Evaluating Maternal Instinct Theories in Modern Contexts
In the discourse surrounding maternal instinct, traditional philosophical viewpoints have often overlooked and undervalued the maternal experience, considering it an innate and natural phenomenon. However, contemporary perspectives, spearheaded by thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Lucy Irigaray, and Adrienne Rich, have challenged this notion, emphasizing motherhood as a deliberate choice and a source of moral virtues such as self-sacrifice and responsibility. Furthermore, societal changes, including increased mobility and cultural ideals of intensive mothering, have impacted modern mothering experiences, reinforced fears and idealizations while challenging personal identity. The historical movement to professionalize motherhood during the Progressive Era also sheds light on the double standard that limits women’s social mobility while simultaneously elevating the value of the maternal institution.
While maternal instinct has been a subject of fascination, the difficulties in distinguishing innate from learned aspects of behavior have long been acknowledged. Theoretical developments by mathematical ecologists in the 1960s and 1970s demonstrated that even learned behaviors could become robust with minimal environmental input, blurring the distinction between innate and learned behaviors. This perspective challenged the traditional approaches that treated innate and learned behaviors as indistinguishable, revealing mathematical inconsistencies in such approaches.
Mammalian parents, including humans, exhibit an innate instinct to care for and prioritize their offspring, often defending them fiercely. This instinct has been systematically studied in various species, leading to the development of at least 15 hypotheses attempting to explain the evolutionary origins of “mother love” and its manifestation through species-typical maternal behavior.
While bearing children is often celebrated as a marker of femininity and womanhood, suggesting a natural instinct for motherhood, this notion is challenged by the existence of birth control and the varying degrees of maternal nurturing observed across species and individuals. Some women undoubtedly possess an instinctive desire for children, but this instinct is not universal.
The association of femininity with emotion, body, and interiority, and masculinity with mind and authority, perpetuates a socially taught chain of dominance that can lead to violence. These gendered assumptions, such as the belief that women are inherently emotional and nurturing, while men are driven by sex, are not only essentialist but also discriminatory and perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
The maternal instinct discourse has evolved significantly, moving from traditional philosophical perspectives that undervalued the maternal experience to contemporary viewpoints that recognize motherhood as a deliberate choice and source of moral virtues. While innate maternal behaviors exist across mammalian species, the distinction between innate and learned behaviours has been blurred by theoretical developments. Furthermore, the celebration of motherhood as a marker of femininity and the gendered assumptions surrounding emotional expression and caregiving perpetuate discriminatory and harmful stereotypes, highlighting the need for a nuanced and analytical examination of these issues.
Factors Influencing Maternal Instincts
Personal. Despite the development of human rights in our contemporary society, human life is broken down into socially legitimate facts. Thus, being part of a family, having a guaranteed, permanent, and income-generating job, having social support, being able to meet expectations, are some of the situations that make one capable of satisfying certain people and, more and more, making families. The agenda of the 21st century being the obligations of the parents towards their children. Among them, we have the alimentary pensions and the necessity of faithful advance to the moral sphere that should conduct the woman.
Physical and mental health. Regardless of whether a woman wants to have children, if she has no physical and mental conditions, she will be prevented from going through this one day. So, one has to care for and maintain physical and mental health. Otherwise, it will be the great infiltrator of her latent desires and obligations.
Women who do not feel the instinct to be mothers do not lack humanity; their mission is something else. Several factors can directly influence the absence of maternal instincts in the female universe. The desire of some women comes from the toys that they lived with, and the maternal instinct became something so natural in the feminine sense that when a daughter did not feel the maternal instinct and did not want to have children, the mother did not accept the fact. Maternal instinct is subject to numerous factors that, directly or indirectly, are capable of conditioning this characteristic.
Biological Factors
1. Genetic predisposition: Studies indicate that some women are naturally endowed with maternal instincts from birth due to their genes. This genetic predisposition is evident from a young age, as these women are drawn to nurturing activities, such as playing with dolls and caring for younger children, even during childhood. Just as some women are genetically predisposed to having strong maternal instincts, genetic variations or differences in specific genes related to nurturing behavior, hormonal regulation, or brain development could potentially contribute to the absence or diminished maternal instincts in some individuals.
