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Romania: Fertility, Gender and Generativity - Joan Raphael-Leff

            Joan Raphael-Leff*

            Abstract

            Background: The concept of ‘Generative Identity’ is presented, arguing that a young child’s gendered self-image is configured by growing distinctions between gender and generations (as defined in that local culture), and by mentally negotiating the fundamental issues of genesis (origins), generativity (procreation) and 'genitive' concerns about arbitrariness and the irreversibility of birth and death.  Attainment of generative identity entails a momentous shift from being someone's creation to becoming a potential pro-creator, and for some, a creator, pursuing material realisations of ideas rather than producing a child.

            Aim: Romania is selected as a special case for discussion, with very low birth rates ascribed to post-communist socio-economic opportunities for women to express their generativity, but also to acts of defiance against previous state domination and control over female reproductive bodies.

            Methods: Psychoanalytic understanding is brought to bear on the past and current situations depicted in relevant literature and population data.

            Results: Parenting a baby is subject to 'contagious arousal' of implicit memories, and resurgence of traumatic childhood experience during parenting.  This raises concerns about formerly institutionalized children who are now becoming parents in their own right. Similarly, the resurgence of gender inequalities erodes the range of conscious generative choices, leading to potential enactments.

            Conclusion: Given the emotional legacies of Romania's traumatic history, the community of psychiatrists and psychologists are urged to offer perinatal psychotherapeutic support to new parents to ensure the future mental health of the next generation.

            Key words: Generative identity; gender equality; infant mental health.

 

            Rezumat

     Context: Conceptul de “identitate generativă” se bazează pe fapul că identitatea de gen a unui copil este configurată prin creşterea distincţiei dintre genuri şi generaţii (aşa cum sunt ele definite în cultura locală), şi prin negocirea mentală a problemelor fundamentale ale genezei (originilor), generativităţii (procreării) şi a preocupărilor “genitive” legate de arbitrariul şi ireversibilitatea naşterii şi a morţii. Dobândirea identităţii generative presupune o schimbare importantă de la a fi creaţia cuiva la a deveni un potenţial pro-creator, iar pentru unii, un creator, urmărind mai degrabă concretizarea în plan material a unor idei decât naşterea unui copil.

            Scop: România este selectată ca un caz de discuţie special, datorită natalităţii foarte scăzute, atribuite oportunităţilor socio-economice post-comuniste ale femeilor de a-şi exprima propria generativitate, dar şi actelor de sfidare împotriva stării anterioare de dominaţie şi control asupra organelor de reproducere feminine.

            Metode: Înţelegerea psihoanalitică este utilizată în abordarea situaţiilor trecute şi prezente din literatura de specialitate şi a datelor din populaţie.

            Rezultate: Creşterea şi îngrijirea unui copil este un prilej de “excitare contagiosă” a memoriei implicite şi retrăire a experienţelor traumatice din copilărie. Acest fapt ridică probleme cu privire la foştii copii instituţionalizaţi care devin la râdul lor părinţi. În mod similar, retrăirea inegalităţilor dintre sexe erodează alegerile procreatoare conştiente, conducând la potenţiale acte normative.

            Concluzie: Având în vedere moştenirea emoţională a istoriei traumatice a României, comunitatea psihiatrilor şi a psihologilor este îndemnată să ofere suport psihoterapeutic perinatal noilor părinţi petru a asigura sănătea mintală a viitoarei generaţii.

            Cuvinte cheie: Identitate generativă; egalitate între sexe; sănătatea mintală a sugarilor.

 

GENERATIVE IDENTITY

 

            Childbearing appears to be eternal since the beginning of humankind, yet over the past few decades facts of life have altered dramatically.  In the West, it is possible to have sex without having a baby.  Furthermore, it is possible to have a baby without sex!  Efficient femalebased contraception methods reveal a paradox that although for the species reproduction is a necessity, for individual women it is an option: some are passionate about having children while others prefer to live a 'childfree' life.  With access to equal education and more job opportunities, women's 'generative identity' now includes the capacity to achieve a creative sense of fulfilment outside of motherhood. Conversely, new reproductive technology enables infertile women to pursue their desire for a child against the odds.

