The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Maté says that, as human beings, we have an innate aptitude for raising children. However, our modern “toxic” culture has made us forget or repress this skill in several ways. To explain how these forms of forgetting came about, Maté notes that theories of modern child rearing after the 19th century were based on the “socializing model” (162). According to this model, the goal of child rearing was to foster a “socially functional personality” (162), where the child was able to fit in with, and function efficiently in, the existing social world. Such a model has led to the neglect of key aspects of childhood development needs. For example, physical contact between mother and child, which encourages mutual bonding between mother and infant, has been de-emphasized, leading to a muted emotional mother-child relation and psychological problems for the child in later life. Similarly, physical and emotional punishment have been and continue to be used to correct childhood behavior in a way they were not in pre-modern cultures. Likewise, “sleep training,” leaving children and teaching them to sleep on their own at specific times convenient for the parent, is practiced in the West but not in other cultures.