title: Kowakare: a new perspective on the development of early mother-offspring relationship.
abstract: The mother-offspring relationship has components of both positivity and negativity. Kowakare is a new concept introduced to explain an adaptive function of the negativity in the early mother-offspring relationship. Kowakare is the psycho-somatic development of the relationship as the process of accumulation in the otherness of offspring. Early human Kowakare has two frameworks, biological inter-body antagonism and socio-cultural allomothering compensating the antagonism. Some features of feeding/weaning, parental aversion to offspring's bodily products, and transition from dyad to triad relationship (proto-triad relationship) in tactile play are discussed. Early human Kowakare is promoted by allomothering with the nested systems of objects/persons/institutions as interfaces between mother and offspring. Kowakare makes mother-offspring relationship a mutually autonomous and cooperative companionship.
authors.affiliation: Department of Human Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, 2-579-15 Mikajima, Tokorozawa, Saitama, Japan. negayama@waseda.jp
authors.forename: Koichi
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Negayama
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001942:Breast Feeding; D002648:Child; D002654:Child Care; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D000882:Haplorhini; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009769:Object Attachment; D012931:Social Environment; D013045:Species Specificity; D014886:Weaning