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Mother‐blaming, relationship psychopathology, and infant mental health: A commentary on Ward, Lee, & Lipper (2000)

In this issue, Ward and colleagues (Ward, Lee, & Lipper, 2000) report that infants diagnosed with failure-to-thrive were less likely to be securely attached to their mothers than infants growing normally. Further, they also report that mothers of infants failing to thrive were significantly more likely than mothers of infants growing normally to be classified as Unresolved (with respect to loss or trauma) based on their discourse patterns in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI; George, Kaplan, M Korner, 1961, 1968), it is a persistent one. We believe that when a distinguished research group is hesitant about reporting their findings for fear of being perceived as mother-blaming, a reconsideration from the clinical perspective may be indicated. Mothers, of course, are not the only ones who get blamed—infants or other caregivers may be blamed for a particular problem or behavior. Nevertheless, mothers generally do get the lion’s share of blame. Mothers are blamed in part because of their involvement—they are the ones who are for the most part “in the trenches,” caring for their infants. In fact, Jordan (1997) has pointed out that as a field, infant mental health has minimized gender politics. She has underscored a central irony: in our efforts to avoid mother-blaming by substituting the more neutral terms, “parent” or “caregiver” for “mother,” we do mothers an injustice. Paradoxically, she argues, these neutral terms serve to displace mothers from positions of power,