Dorothy Rowe

4th January 1997 Friends of the Family My friend Lou has a talent for friendship. If you are her friend you are indeed blessed. Everything she says and does makes you feel valued and important. I tease her about how she is always taking bowls of hot soup to her ailing friends, but I know that if I became ill everything she did for me would not be motivated by guilt or the need to appear virtuous but by friendship. The Christmas before last I spent at Lou's home. Of those in our party only two were related, Lou and her niece to whom Lou is not an aunt or a surrogate mother but a best friend. For the rest of us no family Christmas was possible as our families were scattered across the globe. So our Christmas was a friendship Christmas. And very pleasant it was. No one was pointedly not talking to someone else. No one shouted insults. No one was sobbing in a darkened room. No one was martyring herself in the kitchen, and no one was sloping off to the pub to avoid his in-laws. We made paper hats, told stories, ate marvellous food, drank excellent…

31st August 1996 Liam Gallagher wants to smash his brother's head in with a guitar When Liam Gallagher stormed out of the passenger lounge at Heathrow 15 minutes before his flight to America he was doing what all brothers do - fight. And he was doing it in the way that families do - in the most public place, causing the most embarrassment and inconvenience to his nearest and dearest. Family fights usually erupt at wedding, christenings and funerals. Liam hadn't hidden his feelings towards brother Noel. He's reported as saying of his brother and guitars, "I ***ing hate that tw*t there, I ***ing hate him. And one day I hope I can smash **** out of him with a ****ing Rickenbacker right on his head." Liam is 23 and Noel? . In fifteen years time will they be giving interviews and talking about past misunderstandings but now they're older and wiser and the best of friends? Or will the hatred deepen and the rift widen? Liam and Noel will find that if they don't patch up their differences and at least appear to get along they'll be criticised by those people who believe that families should stick together. The…

1st September 1999 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEAL TIME A great wave of sentimentality is spreading across Britain. In homes across the nation, in newspapers, radio and television, in pulpits and, no doubt in Thought for Today, people are bemoaning the loss not only of the country's favourite television advertisement but also the loss of that great institution, family meal. Since 1983 the Oxo family, at the end of every domestic crisis, has gathered at the dining table and enjoyed Mum's home cooking. This series of advertisements was the most popular in Britain, though it seems that the viewers did not rush out and buy Oxo gravy cubes. Instead, they bought packed pre-cooked dinners and gathered, not at the dining table, but around the television. Some research commissioned by Young's, the frozen food company, showed that in families with teenagers one family in twenty in Britain eats together only on Christmas Day, and over a third of those questioned said that they preferred to watch television while eating rather than sitting around a table with their family. Talking to other family members over dinner was not considered relaxing. Advocates of the sacredness of the family and family values will be…

November 2, 2000 Notes & Queries At school in the 40s I cannot remember any fellow pupils being hyperactive, disruptive or showing symptoms similar to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ADHD). Is the recent growth of this due to a lack of firm discipline at home and in school, or to pollution radiation, junk food, etc? There are always fashions in mental illnesses. In Freud's day conversion hysteria was popular. Now it is rarely found. In Sydney where in the 1960s I was working as an educational psychologist any child with a behavioural or learning difficulty was likely to be diagnosed as autistic. Since then, this diagnosis has come to be used much Discriminatingly. Nowadays the psychiatric profession, supported by the drug companies, readily creates fashions in diagnosis. The committee which decides upon the contents of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, increasingly used here, needs only to ascertain that a group of psychiatrists reliably agrees that a mental disorder exists in order to include this disorder in the manual. Another committee could reliably agree that the moon was made of green cheese, but such agreement does not prove the cheesiness of the moon. There have always…

