Fleming – mothering variation

Mothering isn’t unitary. It’s not as though there’s something called mothering. It’s very complicated. It’s got many aspects to it and what I’ve been studying is how mothers emotional state impact how they interact with their babies. How mothers executive function and cognitive function and attentional function impacts how they interact with their babies. How mothers memories will influence how they interact now and later with first and second babies. So that I think they there are many general process systems like memory, like emotion, like attention and executive function and perception which are general process functions which have to be recruited in order for a mother to be attentive, to pay attention, to be attracted, to be in the mood to do it as it were so that you have to understand the role of all of these in order to understand how a mother is with her baby, or an animal mother is with its baby.  

In humans we know there are many, many aspects of behaviour that influence mothering, like if a mother’s depressed, that’s a really rough place to be. You’re depressed and you’re not responsive, you know, and in fact your baby very rapidly learns to deal with that, but it’s a very difficult emotional thing. It’s nothing about how much those moms love their babies, they love their babies, but if you’re depressed then these other things take over, and so you’re not able to respond in the same way. So I think you have to think about mothering as being quite complex and that’s what I study.