Are early childhood experiences overrated? A reassessment of maternal deprivation

The opinion that early maternal deprivation (absence of mother, lack of stimulation, multiple caregivers) results in lasting damage to intellectual and emotional development is generally accepted. In a real-time longitudinal study 137 children, part of a representative sample of Kt. Zürich (Switzerland) who spent the first years in residential nurseries, were investigated at age 12.6 +/- 8 months and again at age 14 years. In IQ and education this group at follow-up was not different from the general population. The children were no less popular than a control group of classmates. There were, however, among them two to three times more psychiatric cases than among a Swiss comparison group. Behavioral and emotional disorders were not connected with status at first examination or variables of the early environment, but with psychosocial risk factors in the environment the children lived in after leaving the nurseries: parental discord, divorce, psychosocial disorder in parents, presence of step family, abuse. This finding is confirmed by other prospective and retrospective studies. Early deprivation is almost always an indicator that an unfavorable situation will continue throughout childhood. If, on the other hand, the environment changes completely, as it does after adoption, early deprivation by itself does not appear as a risk factor. The role of the mother-child relationship and of early influences in general on personality ought to be reconsidered.