I was looking forward to reading this, since it was recommended to me by numerous sources, and is quoted and recommended by Pam Leo in her wonderful book, Connection Parenting.
I can appreciate that it was an important work at the time it was published (the mid-70s), but I found it to be full of ideas ranging from unhelpful and strange to downright false. To wit, here are the strange:
· Pregnant women should have no stress during pregnancy
· Women should give birth alone or with as few people around as possible. Once the baby is born, no one should be present except for mom and baby (not even dad). After a few hours and an optional warm bath for the baby, mom should continue her normal daily routine
· Dad should not be a primary influence on the child until age seven, since this will impede the child from bonding fully with the primary matrix (mom)
· Children should be discouraged from reading until at least age 11; otherwise, they are likely to become prematurely sexualized (as with many of his more outrageous claims, he doesn’t provide any real information to back this up. He claims that Scandinavian women started menstruating at 17, then 100 years later (post-literacy), the age changed to 14. For Mediterranean women, the age of menstruation changed from 14 to 11. He never shows how this has any correlation to literacy whatsoever).
And the false:
· After a chapter documenting the effects of neglect on institutionalized children, he claims that mental retardation is usually caused by a lack of intellectual stimulation. While it is true that children who are not intellectually stimulated as infants can indeed become mentally retarded, it is by no means the “usual” cause of the disease. The three main causes of mental retardation are Down syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome and fragile X (described on FRAXA.org as “the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common known genetic cause of autism.” Perhaps research in the 1970s showed otherwise, and that is where he got that information. We’ll never know, however, since he does not document or verify this statement.
· He claims that autism is caused by the child’s failure to bond with the mother matrix. This is the old “refrigerator mother” theory, first popularized in 1943 by Leo Kanner. Again, while there is some truth to the statement (neglected and abused children can become autistic), it is not only false but insulting to insinuate that poor maternal bonding is to blame for all cases of autism. This simply is not true.
Despite all of this, I think that we need people with extremist views such as Pearce’s. If nothing else, you get the idea from reading this book that bonding is extremely important, and that neglect can lead to serious mental issues in children. That may be enough to validate reading the book—it may not. Frankly, I would not recommend it. There are lots of books about the benefits of attachment parenting (the parenting theory most similar to what Pearce is advocating) which are easier to read and provide more practical instances for parents to adopt and apply.
Pros: Makes you think about subjects you may not have thought about before, such as the best time to work on your child’s telepathic skills. I’m not sure from reading the book how that makes you or your child any more fulfilled, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Cons: The clunkiness of the writing, the amount of tangential information about psychic phenomenon, the misinformation about mental retardation and autism.
Magical Child on Amazon.com
