A ‘mother’?

Bach­e­lors and Mas­ters degrees in Science. 

Over the years she has been:

Staff Nurse in hospital 

Nurse Man­ag­er

Staff Devel­op­ment Coordinator

Found­ing leader of a com­mu­ni­ty autism society

Board Cer­ti­fied Behav­ior Analyst

Lead Behav­ior Ana­lyst in a state projects

Pri­vate con­sult­ing business

Cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing a Ph.D.

Fre­quent speak­er at con­fer­ences and work­shops at the local, state and nation­al level.

So my ques­tion is – can this per­son real­ly be ‘mothering’ her chil­dren — all under 10 years of age?

Did I men­tion that at least one of her chil­dren has been diag­nosed with autism?

It maybe polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect to even sug­gest that this ‘mother’ might be strug­gling with her ‘mothering’ skills.

What’s miss­ing here is old-fash­ioned com­mon sense. 

Any moth­er famil­iar with the ‘art of moth­er­ing’ will know instant­ly that a per­son with sev­er­al chil­dren in that age group can­not be involved in such a demand­ing career, fur­ther edu­ca­tion and com­mit­tee work and be tak­ing care of her chil­dren. It just can’t be done.

Which means that the pri­ma­ry care­giv­ing of this person’s chil­dren is being done by ‘someone else’ or lots of ‘someone elses’.

My research is con­firm­ing my blink impres­sion and prac­ti­cal experiences: 

Chil­dren with devel­op­men­tal delays are being neglect­ed by their care­givers – which boils down to the fact that par­ents aren’t involved enough to even notice that there are miss­ing pieces to their infants’ and children’s devel­op­ment, let alone be tru­ly will­ing to take the time to do what’s real­ly nec­es­sary to cor­rect the deficits as soon as possible.

As I’ve said before, ‘mothering’ is a long lost art – when it returns and is val­ued as a true spe­cial­ty most devel­op­men­tal delays will disappear.