From The TimesOnline.com.co.uk

March 23, 2010

Men and affairs? It’s all nanny’s fault

According to the psychiatrist Dr Dennis Friedman, entrusting your son to a nanny could turn him into a womaniser

Carol Midgley

Prince Charles with his nanny Mabel Anderson.

Do you have a young son whom you kissed goodbye this morning and left in the care of his nanny? Mmmm, well maybe that wasn’t such such a good idea, actually. At least not for the female who eventually marries him.

According to a new book An Unsolicited Gift by the psychiatrist Dr Dennis Friedman employing a nanny or au pair to look after your baby son could turn him into a womaniser.

What you have done, you see, while he is still gurgling in his Pampers, is unconsciously introduced him to the concept of the Other Woman — the idea that there can be one female to meet one set of needs and another to meet different ones.

As a child this might simply mean that Woman 1 is the natural mother whom he respects, admires (and possibly adores) and Woman 2 is someone who does physical things for him such as feeding him lunch and kissing his knees when he’s scraped them.

When the son is a grown adult, however, this demarcation may manifest itself differently, according to An Unsolicited Gift. That is, he may seek out a Woman 2 (a bit on the side) to get sexual gratification and attention outside his marriage.

"It creates a division in his mind between the woman he knows to be his natural mother and the woman with whom he has real hands-on relationship: the woman who bathes him and takes him to the park and with whom he feels completely at one”, Friedman says. “As a result, he grows up with the idea that although he will one day go through all the social and sexual formalities of marriage, he will have at the back of his mind the notion of this other woman, who not only knows, but caters for, all his needs.”

It is possible that you are a guilt-soaked working mother who is now headbutting the wall shrieking “Great — another crime to add to our list”. Or maybe you are thinking “Prince Charles — this explains everything!” (Indeed a few members of the Royal Family appear to have lived out this premise). Surely modern working mothers are not the remote, absent types we associate with the 1950s. We all recall that old footage of the young Prince Charles meeting his mother after she had been away on tour when she failed to kiss him . The situation is now much more complex; working parents are often so guilt-ridden they lavish their children with love and attention to compensate.

Linda Blair, a child psychologist and author of The Happy Child, believes his theory makes cause and effect out of something that is merely “association”. If a person has had a nanny, for instance, they may also have gone to boarding school and thus may have a different view of the nuclear family. He might also be powerful and ambitious. This may be more about wealth than the nanny, she says.

But it is important to make three points before we go any farther. First, there is no scientific research to back up this theory; second, people with nannies tend to be wealthier and it is surely easier to have affairs if you have money to book a hotel room; and, third, some child experts totally disagree with Friedman’s theory.

However, this doesn’t mean it isn’t a fascinating one with which some people, who have themselves been looked after by nannies as children, concur. After all many nannies and au pairs live in the home — arguably blurring boundaries and reinforcing the idea that it takes more than one woman to “care” for him, don’t they? And what about when nannies leave or are sacked? Other nannies usually take their place. To a child this might leave the residual impression that women are expendable, replaceable. Might it skew the expectation of what one woman can provide?

Friedman, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists with an interest in family, marital and parenting issues, says that he wrote the book not as a parenting guide, but to illustrate the power of parenting and how influential the mother is. He says that if you interfere with the close bond that exists between a mother and child there will eventually be a reaction to it. This can be in a huge way such as abuse — and here he cites the killers of Jamie Bulger — but there can be much smaller, less serious “interruptions” that could have an effect.

Friedman believes in this case that it is often when the boy grows up, gets married and a baby is born. At one stroke his sexual partner becomes a Mother — and, put simply, he feels he cannot do sexual things with a Mother because that would somehow feel incestuous (although he wouldn’t recognise it as such). So he seeks out a nanny substitute to tend to his physical needs. Or as the book says: “Deceiving their ‘children’ (as their parents once deceived them) they revert to their role of unfulfilled child and seek comfort once more in the arms of a surrogate (nanny).”

A newborn baby is totally dependent on its mother, Friedman says. The baby recognises that it has certain “rights” — such as to be loved and comforted by his mother when he needs her. “If he is denied these human rights he may grow up to deny somebody else their human rights,” he says. “And with this the seed of antisocial behaviour starts to grow.”

Girls are also susceptible to this “vacuum of need”, he says, but perhaps less so because the little girls have a different relationship with their mother than little boys do.

Lucy Jones, 35, from Hampshire, is one of five children whose parents employed nannies. She says, according to this theory, her two brothers, now 33, and 27, should both be adulterers. In fact, they are not. “One is happily married with two kids, but, boy, did he have ‘issues’ with commitment,” she says. “His wife waited four years or so, living with him before he proposed, and even then it was somewhat reluctantly. He was fine with the idea of having kids with her, but couldn’t get his head around monogamy. My other brother has been with his girlfriend for five years but if you mention marriage he goes white as a sheet.”

She says that the nannies whom they had doted on the boys more than the girls and that she saw what she describes as a “pedestalisation” effect years later with a long-term boyfriend who was also raised by a nanny before being sent to boarding school at age 7.

He ended their relationship because he “felt he should be more excited”, she says. She believes he resented her for not putting him on a pedstal him enough. “I think he was a spoilt child, and got everything he wanted because when his mother said no, his nanny said yes, and vice versa. I remember actually saying that if he wanted a nanny for a girlfriend, he should go and find one.”

Friedman, 86, who had a nanny as a child himself but does not discuss this in his book, believes that the best place for a baby is with its mother — a view that may upset many working mothers who have no choice but to earn — and that each child has the right to have a relationship with a mother who is “100 per cent connected”. He recommends that parents shouldn’t employ a nanny or au pair until after the baby’s first birthday. Blair, however, disagrees that one should wait until a child is 1 to employ a nanny as that age represents the summit of a child’s stranger anxiety (in some countries children will only be accepted into nurseries at under 8 months or over 18 months).

She argues that what we do know is that as long as child care is consistent and loving in the first few years of life the chances of a child feeling loved and stable are higher. Also it is the mother’s mood state which influences the stability and happiness of a child — so an unhappy stay-at-home mother would not necessarily have a positive effect on the child. “It is ‘how’ not ‘what’,” Blair says. “It’s about quality of care.”

This is of some comfort. But for many working mothers the guilt trip will be beginning — again.