So what's the issue?

[ailbhe]

I paraphrase: "If you'd rather not leave your 10-month-old baby for more than a day, you have deeper issues." I didn't paraphrase the "deeper issues" phrase, since I'm not clear what it means, but the context implies "problems".

But I've heard this before - that it's unhealthy to want to spend almost all of every waking day with your baby, that wanting regular time away in multi-hour chunks is more normal than not, that not wanting such time is evidence that the parent is weirdly dependent on the baby and fostering a dependent attitude in the child, suffocating and other things I can't remember the names for now. If it's a boy-baby Oedipus comes into things once the discussion gets sufficiently heated.

The bit I don't understand is why it's bad for parents, particularly mothers, to want to spend most of the time with their children, caring for them, not leaving them with a sitter or a carer or similar. How does it hurt the mother? How does it hurt the child? How much time away from the child, leaving someone else to care for it, is necessary for optimal psikerlogical development?

This makes about as much sense to me as the assumption that it's bad for children to be left with an alternative carer while the parents, to pick a random example, go out and earn food money, or study, or take papier mache lessons. Why?

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

There's also a matter of "left with whom?" I'd be far more willing to leave my kids with my parents for a weekend than I would with a stranger, not only because they're people I trust, but because they're people the kids know well and love dearly. I leave them with their father (and he leaves them with me) pretty regularly, sometimes for a couple of days at a time if he's gone on a business trip or I have a music event I want to go to. Having a parent gone for a little while is one issue; having nobody the child knows and trusts present is a different one. Both have some impact on the child and have to be handled (we definitely put our two year old on the phone with the missing parent when one of us goes away), but it's a lot more of a big deal to be left with someone they don't know.