— Harry Harlow, documentary Conquest CBS, 1960
This week I met with a colleague over lunch who recounted the challenges she was having in getting her donors on board with supporting families instead of orphanages. This group of donors had visited a family in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. The family were living in a tiny shack with holes in the roof, without lockable doors, electricity or running water.
My colleague lamented. She was finding it very hard to shift the deeply entrenched beliefs that food, water and shelter are all children need to grow up well.
It’s a belief that harks back to the1950s, a time in which the emerging field of psychology believed that children only needed their mother for sustenance and other physical needs. The most prominent behavioural experts thought that love and affection simply didn’t matter and had no bearing on a child’s development.
The interesting and controversial figure who eventually overturned these ideas was a psychologist named Harry Harlow. Harlow devised a set of experiments that set out to prove that love is important and critical to healthy development in children. Harlow’s experiments involved separating infant monkeys from their mothers. They were put in a cage with two kinds of surrogate mothers – one made of wire that was equipped to dispense milk and the other covered with soft terry-cloth.
At birth, Rhesus monkeys have the brain and nervous system of a five-month-old human baby. So based on psychological theories of the time, the baby monkeys should have bonded to the wire mother who was feeding them. That’s not what Harlow found. The baby monkeys spent almost their entire time attached to the terry-cloth mother
In subsequent experiments, Harlow found that baby monkeys learned to self-sooth and regulate their emotions through bodily contact with their terry-cloth mother, what Harlow called ‘contact comfort’. He found that baby monkeys who were raised solely with the wire mothers, would scream, hold themselves and rock back and forth in terror when scared, unable to self-sooth. They demonstrated behaviours that looked a lot like the ones observed in children raised in orphanages.
He concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation was irreversible, that no amount of exposure to a mother-figure could make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred.
Harlow’s experiments became the foundations for the science of love, adding scientific legitimacy to the powerful argument against raising children in orphanages.
It’s hard to watch the experiments on YouTube because of how distressing the animal cruelty is. But it’s important to remember that this is the psychological damage being inflicted upon children when they are senselessly separated from their families and institutionalised in orphanages.
This doesn’t mean that we should leave children living in abject poverty. There is, after all, a straightforward solution for that family living in Sihanoukville. Take the funds needed to raise the children in an orphanage, and instead use it to strengthen public social services that can provide the services the child would be receiving in an orphanage. The Village Hive Early Intervention Journey supports families to repaire the home, connect electricity and water, gain training in financial literacy and develop a secure income. This is not only more moral, it is also a far more cost-effective solution.
When provided with the right assistance, families are more than capable of making their own plans to pave their way out of poverty. Support from international donors is essential to building upstream public systems so that communities are no longer dependent on charities, and families can safely raise their own children. These children will then also know how to raise their own families one day.
The only way to break the cycle of poverty, is to break the cycle of charity.