December 13, 2000 LIFE OR DEATH DECISIONS: TEENAGE SUICIDE The death of two teenage girls in a gas-filled car is shocking. Why would two young women, their lives ahead of them, choose to die in a suicide pact? Teenage suicide is not rare. After 1945 around the world the rate of teenage suicide began to rise significantly. Of more recent years the rate for young women has levelled out while that for young men has continued to rise, possibly because many young men, faced with a dearth of traditional jobs and roles for men, found that society had no place for them. The legal tradition has been to see suicide as an act committed when the balance of the mind is disturbed, that is, as a permanent or temporary madness. This formulation does not explain why a person commits suicide. Suicidal thoughts are considered to be a symptom of depression, but, while all depressed people contemplate suicide as a way of escaping from their misery, not all depressed people even attempt suicide, and it is by no means certain that everyone who commits suicide is depressed. However, it is possible to explain suicide in terms of what it is to…

To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to www.guardian.co.uk For Goodness Sake Saturday 8, September 2001 How many of the people you call friends do you not really like? How many of them do you see as something of a burden, as relationships to be endured rather than enjoyed? You see them because you feel obliged, you resent the demands they make on you, and you don't feel good after seeing them. So why do you keep them in your life? Whatever we do always has, in part, the aim of making us feel good about ourselves. To achieve this, we have to think that what we are doing fits our image of ourselves. Suppose you like to think of yourself as a kind, tolerant, generous, helpful person. You don't want to think of yourself as hard and cruel. When you've got a friend who is hurtful, even destructive, you can't say, "I don't want to see you again", because that would be hard and cruel, and you're not a hard, cruel person. We want the people we know to see in us the qualities we most admire and which we hope we…

The Guardian Monday 9 September  2002 Would you be willing to humiliate yourself on national TV like the has-beens on the celebrity survivor show that reached its climax last night? Or queue for hours for the chance of being slated by a panel of Popstars judges? Or would you let your privacy be invaded, as in Big Brother, by millions of prying, critical eyes? "Never!" you'd probably reply, "I don't crave that kind of attention." But few of us realise that those who seek fame in these seemingly abhorrent ways are no different from the rest of us. We all need to be noticed, and this need is as important to us as is air, food and water. We each have our own way of getting noticed but, whatever ways we use, it is imperative that other people acknowledge our existence. Air, food and water keep us alive physically, but even more important than that is our survival as a person - what we call I, me, myself. Faced with a situation where there is a conflict between surviving physically and surviving as a person, most of us choose to let our body go. If we don't make this choice, if we…

Letter to the Guardian March 29 2007 In 1985 Don McPhee and I spent a wonderful afternoon together, so he could photograph me in relation to my then latest book Living with the Bomb: Can We Live Without Enemies?  After a long search for a suitable location, we managed to get into Waddington air base and Don took a very stark photograph of me with a delta-wing bomber looming over me.  Don's photograph accompanied an article by Walter Swartz about my book.  The large spread and the photograph attracted the attention of HarperCollins editor Michael Fishwick, and this began for me a long and very fruitful relationship with Michael and the publisher. After our meeting, Don sent me a photograph that he had taken of me in my garden.  It is quite the loveliest photograph I've ever had taken and I treasure it.  Ever since that afternoon I've been hoping that I'd meet Don again.  Having to relinquish that hope is very, very sad. Dorothy Rowe London

Daily Telegraph, 23 November 2007 Moral babies or born to be wild? A new study suggests that babies can differentiate between good and bad behaviour from as early as six months. Psychologist Dorothy Rowe disputes claims that humans are born with an innate morality.Babies are born with one thing: an instinct to survive Babies are born helpless. Their survival depends on other people. Babies can make their distress known to others, but those people won't necessarily respond in the way the baby needs. To survive, babies need to be able to assess whether an adult will be helpful or not. So do toddlers, for whom being able to read feelings is essential. My own mother had an erratic, explosive, dangerous temper which she usually vented on me; my survival depended on being able to read her danger signs. For the Yale experiment, six- and 10-month-old babies were made to watch two colourful wooden toys either help or hinder another who was trying to climb a steep hill. After the baby viewed the characters, they were invited to pick one. The babies showed a strong preference for the toy that helped rather than hindered, proving, according to the Yale scientists, that babies…