2. Hormonal influences: While not explicit, the strong maternal desires and nurturing behaviors could be attributed to hormonal factors. Hormones like oxytocin, prolactin, and estrogen are known to play a crucial role in regulating maternal behavior and bonding with offspring. Imbalances or dysregulation in the production or sensitivity to these hormones could potentially impact the development or expression of maternal instincts.
3. Neurological factors: Studies suggests that maternal instincts can be deeply rooted and overpowering for some women, implying that there may be underlying neurological mechanisms or brain circuitry that governs these instincts and drives the intense desire for motherhood. Variations or atypical development in these neurological pathways could potentially influence the presence or absence of maternal instincts.
Today, many women, due to cultural and societal constraints that demand all women to have maternal instincts present at birth, cannot be honest about this issue. A woman is not a child person if she doesn’t have the right to declare her own feelings openly when asked. While many are not in possession of maternal instincts, which puts the whole issue in the biological realm, there are some who do, in fact, have such instincts given to them by their genes. These women would already, in childhood, prefer to play with dolls, and their mothering nature is so strong that they already, in school, babysit other children and care for them.
Psychological Factors
Maternal ambivalence can be observed when mothers believe that their children cause exhaustion and stress. Since mothers with a new baby have not had an opportunity to obey them in sensory perception and to meet their needs, they may feel stressed and temporarily exhausted. As the baby grows, the ambivalence behaviors may increase. More experience of mothers in childcare can increase their ability to perceive sensory information and become more positive with respect to caring for their babies. Especially, more experience can lead to a greater ability to understand the sensory information of the child for mothers who are not quite attuned to their sensations and can promote the rise of positive emotions when interacting with their babies. Therefore, this increased knowledge can lead to a positive perception of the baby’s sensory information of the mother. Basal activity is an important element of early childhood, and as children grow, physical activity generally increases. Interacting with a caregiver can increase happiness. However, mothers are uniquely responsible for caring for infants, which is the primary child caregiver in most cases.
Not everyone’s built to be a parent. Some lack maternal instincts completely, or do well as mothers to very young kids, but as they grow older, as their ability to reason grows stronger, it becomes evident that they were not cut out to raise them. Not everyone’s maternal instincts get activated, there might be a few challenges, specifically emotional or psychological roadblocks that are obstructing the instinct from flowing through. First-time motherhood and many more motherhood fears may lead to avoidance of being with the baby due to stress. First-time mothers may not have positive thoughts and perceptions on breastfeeding. If they learn to breastfeed without stress or discomfort, they are more likely to have positive feelings and emotions. Besides, if mothers do not have positive thoughts and feelings, they would be afraid enough to have those thoughts and whereby tend to avoid interacting with their baby, as negative emotions might hinder distressing baby care.
Sociocultural Factors
There are two aspects that seem necessary for the realization of maternal femininity in a woman. The first one is to have a child because women can become women and evidence of time spent with children, so they can be the primary element of femininity; the second child should be grown in the most natural and coherent way with the ideals and values passed down at the expense of everything, from a woman, who is supposed to be shaped, shaping her own character, the main primordial element of the female character. Motherhood, with its ideals, its values, and its exemplarity, brings together and reflects the qualities of a woman that demonstrate the capacity for total giving of themselves, to the point of not being able to polarize on the preparation of a vision. This demonstrates the purity of the female soul. For women, upon with the reality in parallels to the childish as the main seme pelagic feminine, comes to constitute for women a collective, unique and typical life experience. For some women, maternity so becomes the sole source of absolute fulfillment towards which they must aspire, and which is satisfied only through the self-realization of the external mother/child dyad in its purest essence.
People shape the reality, the principles, and the values of a society with shared symbols and representation. The widespread belief of a woman as a mother, a home educator, and a care worker is shared by many people, and the one who competes with men in the labor force is directed to the second-class position because she is assumed to be selfish. Since women are a group shaped by care, they are expected to have more attention, compassion, and love than men. Even the mother role alone may be expected not only to have the typical female characteristics and acquire primary social identity, but also to create a social motherhood role. The first mother expresses the feeling of sadness and loneliness that she is exposed to in society as “the hardest thing in motherhood”.
Maternal instincts are a construct as much as they are biological.
Historically, societal norms and expectations have often portrayed motherhood as the primary role and responsibility of women, perpetuating the idea that maternal instincts are innate to all females.
- These societal pressures and traditional gender roles limited women’s opportunities and confined them to domestic spheres, reinforcing the notion that nurturing and caregiving were their natural and expected roles.