            'Generative identity' is a term I have introduced as an explanatory concept to account for these very different attitudes to childbearing. I propose it as a fourth component in the structuring of Gender Identity. I shall not deal here with the other three components, 'Sexual Embodiment', 'Role representation' and 'Erotic Desire' (1) Observations suggest that in early toddlerhood, the child identifies indiscriminately with the capacities of both sexes, naively believing s/he can be 'everything'.  Around eighteen months, with growing awareness of sexual difference, this over-expansive view is reevaluated. The two to three year old increasingly comes to recognize restrictions of the basic facts of life.  These include accepting that mother and father have a sexual relationship and a procreative union from which the child is excluded. Clearly, this differs with offspring of a single mother, adopted children, or same-sexed parents and those produced by assisted reproduction.

However, even in these cases, emergent awareness of distinctions of sex and reproductive differences, forces the young child, who previously casually identified with the functions of both sexes and all ages, to face some absolute restrictions:

Sex: “I’m either female or male; I cannot become the other, neither or both.”

            Generation: Adults have/make babies; children cannot.

Genesis: "I am not self-made but formed by combined gametes from a man  

and a woman

            Generativity: Pro-creatively females produce eggs, gestate, and lactate; males

produce sperm (although both can be creative in other ways)

Generative self-awareness is also informed first in early childhood, and again in adolescence, by increasing awareness of issues that I term 'Genitive' ― of bodily separateness, arbitrariness (meeting of mother and father; sperm and ovum), and the irreversible trajectory of birth and death.

•         only one sex (vs. both &/or unlimited) 

•         pre-potent (rather than omnipotent)

•         only half of future procreative coupling (interdependent rather than autonomous; no parthenogenesis).

•         inability to reverse finitude and Time

These generative facts of life now fill the previously 'omnipotent' child with feelings of disillusionment, shame and rage.  The tantrums and inconsolable grievances of the "terrible two's" include battles over control, jealousy of older children and adults' privileges, penis and womb envy of the other sex, and demands for compensation. 

Accepting generative limitations necessitates giving up oedipal hopes of ever becoming a parent’s partner and receiving/giving an incestuous baby. In most societies taboos also necessitate renouncing incestuous desires towards siblings. Compensation lies in future promise of finding an exogamous mate, and having a baby of his/her own.

            Each child’s beliefs are inevitably affected by their own specific household and wider culture. Based on psychosocial definitions and interpretations, notions of femininity and masculinity relate both to the unconsciously introjected representations of observed behaviours, and to the normative rules of role performance, which vary according to context.  These rules are bound by constraints of the local social unconscious - ‘myth, ritual and custom’ and cultural processes of which people to a greater or lesser degree are unaware (2). Understanding of the nature of such constraints may be disregarded, resisted, or actively raised to consciousness, as happened through the second wave feminists in many western countries.

            Genitive issues about separateness, the irreversibility of life’s trajectory and inevitability of death, are similarly affected by local beliefs.  Some traumatic experiences and tragic truths are only gradually acquired and often unconsciously refuted or anxiously reworked over our entire life-course, peaking again at nodal points such as adolescence, childbearing, mid and later life, when many societies provide explanatory myths or traditional practices to help people address their anxieties at a time of increased vulnerability (3).

 

SOCIO-POLITICAL BACKGROUND

 

            The ideas in this paper are informed by my 35 years of psychoanalytic work in a practice devoted to issues of reproduction; small empirical studies and systematic thrice-weekly longitudinal observations I conducted, on 23 children and their families, from their early weeks until forty months, engaged in solitary free play or interaction with their primary carers  and peers, in a large community-centre setting of some 250 families, in successive cohorts between 1978 and 1985. Also, as a baseline, I filmed three orang-utans from their respective births within a troop at London Zoo, every week over a period of thirty months. This data is supplemented by consultations and supervisions with therapists and primary health workers in the UK and abroad, and workshops with perinatal professionals and parents in many different countries. [i]

On the basis of these I have extrapolated some common psychological themes. In each society, the child’s internal world is constituted through interchanges with primary carer/s who also transmit the local culture. The way in which generative identity is resolved during childhood affects reproductive choices and parental practices in adulthood. Furthermore, in most societies, generative concerns are addressed in childhood play which offers a safe medium for testing out both internal and external realities.  By fostering self-reflectiveness play becomes the principal means through which children can acquire local patterns of femininity and masculinity, and address their anxieties. Gender and generative identity are consolidated among peers, usually with the help of sympathetic parental guidance (4).

