Differences between infants who reject and infants who are rejected

Good points to ponder, thanks. I will have to ruminate on these ideas for a while, it seems a foreign concept to me. If we ever owned anything it was due to mom and dad, same if we got good grades or compliments on our looks or behavior, all due to mom and dad. Guess I thought their standoffish-ness and sometimes downright coldness was all on them, too. And I knew they were right when they made their little digs, compared us to each other, and found one lacking. Sis was pretty, I was smart. 40 years later I still believe I'm ugly and she's dumb.

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

As someone with raging dismissive avoidant attachment, I am not sure I'd fully trust my parents' interpretations of my behavior as an infant or a child. I mean, if you asked my uncle, he'd want to tell you that I was interested in sex at age 4, and seriously, would anyone believe him?

I was avoidant at a young age, but that was my reaction to the circumstances. Better circumstances, less jacked up attachment.

this makes a lot of sense to me. if there isn't something physiological going on with the infant then i'd think there is something in the environment that would lead the child to "reject" the parent.

am i confusing you with someone else or haven't you said that you were beaten as a child? if i'm remembering correctly that you were beaten was it the parent that you didn't "accept" that later beat you?

Corporal punishment was not unusual. I may have used the word beaten, but they were not especially bad beatings. No broken bones or anything. I would say it was rather the usual amount of corporal punishment for the times.

it may have been considered acceptable at that time and may even be considered abuse these days. in my family there was constant conflict and yelling. my mom thinks that is "normal" and how most families are. i don't agree and even if it were "normal" it sure wasn't healthy.

I do believe that by today's views, it could be considered abuse. I don't think it was but there are some things that some people could get charged up about.
But that is past the rejecting one's own mother as an infant or small child.

I'm still not sure the rejection was real. You may have been fussy or stoic or just not met your mother's expectations in some way. She may have been overwhelmed and uninformed raising you separate from her husband and family, and unable to cope. You may have picked up on her behavior and mirrored it, or you may truly have been frightened and on your guard. Whatever the real truth is, however you responded to your mother, it was in no way appropriate for you to bear the burden for the space between you two!

Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk

Are there infants who reject? Are we talking reactive attachment disorder? Failure to thrive? Im gonna hafta google this.

this is speculation, but i think if your mom was the one who later went on to primarily do the corporeal punishment then you could have picked up on other cues as an infant that she wasn't a safe person and so you didn't want to bond with her. it would also explain why you have such a negative reaction to your female Ts.

whatever the case is, i tend to think there is always a reason why people act the way they do whether it is caused by nature or nurture or both. i don't buy that there are infants who are just terrible for no reason and popped out the womb that way.

I don't think anyone was suggesting the possibility of infants being terrible...

I think we're discussing behavioral cues that are easy to interpret as offputting, such as turning, pulling or kicking away from a caregiver, extraordinary amounts of screaming, scowling, non-responsiveness, etc.

There's just a spectrum of infant behavior and each child occupies a little different place on it, with those at one end unfortunately having a correlation with worse treatment. That's what I was taught studying child psychology. I didn't find it pleasant, but I came to understand that it's not the same as saying those infants are in any way bad or even remotely responsible for any mistreatment. Correlation is NOT cause.

This thread is a little confusing, I'm not sure if we are all talking about the same thing or what the thing is.

I don't think any babies reject their parents fully or any parents reject their babies fully. Some babies are more difficult and some parents are less patient with babies. But I don't think it's possible to link abuse or whatever just to baby's behavior. That's one link only in the chain.

Well, it's interesting the talk of "rejecting" because indeed, it implies perception.

(Doctors used to talk quite a bit about babies rejecting the breast, but we don't hear much about that anymore.)

However, in terms of behaviors we call rejecting, really, I'd say it's more apt to say the adult interacting (doesn't have to be a parent) *feels* rejected, but the behaviors are not intended as rejecting, that's just an interpretation of them. (As someone posted earlier, those babies still monitor as experiencing distress and needing care, but they're not behaving in ways that are as easy to read as wanting or needing said care.)

However, yes, there has been a correlation established through research that babies exhibiting some of these behaviors are more commonly abused.

In other words, some babies are indeed harder to raise and respond to than others *in an equally nurturing manner* than other babies who may exhibit more behaviors that are classified as engaging, positive, attractive, etc.

That doesn't make those babies responsible for being abused! Nothing of the sort.
And it doesn't make those babies bad, terrible, broken or anything else. Those are all value judgements that I don't think apply. It's certainly a highly charged topic, understandably.

And of course the issue is complex and this is only one facet of it. Certainly there are a huge number of risk factors for abuse. It's not like a random parent with a less responsive infant is always going to abuse that infant. Not at all. It's just one factor in a host, and of course, there's a wide spectrum of behavior by parent and child, not all or nothing, not simple.

