Is Love All You Need?

I could swear I read somewhere babies who had all the basics, but had minimal human contact, fared much worse than babies raised by loving parents who couldn’t provide adequate food and shelter. I have thought much about this, and I hug and kiss my children incessantly in the belief that if I fail them in every other way, they will feel my love and that alone will be enough save them. I tried to find the study, but only came up with one done on Rhesus monkeys. Uh oh … maybe love isn’t all you need!

This well-known study done in the 1930s , while non-human, so do with it what you will, demonstrated a baby monkey chooses a soft, fabric, fake mom monkey over a wire model that provides nourishment. Follow up studies showed negative long-term social and psychological effects in monkeys abandoned in infancy. You can see some of the actual experiment on YouTube and while its findings are crude and its methods are seemingly cruel, Harry Harlow’s experiment changed the way society thought about raising children—for the better.

What about humans? Ethics has prevented similar controlled experiments on human babies, but there has been other observational research. Studies of children raised in orphanages as opposed to those in foster care, reveal a higher rate of psychological and emotional problems among the children reared in even the most well-kept orphanages. If you are interested in learning more, this article in Time provides a nice summary.

So, while there has been no case-control study to look at children who receive love and those who do not, the references above, combined with good old common sense, tell me to continue to shower my kids with affection. There is no feeling of safety like that of knowing you are loved unconditionally. And, safety and assurance are great deterrents to making stupid decisions. Besides, I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. We are genetically preprogrammed with this insane parental love to prevent us from eating our young and shipping off our teenagers.