In patriarchal societies the definition of gender roles is polarized, a gender binary which restricts female generative identity to childbearing and childrearing functions, and emphasises 'macho' aspects of masculine identity.  In more complex transitional societies, both men and women benefit from a wider variety of choices for expressing their generative agency, not necessarily related to reproduction.  In fact, the emancipation of women's creative capacities from a procreative template has brought about a revolution of demographics in higher income countries.  In Europe some 12-20% of women now remain childless by choice (39% of educated women in Germany).

A variety of factors contribute to the fall in birth rate in many societies:

Safer abortions and efficient female-based contraception enable women to make reproductive choices. Similarly, more relaxed social attitudes allow for a variety of life styles, and women's sense of self-worth is enhanced outside of motherhood, with childbearing no longer regarded as a social duty. Increasingly, women's social status is ascribed to their profession or occupation, rather than their role as mothers, or even grandmothers. In some societies, having a large family might be socially deprecated, associated with lower status groups. Furthermore, lower child mortality has reduced the need to produce many children for a few to survive. And the EU prohibition of child-labour also decreases the economic impetus to have large families.  Conversely, the cost of raising and educating a child today is such that urban families cannot afford to have many children. 

However, in some societies, despite female educational parity and greater economic autonomy, some social attitudes are so deeply entrenched that male actions lag behind their values. An unequal division of household labour persists, with wives carrying the bulk of the home responsibilities in addition to their non-domestic work-load. With geographical migration, family and other sources of support are scattered or unavailable.  Partners in nuclear families are therefore intensely (and unrealistically) reliant on each other, especially following a birth.  In addition, loss of the woman's income at this time of high expense adds to their strained predicament.

Thus, while providing many benefits, in societies-in-transition various factors also militate against having large families:

•         Rapid urbanisation and social mobility

•         Dispersed extended families

•         Loss of community networks

•         Individualisation yet high dependence on partner

•         Socio-economic stresses/adversity

•         Inner-city pressures -  discrimination, alienation, alcohol and drug-abuse

•         Isolation, violence, crime, rape and increased life-events

•         Rising mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, self-harm, domestic violence and suicide

            Various combinations of these factors have resulted in decreasing family size worldwide. In places as diverse as Hong Kong; Korea; Armenia; Spain; Italy; Bulgaria; Russia and Greece the birth rate  has fallen to one child per woman (when replacement levels are 2.1). For the first time in world history the death rate exceeds the birth rate!  For a variety of reasons, including women's expression of their feminine generative identity in ways other than childbearing, emigration and sub-replacement fertility rates have contributed to population decline, from North Asia through to Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary. And Romania. This has long term consequences.  For instance, in the UK, with a fertility rate of 1.5 (which includes the highest rate of teen-age motherhood in westernised Europe), it was estimated that unless immigration intervenes, the UK population would halve in 44 yrs, with drastic consequences. Anxiety about the decline in Japan's birth rate is so severe they have invented a word for it - 'shoshika', meaning a society without children.[ii]

The shrinking working-age population is causing concern. Since the 1950s, life expectancy in Europe increased by 8 to 10 years (while falling to an all-time low in Africa).  Over the next 15 years the number of people in the EU aged 80 and over will rise by almost 50%. Fearing they will be unable to sustain this ageing population Governments expressed alarm, recognising too, that depopulation also has an adverse effect of on quality of life for younger citizens, with increased social and economic pressure to work harder in order to support an infrastructure with costly, intensive care for the oldest among their population ― paradoxically, delaying them from starting a family, thereby contributing to a fall in fertilty rates.  However, timely interventions seem to have had an effect and recent figures show an increased birth rate in many European countries. [iii]

Most democratic governments are averse to overt pro-natalist programmes.  Encouragement to breed is associated with fascist control, such as Mussolini's tax on single men, and Hitler’s encouragement of large families and Lebensborn, the SS program devised to propagate Aryan traits in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium under the Nazi occupation. In Romania in 1966 Ceausescu banned abortion and taxed childless people. Conversely, in 1979, the Chinese government imposed a coercive anti-natalist policy to control its population growth, including compulsory sterilizations and forced late abortions which succeeded in driving births down from over five to an average of 1.4 children per woman. All these contravene the 1945 'Proclamation of Teheran' and subsequent UN charters of Reproductive Rights.

