statistics behind Mother’s Day”
Extremes … an individual’s distribution and the distribution of individuals
World society – any society – involves a system of relationships; and any relationship has two key features: its strength, active or passive; and its value, positive or negative. Recently I have referred to the global positive system and the global negative system. Tomorrow is Mothers Day, an event in the global positive system, a celebration of the reciprocation of love between mother and child. So it seems an appropriate occasion to revisit a chapter I wrote some time ago about relationships.
“Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing”
GO TO: Relationships: Family and Friends, Care and Therapy, Nurturing Flourishing
John Burton and Steven Pinker
Your daily dose of emotional and relationship advice
Babies: emotional and relationship development
Parenting styles and child development
Marriage and divorce
Gottman’s research on marriage
Singles and couples
Family, friends and strangers
Humans, pets and other animals
Social care and psychological therapy
“Chapter 4 is about relationships at the personal level. We consider relationships between children and parents, between couples, between friends, between humans, pets and other animals, and between an individual and their carer or therapist. Our focus will be on whether the relationship is positive – “harmonious” in Burton’s terms – or negative. Just before his death in 2010 John Burton called for a Universal Harmonious Human Relations Research Association: “how we communicate and relate with each other is fundamental to producing harmonious and hence peaceful societies”. Steven Pinker and others have suggested that our relationships – at all levels of society - are becoming less violent. There is a great demand in society for emotional and relationship advice and such advice is offered by newspapers on a daily or weekly basis. We start by looking at the emotional and relationship development of babies. Parenting style can be positive or negative, active or passive. We then consider adults and their closest personal relationships. A key distinction is between singles and couples and a change in status is a major life event – either a change from being single to being a couple (for example a marriage) or a change from being a couple to being single. The latter change may come about through separation, divorce (in the case of a marriage) or death. Gottman emphasises the importance of the balance between positivity and negativity in marital interactions. There is a cultural debate about the values of being a couple or being single, the value of marriage and divorce. The overall pattern of an individual’s relationships with family, friends and strangers is resource-limited with differential resource investments and differential value and a possible gap between expectations and reality. We consider the relationships between humans, pets and other animals. Humans can be positive or negative towards animals and animals can be positive or negative towards humans. Finally we consider the relationship between an individual and their carer or therapist. One account of the field is implied by the UK school syllabus for Health and Social Care. Like the mother-baby relationship, care and therapy relationships are about ‘nurturing flourishing’ – the quality of the therapeutic relationship is key.
Positive and negative relationship patterns
“Positive and negative relationship patterns” is the opening section in my report last year, “Loving the self, but not the other … USA election and religion”.
Loving the self, but not the other … USA election and religion.
The ‘all positive’ or ‘reciprocated positivity’ pattern involves two selves where each self is positive about the self; and positive about the other. This is the pattern in the ideal mother and child relationship.
The ‘reciprocated antipathy’ pattern involves two selves where each self is positive about the self but negative about the other. This is the pattern commonly found in conflict situations.
Negative about the other: UK; and USA
“Our message to Denmark is very simple. You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”
“Chilly reception as Vance touches base in Greenland.” The Times, March 29, 2025: 36-37.
Negativity about the other is commonly found in certain conceptions of the national self. Recent exponents are Boris Johnson in the UK and Donald Trump in the USA. These two leaders are discussed respectively by Rory Stewart and Nick Bryant. Both authors look beyond Johnson and Trump finding negativity by others elsewhere and at other times.
Politics On the Edge. Rory Stewart. Vintage: 2024 (2023).
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442034/politics-on-the-edge-by-stewart-rory/9781529922868
The Forever War. America’s Unending Conflict With Itself. Nick Bryant. Bloomsbury Continuum: 2024.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/forever-war-9781399409308/
Two of the chapters in Bryant are entitled “the demagogic style in American politics”; and “American authoritarianism”. The subject finds an echo in today’s paper:
“Tariff wars show how ‘King Donald’ is amassing power.” The Times, 29 March 2025: 36-37.
While Trump is using power internally and in some relationships, Niall Fergusson reflects on US power in relation to China.
“Does Trump know what he’s doing on China? President has replaced deliberate US ambiguity towards Taiwan with a strategy that looks uncertain. Will this be a showdown or a climbdown?” The Times, 29 March 2025: 28-29.
