Surrogate Parenting Loss Arrests Mourning Process in Children

Surrogate Parenting Loss Arrests Mourning Process in Children

In a series of earlier papers psychoanalyst Harry Hardin pursued a clinical study, now in its twentieth year, of adult patients who early in life received primary care at home from surrogate mothers. In recent years his son, Daniel Hardin, Ph.D., a sociologist, has collaborated in the study resulting in the publication of "Loss of the Surrogate Mother and Arrest of Mourning" in the Fall 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA).

In the JAPA article, the authors demonstrate how there is an arrest of the mourning process in children who lose their Early Primary Surrogate Mothers(EPSMs) -- that is, primary caretakers other than the biological mothers.

When there is a loss of an EPSM, as with the loss of a parent, it is necessary for surviving family members to mourn openly to validate the loss, thus enabling the bereaved child to become involved in a healthy mourning process. This, however, raises a critical issue: while the loss of the EPSM -- a psychological or de facto mother -- is almost invariably a tragic event for the child, the same is not true for the parents.

Except in certain circumstances (when a relative is the EPSM, for example, or when the parent had the same caregiver as a child, or when a parent and EPSM have developed an unusually close relationship) parents do not mourn the loss of their child's EPSM, and do not provide that necessary validation.

The authors have long associated loss of an EPSM with the development of characterological fear of loss, severe separation anxiety, and the inability to become intimately involved with others. They now consider that the arrest of the mourning process is heavily implicated in these developmental consequences. The potential for long-term developmental repercussions of this arrest is evident in the examples described in the paper.

There are many research implications of this study:

1. In most developmental research involving the mother-child relationship the influence of EPSMs is all but totally ignored.

2. The potential for developmental problems associated with early primary surrogate mothering and particularly the loss of caregiving figures points to an urgent need for additional research on this burgeoning form of childcare. Such an undertaking requires that investigators reconsider the commonly held view that primary caregiving by others is equivalent to care by a biological mother.

3. One difference with other-than-mother primary care is that though the EPSM becomes a de facto mother, the parents may not validate that reality for their children. The authors stress that this validation is part of the necessary task of nurturing and protecting the attachment of both the parents and the child to the EPSM.

4. The most significant difference is that EPSMs are almost invariably lost to infants and children, who may also suffer an arrest of mourning.

5. There are psychosocial implications as well, highlighted by the increasing prevalence of other-than-biological-mother primary care in North America. In more and more homes, the EPSM has become a de facto member of the family, capable of exerting a profound influence on the future of the children and on their relationships with their parents. This largely overlooked phenomenon of early development must be recognized and investigated extensively, in parallel with those current studies that continue to focus solely on biological parent-child relationships.

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