Today some governments provide financial incentives, hoping to elicit voluntary cooperation to boost birth rates. [iv] Studies indicated that, even when cash allowances are boosted by 25%, the fertility rate climbs just marginally, by as little as 0.6%.  Nonetheless, paid maternity leave and child-care provisions do seem to increase the motivation of working women to have larger families (5, 6). [v]

 

ROMANIA

 

            Romania is selected here as a special case. Its Total Fertility Rate has fallen from a high in the 1970s of 2.96 to 1.30 in 2000 (with a slight rise to 1.35 by 2008).  Romania had a population of 23 million when former dictators Nicolae and  Elena Ceauşescu were executed in 1989. The1.5m fall between 1990 and 2006 caused alarm that it would decline further. [vi]  This drop must be seen against the historical background of the previous regime which in 1966 introduced draconian policies to increase the very low birth rate to four or five children per woman. National demands overrode personal choices as contraception, abortion and divorce were banned. Submission to these imperialistic decrees was exacted through strict state control, including taxation of men and women who remained childless after age 25 (10-20% of their incomes) and humiliating subjection of Romanian women were to mandatory monthly gynaecological examinations.  During this period of enforced reproduction, many women were damaged or died during clandestine abortions, leading to the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe. [Today, this is still high, with abortion-related deaths accounting for a large proportion of the figures: Romania’s abortion rate is five times higher than rates in western European countries. And although it has fallen from 18.6 to 11, the infant mortality rate is still the highest in the EU].

 The rise in childbearing was accompanied by unrelenting poverty, resulting in many families having to entrust their children to Romania's 600-700 notoriously overcrowded and under-stimulating abusive institutions.

We can only imagine the barren conditions under which such unwanted children negotiated the five generative facts of life (Gender, Genesis, Generation, Generativity and Genitive issues), usually explored and incorporated through imaginative play with the help of adults within a loving family.

The scale of the problem was immense: 300,000 children whose parents were unable or unwilling to provide for them, were confined in state orphanages (leagane) run by four government authorities, including the Ministry of Health and of Education across the country. As records were minimal, and children were moved from one institution to another, parents who cared to re-find their children were unable to trace them. On entry they were classified as either 'normal', in need of 'special' education (which they did not receive) or 'irrecoverably handicapped'.  They lived cut off from the outside world, often tied to their beds in huge dormitories, with little intimacy, warmth or continuity of carers, minimal contact with peers, no toys, stimulation or schooling. The staff ration ranged from 8:1 to 35:1 (7).

For many parents, sending their children away must have been accompanied by anguished guilt, remorse and depression.  For others it no doubt necessitated dissociation from the act of rejecting a child, inducing emotional detachment which would have affected the children who remained in the household.  In their teens, many older children, too, were banished by families who could no longer afford to feed and clothe them. Around 6,000, including some who escaped from the institutions, were thus homeless, living rough as street children exposed to economic and psychosocial adversity, including undernourishment, frostbite, sores, infestations, induction into sex-work and sexually transmitted diseases.

Nor did the end of the Ceausescu regime offer much respite. Fostering was restricted after Iliescu took power, as the law insisted that no adoption could take place without parental consent, although many families were uncontactable after so many years. The poorly kept records meant that parents could not trace their forsaken children, and conversely, younger children who wished to find relatives, had no means of identifying or locating them. After years of ceaseless longing and defensive unremembering, the lost generation still could not come home. 

In fact, UNICEF found that numbers in residential care increased after the 1991-2 fall from 86,000 to 73,000 (largely due to international adoption). By 1994, there were over 98,000 institutionalised children, which included newborns abandoned in maternity units by mothers still unable to care for their babies (8). The Romanian Relief Fund reported that after 1998, various charities and local efforts improved the situation, creating smaller children's homes, offering alternative forms of family-type protection, and establishing measures to prevent institutionalisation and abandonment (9) [vii]:  The new Children's Law of January 2005 stipulated that children under two should be placed with emergency foster care, not in institutions. Recent changes improved the ratios of staff to children considerably and provided access to free education for all those in residential care. Today, the strategy of dealing with the orphanage problem is to close the institutions and return the children to their families. However, even when this much delayed reunion is feasible, few support systems are in place to deal with emotional repercussions of such a momentous upheaval for all concerned.