“The myth of perfect motherhood”
“I love being a mother but there is a darker side.” Credo. Chine McDonald. The Times, March 29, 2025: 73. Chine McDonald.
Unmaking Mary. Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood. Chine McDonald. Hodder & Stoughton: 2025.
https://www.chinemcdonald.com/blog/coming-in-2025-unmaking-mary-the-myth-of-divine-motherhood
“Mothers as Makers of Death.” Claudia Dey. Paris Review. 2018.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/14/mothers-as-makers-of-death/
Heartbreaker. Claudia Dey.
https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/heartbreaker-claudia-dey?variant=32546608676942
The theme is repeated about twenty times in Chine McDonald’s Credo piece in today’s Times. On Mothering Sunday children will “give us thanks for what we do for our children. However beautiful as this is I can’t help but think beyond the saccharine elements of the maternal experience.” The life of a child entails the possibility of their death or suffering. Such an occurrence entails the suffering of the mother as does the mother’s fear of such an occurrence. “Try as I might to push the thought away, it is the dark cloud that intrudes into my most joyous moments.” For McDonald the maternal experience is anxiety and pain alongside joy. In statistical terms the maternal experience is a distribution of positive and negative. This finds expression in religion with Mary at the foot of the Cross …
Mothers “make the world better”
… Mary “is spurred on to make the world better in some way”. McDonald cites mothers who “fight for change in the face of their children’s death”. “Here, just as in the Easter story, first comes death, then grief, then resurrection.”
MOTHERHOOD: how is it for you?
What does it mean to be a mother? That’s what we wanted to understand in our landmark survey… and the results made for fascinating reading
It’s easy to forget that each time a baby is born, so is a mother – and that every woman will have her own unique experience of becoming a parent, navigating the primary school years, tackling teenagers and then moving into the entirely different space of parenting adult children. Birth experiences, and those exhausting early years, stay with you for ever – shaped, for better or worse, by the maternity care you receive, your support structure, your postnatal experience – and, as our survey suggests, the decade in which you were born.
Did mothers have it easier in the 1970s and 1980s? Were we better prepared for the challenges of the early weeks of motherhood in previous decades? We wanted to understand more about mothering experiences for every generation, and that’s why, as part of our landmark 2024 Motherhood Survey, we asked you to share your journey.
The results made fascinating reading. Nearly 1,400 of you, from every generation, responded; the oldest was 97, the youngest, 23. We asked questions about all aspects of new motherhood, including whether or not you had access to help, support and information. We also wanted to explore the impact of having a new baby on your emotional state. And we wanted to find out: are we open enough about what motherhood means?
2024 Motherhood Survey
“Most women say that having children is bad for your career.” The Times, March 29, 2025: 14.
USA https://www.mother.ly/news/2024-state-of-motherhood-report/
wilting statistics behind Mother’s Day”
“The wilting statistics behind Mother’s Day”
“The wilting statistics behind Mother’s Day. The world is in the middle of fertility collapse. We owe young adults more help and more optimism about parenthood.
I’m writing on Mother’s Day which I once thought an overly sentimental festival … Not now. Fewer and fewer women are becoming mothers worldwide, and to fewer children.
… [on the other hand] 91% of parents were glad they’d had children [YouGov].”
Jenni Russell. The Times, 31 March 2025: 17.
“To what extent, if at all, do you regret having children?”
I do not 91%; a small extent 5%; a moderate extent 2%; a great extent 1%.
Report: https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/51749-why-do-some-britons-not-want-children
Data: https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/Internal_Children_241126_new.pdf
Extremes … an individual’s distribution and the distribution of individuals
Motherhood: Heaven? Hell? Mary: perfect bliss? perfect torment? Chine McDonald wishes to shatter “the myth of perfect motherhood”. She draws our attention to Mary in torment at the foot of the cross. These are two opposing extremes. McDonald feels that the extreme of perfection (the idea of perfection) can be unhelpful; might the opposite extreme (the idea of torment) also be unhelpful? These two extremes may or may not happen. What is the case is that there is a distribution of experiences of motherhood: different individuals have different experiences; an individual has different experiences over time; and an individual has different experiences at the same time (ambivalence).
THE END