Death Without Weeping Response

However, Rutter’s Romanian orphan study suggests that mothers are not special in the way Bolby believed. Infants displayed a range of attachment behaviour towards attachment figures other than their mothers and there isn’t any particular attachment behaviour that was exclusive to their mom. Schaffer and Emerson as well, found multiple attachments are the norm, in fact 39% of children had their main attachment to someone else than the main carer. These two findings undermine Bowlby’s theory.

While visiting Alto do Cruzeiro in 1965, Hughes noticed women were indifferent concerning the death of their children. Infants born dead or “waiting to die” is a common occurrence in Alto do Cruzeiro. The women of the community became use to experiencing these tragedies and decided it would be easier to cooperate with Gods plan. If an infant is born “waiting to die”, the mother will usually leave the child to die. Having this kind of attitude towards dying infants has a powerful impact on maternal thinking and practice. Already knowing that an infant will not survive makes the women less loving and nurturing. When an infant actually survives, the mother has a difficult time raising the child. Children born in this area “lack traditional breast feeding, subsistence gardens, stable marriages, and multiple adult care-takers that exists in the interior.” Since single parenting is the norm, woman are forced to leave the infant at home, many times by itself. The women cannot carry their child with them at work or by the river. They can not leave their child with the older children because if they are not in school they are working as well. Also, since women earn a dollor and day, they can not afford to hire a baby

The child who died is considered a gift to the parents and family, and they are forced to give up that gift. Yet, as parents, they also strive to let their child's life, no matter how short, be seen as a gift to others. These parents seek to find ways to continue to love, honor, and value the lives of their children and continue to make the child's presence known and felt in the lives of family and friends. Bereaved parents often try to live their lives more fully and generously because of this painful experience.

After reading What’s Heaven by Maria Shriver, I got the opportunity to realize that talking about heaven can be difficult—especially when a child’s grandparent passes away or loved one passes away. For instance, as a child I always thought that human beings live forever; however, as I got older I began to realize that human beings cannot live forever. Nevertheless, as a nineteen-year-old college student, talking about death and heaven is tough and emotional for me; I cannot imagine myself mourning the death of a loved one—specifically, my mother, brothers, sister, aunts, cousins, friends, etc. My mother attempts to have conversations about death and heaven with me: “Kevin, my son, human beings get the chance to live a long-life here on earth;

Spending a few days with the newborn, doesn’t give adequate time for the mother to structure any type of connection with the child. The first months of the baby’s life are essential for its progress. In the later years when it’s time for the mother to come home, she and the child are strangers. Not having developed that bond at an early age causes the child to be unfamiliar with its own mother, which leads to long term sentimental and conduct issues.

Kinship is when a child is cared for by either close family friends or relatives. This is usually short-term; however it can become long term. Kinship is preferred for children who have been separated from parents because it sustains the Childs connections with their families.

The grieving that individuals experience with death is unique, but the main stages are universal across cultures (Axelrod, 2017). There are five stages of grief. Nicolas Wolterstorff’s story, Lament for a Son, addresses these five stages as he tries to find joy after the loss of his son. The meaning and significance of death in light of the Christian narrative is also addressed in the story. Having a hope of the resurrection can help comfort individuals in situations similar to Wolterstorff (Wolterstorff, 1978).

Ana Castillo’s novel, So Far From God, propels the reader on a vibrant and surreal journey through the tragic ordeals of Sofi and her four daughters. The first chapter, which offers certain similarities to the Bible’s story of Jesus Christ, in that Sofi’s three year old daughter, La Loca, seems to succumb to a violent and horrifying death, and at the wake, she returns to life with a tale of her journey beyond the veil. This scene creates a notable comparison between the patriarchal religiosity of the story of Jesus Christ and the Chicana-centered resurrection, complete with the hypocrisy of a male-centered system of beliefs, the acts of acquiring selfhood as a female centered savior, and the phenomena of the “death” of the saviors.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes studies and observes the connections between the loss of infants and the mother’s ability to express maternal love in the shantytowns of Brazil in her article “Mother’s Love: Death without Weeping.” Studying documents, interviewing, and observing the everyday lives of mothers, were the fieldwork procedures she used to conduct her research. The results of her research provided evidence of two theoretical perspectives observed in the article, structuralism and materialism.

Scheper-Hughes provides a controversial breakdown of the mothers' evident lack of concern to the death of their babies as not a repression of grief, but as a plan for endurance. The mothers, by allowing themselves to form attachment to only the babies who have already verified their capability to survive by doing so during early infancy, these women can increase the existence odds of their strongest children. Modern ideas about "mother love," and about mother-infant bonding as a naturally occurring process that in general occurs in the first few moments of a baby's life, are the cultural result of the statistical differences which allows women to give birth to just a few children, each of which she may be expecting to raise to adulthood.

Kinship is the study of relationships or kin, therefore is an important role on how a person behaves as well as form attachments with other groups i.e. new family members. A great example of this is the movie we watched in class called The Dark Matter Of Love. Masha had a very difficult time adjusting with her new family because she couldn’t understand them and the family felt overwhelmed with 3 adopted children from Russia and you could tell by the way the parents acted. But, overtime she and the other two adoptees learned to love, care ad be happy with their family. Which goes to show that once you adjust and take things at a slow and steady pace that everything turns out for the best. I also believe this goes in hand with Stryker’s central argument that if new parents had the same way of thinking like the Diaz’s, that maybe they wouldn’t reach the point of distress and turn to the evergreen model. Stryker’s main point is that there are different ways to get help for your child, and that you don’t need to basically torture them for them to love

The modern world is in the midst of reconstructing gender roles; debates about contraception, reproductive freedom, and female inequality are contentious and common. The majority now challenges the long established assertion that women’s bodies are the eminent domain of patriarchal control. In the past, a woman’s inability to control her reproductive choices could come with ruinous consequences. Proponents of patriarchal control argue against reproductive independence with rhetoric from religious texts and with anecdotes of ‘better days,’ when women were subservient. Often, literature about childbearing fails to acknowledge the possibility of women being uninterested in fulfilling the role of motherhood.

One part of Hecht’s article that might be applicable to life is that he talks about how people once treated the event of someone who was on their deathbed, that in past centuries society it was sacred and revered. How deathbed scenes were commonplace in literature, theater, magazine essays and Sunday sermon. He compared it to how childbirth is treated to today. The article stated that a possible reason for the change of thought might have had to do with events such as World War I, World War II, and the holocaust.

The article, “Mother’s Love: Death without Weeping” by Nancy Scheper-Hughes is about mothers in the Alto do Cruzeiro and how the mothers take the death of an infant. The mothers have been thought not to morn for their babies and to not become attached. They do this because the high rate of mortality because the infants are left at home while the mother is at work. No one is there to tend for the babies and the mother cannot take the babies to work with them. No funerals are done with the death of these babies some of the babies never even got a name because the mothers are thought not to get attached to the child until they know the child will survive. This is all due to the malnourishment in the children because the mothers are in poverty

Infants are a special cohort of a population in the society. Children between the ages of five months to two years are at a stage where they start familiarizing with their surroundings and have different reactions to situations. The surrounding where an infant grows greatly determines his or her development. The primary determinant of the development of infants is the parent-infant interaction (Crain, 2015). The first bond or relation of a child is with its biological parents or guardians in the case of orphaned children.