I don't think I have a negative reaction to the therapists I see. And certainly not because they are female. I did have an extremely negative reaction to the two male ones I interviewed. I find the profession squirrelly as a whole.
I loved my mother and I completely adored my grandmother.
I was not an easy infant by their descriptions. I walked very early, I would fling myself out of my crib if left there when I did not want to be before I could walk, I could disengage the straps to the stroller and would do so and escape, I did not often go to them if I hurt myself and so forth.

that was the terminology used in the OP altho i see it was a carryover from the other thread. i just don't buy the implication some here have received which is that an infant is "rejecting" a parent for no reason whatsoever and thus the infant is the problem.

Rejection is how the behavior is perceived.

Behavior is not synonymous with intent to convey a particular message.

Just as we can be silent for many reasons, from sore throat to withholding our conversation in anger to puzzlement to a desire for some meditative quiet...

so can an infant behave in ways that can be interpreted as rejecting but that don't have that intent.

Trouble is, no one can ask the infant "why are you turning away from me" and get a comprehensible verbal answer.

It falls to the caregiver to try and meet the infant's needs and to interpret its cues. Of course, it's easier to interpret some behaviors positively than others. When we see an infant smile, right, the classic example, mothers commonly perceive see it as positive interaction, when it can be gas, lol.

New moms are often in a pretty vulnerable emotional space. Some babies are really fussy and hard to soothe and/or seem to prefer other people to their mother. It is easy as a new parent, even a healthy new parent, to feel terrorized by your baby and pretty common to experience feelings of hatred or resentment toward the baby. If a mom is narcissitic or otherwise emotionally unwell to start with, was looking to her baby for validation and love, gets a fussy baby and has little support from others around her it can be a perfect storm for blaming the baby and experiencing the baby as rejecting or attributing malicious intent to her baby's behaviour. (No joke, I had a friend who sincerely believed that her five week old was being smiley that day because he knew he'd been "bad" the day before and was trying to make it up to her.)

But it is not the baby's job to soothe it's mother's insecurities, it is the mother's (parent's) job to soothe her baby. The baby doesn't exist to inflate the mothers ego. A mother who is hoping to get validation from her baby is a mother who is in a lot of trouble. The baby has no emotional resources, no experience of the world, nothing to draw on but what she gets from her parents and caregivers. The parent has to help the baby attach and sometimes that's pretty easy and sometimes it's not. The baby isn't rejecting its mother, it just hasn't yet attached. It's the parents' job to keep at it, cope with their frustration and feelings of rejection and continue to provide lots of attachment.

I absolutely agree with all the above. Trouble is, some parents have it much harder than others.

Which isn't to say some babies don't have it much harder than others too.

Sad all around. And troubling.

Yeah. LOL. That sounds like my daughter. She's like freaking Houdini with the car seat straps. She throws stuff at us and has several tantrums a day. But though it's hard and sometimes we want to tear our hair out, we know it's developmentally appropriate toddler behaviour. It's our job to provide safe opportunities for her climb and fasten and unfasten things, practice throwing, spitting, spilling and tearing. You can decide your kid is bad and a real pain or you can admire her spirit. You can decide she's the devil and she's out to get you or you can see that it's time to go to the park and run or have a snack or a nap. It's the same behaviour, it's just how the parent chooses to interpret it.

Hell, it is hard to recognize that my puppies (both of whom are now dogs) are not rejecting me when they find a smell or a snack or playing with each other more fun than coming to me as normal pup behavior (which it is). I can't imagine how hard I was on my own mother.

I kinda see what Partless points out--that the thread is a big mixture of things and there really isn't a clear-cut answer.

I focused on attachment. Either someone had mentioned it or it seemed to be relevant. Just to add one note of exquisitely conducted research is the work of Beatrice Beebe (and colleagues). She has done micro-analysis of infant-mother dyads from early on to later and been able to accurately predict things. And it is not all that clear-cut either. Sometimes what is called "looming" (moving forward, being very attentive) which might seem to be a responsive type of thing actually has negative effects and longer term consequences. You really have to read the actual research to find out what behaviors of all sorts of types are considered and what is tolerated (regardless of temperament) and what produces confusion or negative response.

As far as the sense of an "attachment disorder," well, not really. Yes, attachment is very real and has tons of research now to back it up, but no, in the clinical language there are very few clinical disorders that are solely attachment based. In fact, really only 2 or 3. One is separation anxiety which has some sort of relation to attachment though is really thought of as anxiety primarily. The main two are really childhood disorders, both related and just the opposite of each other, with almost the exact same causes, which are listed as extremes of neglect, instability of caregiving, etc. Not necessarily direct abuse that would lead to a more trauma based type of thing, but these disorder are listed now in the trauma related disorders.

