Letters | If Hong Kong has a mother in Carrie Lam, why is she avoiding her children?
- According to psychoanalyst John Bowlby, children are programmed to elicit care from their primary caregivers. By avoiding the protesters who Chief Executive Carrie Lam said were like her children, she may be inadvertently provoking stronger reactions from them
I still remember what Lam said: “I’m a mother too, I have two sons … if I indulge his wayward behaviour, he might regret it when he grows up. He will then ask me: ‘Mum, why didn’t you call me up on that back then?’”
Lam was suggesting that she was like a mother to the protesters and needed to do what’s right. Therefore, she had no intention of backing down and withdrawing the extradition bill.
I could not help but immediately think of the psychological theory of attachment of John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst who looked at the effects of separation between infants and their parents.
All human infants are biologically programmed to attach. This is critical for development. A child is motivated to elicit as much care as possible from the caregiver and will therefore learn to adopt strategies to do so.
Between six and nine months of age, infants develop a range of attachment behaviours with the purpose of keeping a parent close, so as to feel secure, especially in times of stress. Bowlby hypothesised that the extreme behaviours that infants engage in to avoid separation from a parent or when reconnecting with a parent – such as crying, screaming and clinging – are evolutionary mechanisms.