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Child Development
The 'Invisible Cliff' Experiment and Maternal Power
The idea of maternal power may make you uncomfortable but it's revelatory.
Updated July 22, 2023 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- It is hard to overstate how much power and influence a mother has over a child's development.
- Amazingly enough, an infant will override her own perceptions of danger if her mother signals it's safe.
- A child's views on the nature of the world—including whether it is safe—emerge from maternal interactions.
Acknowledging that mothers wield great power over their children makes many people uncomfortable. This is because the idea of Mom as a ruler—potentially an attentive and caring monarch, an absentee sovereign, or a punitive tyrant—runs counter to the myths of motherhood our culture embraces. Among those myths are that women are naturally nurturing, all mothers love unconditionally, and that mothering is instinctual; it will not surprise you that not one of those assertions is a universal truth. Deborah Tannen summed it up, writing that a mother not only creates the world the child lives in but dictates how that world is to be interpreted.
The dependence of the infant on maternal behavior and responsiveness is captured in a number of experiments, among them “The Visual Cliff.” If you took an introductory psych course, the chances are good that you were told about it.
“The Visual Cliff”
Imagine an infant just a month over one-year old; she’s not walking yet but she is a confident crawler and even though she’s in an unfamiliar place—it’s a laboratory—she is on a long plexiglass table and her mother is in view at the other end. She looks around with a certain amount of curiosity but there’s nothing to make her anxious.
This is the setting for “The Visual Cliff,” which was originally devised as an exploration of whether depth perception was innate or learned. The idea came to Eleanor Gibson, the mother of two, on vacation at the Grand Canyon and I’m guessing it was inspired by angst. The setup Gibson and her colleague devised for the experiment is simple but remarkably clever: A checkerboard pattern lies flush to the surface of the table for 4 feet and then slants, creating the illusion of a steep drop. The researchers put rats, kittens, puppies, goat kids, and human infants on that table and discovered that each and every one screeched to a halt when they saw what appeared to be “the drop.” Even the bribe of a toy—just out of reach past the drop—could not entice a single child.
So, it appears when that when animals and humans are able to move on their own, their depth perception kicks in. That is a good thing for one and all, including worried mothers near precipices like Eleanor Gibson.
But 25 years later, James Sorce and his colleagues revisited the Visual Cliff with other goals in mind and this is where we get a glimpse of the breadth and depth of maternal power.
A Mother’s Power: Close-Up and Personal
Once again, the infant is on the table and her mother is at the other end. Sorce and his colleagues wanted to know how a one-year-old would resolve the conflict between what she’s feeling, her knees and palms against the solid of the plexiglass, and what her eyes are telling her about the apparent drop ahead. If she’s feeling conflict, the researchers surmised that the infant would look to her mother for guidance.
The researchers had the mothers change expressions when the baby approached the “drop." When the mother was smiling at the baby, an astonishing 74% ignored their sensory perceptions and kept on crawling to Mom, even over the “deep” end. Think about that for a moment and recognize its implications. In contrast, when the mother looked angry and upset, the infant screeched to a halt even before reaching the “drop.” Some became sufficiently aroused by their mother’s disapproving faces that they actually crawled backward.
The Centrality of the Mother to the Infant’s World
But infants just don’t look to their mothers for guidance; they learn about the world and manage their emotions based on their mothers’ attunement and responsiveness to their emotional cues. That was shown in another experiment, “The Still-Face.” (See here for more.) In that experiment, the mother deliberately becomes unresponsive for a short period of time and the infant essentially melts down because of the emotional pain of the disconnect.
“The Visual Cliff” and “The Still-Face” experiments make it clear that the mother’s face is the lodestar by which an infant learns to navigate the world.
But how does the mother wield that power? Is she aware of it? Here we get into the territory of the loving monarch, the absentee sovereign, and the punitive tyrant.
The Upside and Downside to Maternal Power
With a loving mother who works hard at being consciously aware, the infant can develop optimally; it’s estimated that roughly 50% to 60% of children find themselves in that place and they develop a secure style of attachment. But that does leave 40% to 50% of us in another place entirely and, alas, where there is power, there’s also the potential misuse or abuse of it. Cultural myths notwithstanding, the mother-child is not exempt.
Imagine a mother who’s disenchanted and sees mothering as a burden; she does what she can to ignore her baby. That infant grows up without a lodestar and her mother’s treatment will affect not just her development but how she sees the world of relationships; most likely, she will see emotional connections as unsafe or unreliable.
Imagine a mother who is always angry and unsmiling because the baby is so needy and demanding and so much work. That baby will learn to ask for little and to expect nothing because it hurts to see that angry face. This mother may actually like the rush the power she has over the child because it seems to even the score.
Finally, there’s the mother who can muster the energy some of the time to be present but not at others; she vacillates between being present and absent and the infant is continuously caught off guard. In some ways, this causes the most damage of all.
Maternal power is real and it should always be wielded with conscious awareness. When it isn’t, the effects are as real as the power itself.
This post is adapted from my book, Daughter Detox: Recovering from an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life.
Copyright © 2017, 2023 by Peg Streep.
References
Gibson, E.J. and Walk, R.D. “The ‘Visual Cliff.’” Scientific American, 1960, vol. 202, pp 67-71.
Sorce, James F., Robert Ende, Joseph J. Campos, and Mary D. Klinnert. “Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effects on the Visual Cliff Behavior of One-Year-Olds. Developmental Psychology, 1985, vol.21 (1), pp. 195-200.
