Fleming – mothering

Often mothers who have had very poor early experience being mothered, they’ve been neglected or they’ve been treated harshly, that will influence actually how they mother later on and also whether they want to mother.  

That’s sort of an environmental reason for mothering. The work I’ve been doing is much more biologically based I’m sort of, concentrate much more on the role of hormones and mothering. So we know that hormones can predispose other animals, non-human animals to want to mother, but there also seems to be a role of hormones in human mothering, but not alone you see. So they’re early experience matters and maybe their hormones matter. So you have those kinds of environmental and then hormonal factors. You can look at whether mothers have support around them. That can help them adjust to mothering or transition into mothering if they have a lot of support. It’s one situation if they’re alone, in they’re quite poor, if they’re have been sort of not supported by their community then that makes it much more difficult to mother. So contextual things matter. The brain matters. We’ve done a lot of work on neurons in the anatomy of mothering and how hormones act on that brain to predispose females to mother after they’ve given birth. But of course, you can mother without undergoing hormonal changes. We know adoptive mothers will mother. Now what’s interesting is that in other animals, you can show adoptive mothers will mother as well, so you don’t need the hormones in order to do the mothering, but it helps, it just helps.  

It’s sort of multi factorial to be academic, so why do mothers want to mother? I think there are probably a lot of different reasons and a lot of different mechanisms.