- With the advancement of society and the changing dynamics of gender roles, women have gained greater access to education, career opportunities, and financial independence, broadening their horizons beyond traditional caregiving roles.
- The demands of modern life, such as balancing work and family responsibilities, have challenged the notion that women’s primary focus should be on nurturing and caregiving, potentially leading to a perceived ‘loss’ or diminishment of maternal instincts.
- The exposure to diverse life experiences and opportunities has allowed women to explore different identities and roles beyond motherhood, potentially impacting the manifestation of maternal instincts.
Maternal instincts are biological and remain unchanged by social constructs.
- Maternal instincts are deeply rooted biological and evolutionary mechanisms that have ensured the survival and propagation of species, transcending societal norms and expectations.
- While societal pressures may have reinforced the idea of maternal instincts as inherent to all women, the underlying biological factors that govern these instincts are not necessarily influenced by changing gender roles or modernization.
- Individual variations in maternal instincts have always existed, with some women naturally possessing stronger nurturing tendencies than others, regardless of societal norms or expectations.
- The perceived ‘loss’ of maternal instincts may be a reflection of societal acceptance and normalization of different life choices for women, rather than an actual diminishment of these instincts.
- Women’s exposure to new opportunities and responsibilities does not inherently negate or diminish their biological inclinations towards nurturing and caregiving; instead, it provides them with the freedom to express or prioritize these instincts according to their individual preferences and life circumstances.
Society vs Biology
Despite society’s portrayal that modern women can seamlessly balance personal and professional aspirations, the reality is that embracing motherhood while “having it all” remains an elusive and often unattainable ideal. The notion that women can excel in their careers, maintain fulfilling personal relationships, and fully embrace the demands of motherhood with equal dedication and success is a romanticized fantasy that fails to acknowledge the inherent tensions and limitations imposed by biological and practical constraints.
At the core of this debate lies the concept of maternal instincts — the deeply rooted biological drive to nurture and care for offspring. The biological realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and the intense physical and emotional demands of motherhood cannot be understated. These primal instincts, ingrained in the female psyche through evolutionary processes, often clash with the rigors of professional life, where long hours, travel, and unwavering commitment are expected. Attempting to juggle the innate drive for motherhood with the demands of a career can lead to overwhelming stress, burnout, and a perpetual sense of inadequacy in one or more domains.
Moreover, the societal expectations and pressures placed on women to excel as mothers and professionals simultaneously create an unrealistic standard that few can truly attain. The idealization of intensive mothering practices, coupled with the demands of modern careers, leaves little room for women to fully embrace their maternal instincts while also pursuing personal growth or individual interests beyond the realms of work and family.
While some women may appear to have achieved a semblance of balance, the truth is that sacrifices and compromises are invariably made, often at the expense of personal well-being, the quality of relationships, or the ability to fully embrace the innate maternal instincts that drive the desire for nurturing and caregiving.
Ultimately, the notion of “having it all” is a myth perpetuated by a society that fails to acknowledge the inherent tensions between biological imperatives and societal expectations. Rather than clinging to this unrealistic ideal, it is crucial to embrace the diversity of individual choices and priorities, recognizing that true fulfillment lies in finding a balance that aligns with one’s unique circumstances, values, and the profound biological drive of maternal instincts, even if it means relinquishing the pursuit of societal expectations that demand unwavering perfection in every aspect of life.
Ultimately, the debate surrounding the impact of societal changes on maternal instincts is complex and multifaceted, involving interplay between biological factors, societal norms, personal choices, and individual variations.
Questions for Critical Reflection and Creative Appraisal
1. What’s your synthesis on motherhood as a deliberate choice and source of moral virtues? How have societal changes including increased mobility and cultural ideals of intensive mothering, impacted modern mothering experiences?
2. Do you consider it true that the historical movement to professionalize motherhood during the Progressive Era sheds light on the double standard that limits women’s social mobility while elevating the value of the maternal institution?
3. Do you concur with the association of femininity with emotion, body, and interiority, and masculinity with mind and authority and how such associations perpetuate a socially taught chain of dominance that can lead to violence?
4. Oh, and one last thought, can you take a chance to appreciate the many men and women in your life that embody the maternal instinct albeit innate or learned behaviours… If it’s not too much, do let them know you see and appreciate their efforts.
