okay. listen. I try not to be pedantic about this sort of thing but it’s starting to get on my nerves. the wire mother offers milk but not comfort. the cloth mother offers comfort but not milk. if something is comforting, fun, or otherwise compelling, but lacks substance, that is the cloth mother. if something is boring or unpleasant but has substance, that is the wire mother.
things are heating up in the unethical experiments fandom
nah nah hold on, let me get even more pedantic.
the big finding of the whole experiment was that both food and comfort are not just substantial, but required for healthy development. in the 50s the popular theory was that mothers should touch and hold their babies as little as possible to avoid “spoiling” them, especially right after birth (which explains uh. a lot about boomers as a generation).
Harlow conducted his experiment to investigate this idea, and he found that physical comfort nearly eclipsed the food as a need in the baby macaques. They would go to the wire mothers only when they were hungry, sometimes even trying to reach the milk bottles without letting go of the cloth mothers, because they so badly needed both. Harlow’s other experiments showed that being deprived of parental comfort and enrichment as babies dealt lasting psychological damage to the macaques. and today we know that human babies can just up and die without enough skin-to-skin contact.
so yeah, to highly social apes like us, comfort and fun are no less substantial than food, it’s just a question of how quickly it will kill you to go without it. do not deny yourself the cloth mother
