The Maternal Instinct Controversy
Photo by Sean Roy on Unsplash
Writing in the New York Times on Sunday October 2, 2022, Chelsea Conoboy challenges the widespread cultural assumption that women have a built-in maternal instinct that kicks in (for most) when a child is born. This instinct supposedly accounts for “the selflessness and tenderness babies require.” She points out that this idea is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one.
Conoboy goes on to discuss the origin of this idea — “…constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be” — and its effect — “It keeps us from talking about what it really means to become a parent, and it has emboldened policymakers in the United States, generation after generation, to refuse new parents, and especially mothers, the support they need.”
It’s relatively easy to debunk the idea of the maternal instinct and the questionable science that supports it. For example, research into the brains of people who care for infants shows a similarity of structure and function no matter what their gender. According to an article I found at webmd.com, “They experience an increase in activity in their amygdala and other emotional-processing systems, causing them to experience parental emotions.” The idea that activity in the brain and the experience of emotions are related is one thing. To place the cause of this relationship in the brain is another example of the self limiting belief that the cause of our experience lies in the physical, thus leaving us powerless, at the effect of these physical processes.
However, my argument is that underneath this controversy is another well-hidden assumption — that instinct itself is a hard-wired feature of the mind-body entity we call a human being, men and women alike.
This overlooked assumption, that we are both sustained and limited by hard wiring, is a mechanistic view of life. This view is the result of believing that to do rigorous science we must disregard the role that consciousness plays in the unfolding of the physical world (see this blog post). This belief that science can and must eventually find in the physical world the cause of all our behavior may be the ultimate self limiting belief.
There is another way to look at ourselves and the world that allows us to recover our power to determine our own experience. This viewpoint starts with the premise that the physical world we perceive is the product of interpretation of sensory data (light impinging on our retinas, pressure waves in the air surrounding our eardrums, and so on). Our brains then make a three-dimensional picture of our world, and we literally walk around inside this interpretation system instead of experiencing the world directly. We look at that picture when we think we’re looking at the world.
The way out of living entirely in our heads, in the pictures our brains make from sensory input, is to open ourselves to the vastly greater intelligence that gave rise to all creatures in the first place. This requires replacing the idea of instinct as hard wiring with a secure connection to that greater intelligence. This opening of oneself to expanded intelligence is called intuition, and it becomes increasingly available to us as we liberate ourselves from self limiting beliefs. One of these beliefs is our culturally derived view that experience is determined by physical hard wiring.
Armed with the understanding that instinct is really intuition, one opens oneself to the experience of caregiving, and the brain and the rest of the nervous system expand and change to facilitate that experience. The maternal instinct becomes the intuitive understanding that children need conscious caregiving, no matter who shows up to provide it, no matter their gender, age, or any other characteristic.