As studies revealed already in 1945 by Spitz, and later by Bowlby, psychological damage to children in this type of institution is deep-rooted and long-lasting, with social attrition and physical developmental delays, deep insecurities, and traumatisation (10, 11, 12). Research into Romanian children adopted to Canada found that about a third continue to suffer post-institutional attachment disorders, autistic spectrum and attention deficits while others prove remarkably buoyant (13). Although resilience is seen here more as a function of the quality of care in the new environment than personal characteristics, it also reflects security of attachment, possibly building on early meaningful moments.

Today at least 80% of institutionalized children are over 10, and many are now in their late teens. Some of those incarcerated during the Ceauşescu regime have gone on to have children of their own. Focusing on generative identity (although I know of no studies that relate to this topic), I suggest that in their childhoods, many of the 'orphanage' children must have conceived of generativity in negative terms. I have argued here that a young child’s gendered self-image is configured by growing distinctions between genders and generations (as defined in that local culture), and by mentally negotiating the fundamental issues of genesis (origins), generativity (procreation) and 'genitive' concerns about separateness, arbitrariness and the irreversibility of birth and death. For that generation of Romanian children, genesis, including their own gestation and birth, was seen to be the result of external policy, not a decision by a loving couple to have a child. Thus, identification with their own parents' procreative functions was complicated by the terms of enforced breeding. Similarly, learning that women's bodies serve as a site of social control through compulsory reproduction changes the intrapsychic relation to the archaic maternal body.  Each mother's lack of ownership of her own womb, and dearth of procreative choices was painfully evident to her children. Coupled with the natural sexual discrimination of female bodies carrying the baby, state dictates to breed affect the imagery of the Great Mother, mitigating her life-giving and death-dealing powers. This further contributes to a demeaning representation of women as helpless, inferior and exploitable. Finally, generationally, emotional neglect and institutionalised deprivation targeted babies, children and youth by comparison to adults. Rather than playing out these anxieties in secure transitional spaces with parents, siblings and peers, the children were left to their own ruminations, only interrupted by cruelly detached institutional workers. These, along with the rejecting parents, must have appeared punitive and omnipotently powerful or else helplessly disempowered — rather than ordinary, fallible yet caring humans. Far from attaining a shift from being someone's creation/creator to becoming a potential pro-creator/creator, these children remained under the totalitarian control of others, who could erode their most fundamental sense of self and identity.

 

FACTORS IN MENTAL HEALTH

 

Increasingly sophisticated neonatal research has confirmed innate sociability. From birth infants seek a state of emotional connectedness (14). Numerous studies worldwide have shown that reliable, continuous and sensitively attuned care results in secure attachments underpinning self-esteem, agency and resilience.  This early experience of care forms the 'internal working model' that serves as an unconscious prototype of expectancy for future relationships, including parenting (15). Internalising the caregiver's capacity to respond to anxiety enables the growing child to contain, 'metabolize' and understand his/her own feelings (15). Thus, parental 'mentalization' and capacity to understand the baby's state of mind enables the child to recognize and regulate his/her own affects.  Conversely, research confirms that people who suffer early trauma are less sensitive to mental states; their own and those of others (16).

            Importantly, the mother or primary carer is recipient of the baby's destructive impulses as well as his/her passionately loving feelings, and must be able to accept these without retaliating.  We can see how in the Romanian situation, parental neglect real abandonment, and institutional abuse must have aroused intense feelings of anxiety and guilt, if seen as punishment for hostile emotions. This would have resulted in obsessional splitting of 'good' and 'bad' emotions, a lack of integration which often results in intrusive thoughts, overwhelming impulses and intolerance of ambivalence, on becoming a parent oneself.

            According to the psychoanalyst Winnicott, the mother's face is the baby's first mirror (17).  Her 'reflective function' enables her both to convey her own experience of the baby as having a mind with intentions and beliefs, as well mirroring a 'marked' (exaggerated) version of the infant's  mental state (18) through which he/she learns about his/her own subjective feelings, those of others, and the fact these are meaningful. However, when the carer's own emotional state predominates, the child is unable to learn the subtleties of his/her own feelings, and may internalize a false self or inauthentic version of themselves (19).

            Under normal conditions, intersubjective mutual-regulation (20) and collaborative affective communication between the adult carer and the baby creates a 'dyadic intersubjective state of shared consciousness' (21).  This form of implicit 'relational knowing' (22) expands and changes through intimate meaningful moments between the two. This rich emotional experience of mutuality is missing for the child who lives with an unresponsive primary carer, or with a series of institutionalised staff who treat him or her interchangeably with other children.

