IF YOU PLAY the video at the end of this post, you'll see Charles Collingwood interviewing the psychologist Harry Harlow for CBS. Harlow ran the primate lab at the University of Wisconsin in the 50s and 60s and conducted the famous wire monkey/terry-cloth mother monkey study we know from Psych 101.

With  Mother's Day coming up, I can't help thinking of those little baby rhesus monkeys. They took nourishment from the wire mother, but they clung to the terry-cloth mother for security. They needed contact comfort just to survive. 

They needed much more than terry-cloth to become proper monkeys, of course. As Harlow discovered, they needed real mothers who would feed them, cuddle them, teach them, and push them away when they became too big. They needed the society of other monkeys, too, but more than anything else, that early relationship with mother made them the monkeys they were meant to be. 

There's something else that comes to mind this close to Mother's Day:  the concept of the "good enough" mother. The developmental pediatrician Donald Winnicott observed that mothers who hovered didn't give their babies a chance to learn to regulate their own emotions independently. Mothers who were indifferent  had babies who were in a way like Harlow's unmothered monkeys--eventually they just gave up. Mothers who struck a balance of "imperfect" mothering had the most well-adjusted babies. 

So here's to all of us imperfect mothers and children of the same on Mother's Day: Let's remember to give each other a hug and, when we do, hold onto the thought that sometimes all things have to be is good enough.