The growth of love

Abstract

This article explores how and why child care theory and practice has been separated from the idea and concept of love since Dr John Bowlby used the word in his book, Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953). The author attempted to reconnect child care theory and love in his book, The Growth of Love (2008) the title of which was deliberately chosen to reflect the debt owed to John Bowlby, and his son, Sir Richard Bowlby contributed the Foreword. Some of the challenges and implications of this approach are described, before reference to the writings and work of others that he discovered in the process. Three mentioned are Janusz Korczak, Paulo Friere and Friedrich Froebel. Recent research on cognitive development creates space for thinking about love, for example Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters (2004). The article concludes with reference to children in hospital and love in religious traditions, with a final mention of how Johannes Brahms saw love as the key to all of his music.

Encounters with Care in a Scottish Residential School in the 1980s

“…The St Roch's boys did not speak of rights in any legalistic sense but about a sense of fairness and what might be termed 'right relationships' [54], negotiated through peer relationships and against a backdrop of adult authority. This process emerged through and was apparent in daily living and in inter-personal relationships.…”

Revolutionary Love: Early Childhood Education as Counter-Culture

“…They point out that one of the key features of the Western industrial domination system has been the use of a universal and context-free science as the exclusive measure of human value, often being used to justify patriarchal assumptions about women and care. For example, White [47] points out that only John Bowlby's first publication used the vocabulary of love to describe early relationships. He refers to a video interview of Bowlby's son Richard in a video saying that the term 'attachment' was soon preferred as 'love had too many different meanings for a scientist' [48]).…”