Dr. Stanley Goldstein - Author and Psychologist

My experience with treating mothers has long impressed me with their strength. Despite their continuing daily tasks of tending to wandering-about youngsters, seemingly incomprehensible teenagers, difficult husbands, and an occasional sickly rabbit or other pet, they cook, clean, negotiatate with school officials, provide transportation to appointments, and cope with such intermittent crises as helping with children's homework and arranging for home repairs. All while trying, and often failing, to care for themselves.

Part of this is inevitable since, in most families, the mother is the emotional center of the family, which also makes her the major recipient of children's complaints. If a child is unhappy, it's HER fault. Is this fair? Of course not but that's how it is.

Which is not to say that the father's role is unimportant since, though the mother (or mothering figure who can be a male) is the most important figure during the first two years of a child's life, the father becomes equally important during their third year, serving to pull the child from the symbiotic relationship with their mother into the larger world and, ultimately, independent adult functioning.

After telling me his nightmare, a patient rejected my interpretation of it as reflecting anger toward his mother. "No, my mother always loved me," he said. Which may have been true for her relinquishing of parental rights enabled the patient's life to dramatically improve after his adoption and psychotherapy.

It is hard to accept being unloved at birth. Though the helpless infant can survive without physical care, psychological neglect can equally damage their future. And the most important person in their earliest years is their mother or mothering figure. Viewing the world with an immature mind, every child considers their parents to be omniscient. Thus if the child is unloved, it must be their fault.

 

Only with maturity, and possibly psychotherapy, can one accept a basic psychological truth: that while all children are lovable at birth, some mothers ore incapable of providing it. For this realization to occur, two things must happen: an acceptance of their parent's limitations, and their own.

Postpartum depression is a term which has usually been applied to mothers. And who can wonder at this for, after the birth of her child, the mother’s life irrevocably changes. Her first priority must now be the welfare of her child who is wholly dependent upon her for its continued existence.

But a  Read More 

Being a parent is never easy but it's particularly difficult when your child is ill.
Not with the commonplace cold or pinkeye which every child gets, but with a chronic
medical condition which requires continual monitoring and intervention.

A Norwegian study revealed the effect which having a child with a
congenital heart defect has  Read More