            Furthermore, neuro-psychological research now shows that the structure of the brain itself is affected by the quality of caregiving. When distressed infants are responded to, not only do they feel secure and comforted, but neural pathways are laid down that enable them to perceive their own sense of agency so that eventually, they can comfort and care for themselves and empathise with others (23).  Conversely, due to neuroplastic malleability during the critical early period of prolonged dependence, the developing brain of the ‘unrecognised’ infant may itself suffer permanent maladaptive ‘wiring’ of neural response patterns (24). Emotionally damaging effects of neglect, rejection or emotional/physical abuse are associated with faulty stress and affect regulation, and inability to self-regulate, which in borderline conditions persists into adulthood (25, 26). There is now also evidence that environmental experience can actually alter gene expression; and conversely, that genetic endowment can mediate environmental impingements (16).

            Thus, we know that a baby learns meanings of self, other and the world from their carers. We also know that future parenting is rooted in the experience of being parented. Psychoanalytic work shows that fantasy is ever-present and cognitive experience is accompanied by emotion. Old feelings of rage, hostility and aggression from previous abusive times are transferred into new situations, released especially at times of heightened arousal and suspicion.  Through a mechanism I termed 'contagious arousal', caring for a young baby reactivates subsymbolic experience in the adult. Implicit feelings and unresolved emotional conflicts about dependence, dismissal and deprivation from the parent's own infancy and childhood, are revived, reopening old wounds with flashbacks of unprocessed traumata.  These lead to displaced reactions and distortion of attunement with the child in their care.

            Again, we can only imagine the unspeakable imagery that haunts parents who suffered institutionalised care, and their envy of the thoughtful care they themselves provide for their own child. Hateful feelings aroused in the adult necessitate projection of their own disowned neediness and sadism into the child in their care. The focus and timing of their disturbance reflect the weakest links of the adult’s own early years (27). Postnatal disorders exaggerate the nature of each person's habitual defences, such as excessive dependence, schizoid withdrawal or emotional avoidance, obsessional rigidity, guilty self-harm, or suspiciousness, aggression, or reliance on alcohol or drugs – and under extreme conditions, such defences, too, tend to be extreme, inclining towards borderline, personality or sociopathic disorders.

In the case of Romanian children who grew up unwanted in their own homes, neglected in orphanages, or scavenging as street children—when they become parents themselves, their weaknesses are not time limited but formed by cumulative corrosive experiences of emotional and physical abuse. They may find it difficult to form intimate relationships, or to control their feelings or behaviour when frustrated; they may be impulsive or emotionally unstable.  In the absence of intensive psychotherapy, such disorders inevitably will be re-enacted and unconsciously transmitted trans-generationally to their own offspring.

Clinical experience shows that people who have been deprived in their own childhood often wish to compensate for their own hardships by wishing to provide a 'perfect' infancy for their offspring.  We know that such an ideal cannot be sustained, and depression often follows their failure, as they are revisited by 'ghosts' from the past (28). Similarly, the desire expressed by many needy adults to have a baby who will love and nurture them is pathogenic. Numerous studies have shown the detrimental effects of such parentification of infants. Our tendency to focus on postnatal depression and anxiety often obscures persecutory disorders, such as suspicion, paranoia and phobias.  Mothers of unwanted babies tend to experience them as demanding parasitic intruders, or have the sense of a competition between them over scarce resources, even in the womb (29). 

            Belatedly, we have become aware of the very important influence of paternal involvement.  In most societies fathers still engage with their infants much less than mothers, yet research shows that this is a social factor rather than one of innate capacities, since fathers are as sensitively responsive as mothers and their physiological reactions to a baby's cry are similar (30, 31).  Many studies including a large multi-site American study found that father (or father figure) presence is associated with better cognitive development, greater perceived social competence (by the children themselves) and fewer depressive symptoms. The associations do not differ by child's gender, race, or relationship to the father figure (32). Conversely, studies on the effects of paternal absence find associations with teenage promiscuity, substance use, and crime.  These findings indicate the value of fathers' presence and involvement, supporting the case for implementing social policy which encourages partner collaboration (whether co-habiting or not) as an emotional base for the secure development, rather than focusing on outcome poverty after family breakdown.

            My own research shows that paternal patterns differ in terms of fathers' motivation to be positively involved in their baby's life in the context of two parent families.  Th