One is what hamster mentioned: reactive attachment disorder, which is the complete lack of seeking comfort, even rejecting attempts at comfort, seeming to be unmoved or uninterested in any kind of attachment based soothing. It is actually considered quite an extreme disorder. The list of what has to happen to cause it is very awful. It just doesn't sound like that is really in place for the OP or even for most if not all of the responders.

The other is the opposite--a disinhibited social inappropriate way of attaching. The exact same very disturbing circumstances lead to this behavior. And personally I can see some of the personality disorders coming from this more primary problem that may be overlooked when people are children.

What is weird is that all the traumatic things acknowledged for both of these attachment based disorders are NOT acknowledged in the current diagnosis of PTSD, even though they are in the same category and literally a few pages away from each other.

Clearly there is a problem with the overall understanding of the role of attachment and also early experiences.

The bigger point for me, is that the therapists keep blaming my mother/parents rather than considering that it was probably my rejection of my mother that caused some of the difficulties.
And I wondered, after the thread about bad babies (paraphrase) if others had discussed being bad babies either causing the parent to then reject the baby or if the bad baby was due to rejecting the parent.

Awe, I don't think they're bad babies regardless. I think they're babies who have a tough time getting along, and that's hard for baby and parent. Sometimes, we as parents fail, and fail more, when our babies need more care. It's sad all around, but clearly never the baby's fault.

The adult is possessed with countless resources that a baby is devoid of. Typically, the baby's only resource is it's caregiver. When that caregiver fails, for whatever reason, it is their responsibility.

And yes, I have discussed my difficult behaviors (which could be perceived as rejecting) as cause for the way I was treated. But I don't find it makes sense to blame one person for another's behavior, regardless of relationship or age. If someone hits me, they've chosen to hit me. If someone neglects a baby, they've chosen to neglect her.

My little girl is nine. She has oppositional defiant disorder. If she tells me she's not going to eat and she hates me and wants me to leave.... do you think I'm just going to leave, going to let her starve? I don't take orders directly or indirectly from my minor daughter. She's not competent to raise herself, and neither is any infant.

I take good care of her. I feed her, I stay with her, I love her, I teach her as best I can. Have I needed five minute time outs, sure. Have I ever lost my temper, sure. Whose responsibility is it for all my actions? Mine. Mine Mine. Mine.

I'm responsible for every screwup, no matter that she never stopped crying as an infant, wouldn't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time, and was quite fussy.

And you know what? If I can't handle her- if I start to think she's a 'bad baby' or a 'terror' or 'too difficult'....

I pick up the ****ing phone and call for backup. It's my job to keep perspective. My poor kiddo can't do it, and she certainly couldn't as a helpless infant.

And if I don't, that too is my failure.

I do agree that babies should not be rejected by parents.

One of the most quoted guys on early development, Winnicott, said, enigmatically and purposely so, there is no such thing as an infant.

What could that possibly mean? He was not just a child psychiatrist and analyst; he was also a very actively practicing pediatrician. So he had a lot of real world observation.

What he meant is that the infant is born into a dyad with lots of contingencies, that mostly are temporary but some mothers don't necessary adopt them and that leads to problems.

Now in the field that Winnicott once occupied there are people who use infant neuroscience and attachment research to ground their theories and also their approaches to therapy. And that is very complicated but some of the findings do pretty much show that human infants are born with an ability to recognize and relate to what would be the care giver's cues. It is so clear that even an infant's focal eye length is not what you would think, just immediate, maybe for the breast and feeding. No. It is about 8 inches and seemingly designed to be able to focus on the face while feeding. Think about the difference that makes. It is truly amazing.

But it also shows that there can be lacks in the process that may not be intentionally harmful but still result in negative consequences.

As some others have said stop dog, maybe you should try to remember your mother's care from a non biased person. It's highly unusual for a baby to reject the mother unless the mother has rejected it first. According to the attachment theory infants are highly sensitive and their only way of communicating is through non verbal facial expressions and through the care they receive: touch, hugs, love. They morrow what they receive.
I know your mum says you rejected her but perhaps you were so attuned to her that you picked up some resistance on her part. A lot of rejection comes from a parents misattunmentattunment. Can you imagine a baby who has just been fed and is drowsy and a mother interprets that as bored and starts to wave a rattle in its face thinking he wants to play..The baby will become irritated and scream and reject when she then wants to hug him. So there cam be lots of misattunmentattunment s.

Have any of you seen the film " We need to talk about Kevin"?
It's worth a look because although some people say that Kevin was born a psychopath, I disagree, his mother never wanted him and she was quite mean to him as a baby so as a sensitive little toddler he picked up on her vibes. He rejected her as he mirrored what he knew rejection