Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers out there, and to all of the lucky children and spouses who owe so much to the wonderful mothers in their families.
I’ve been privileged to be the son of one great mother and the husband of another. Although great mothers may differ in many respects, I suspect that they all share one crucial quality: they have opened their hearts to their children, totally and unequivocally, so that their children’s welfare always is their paramount consideration. Even when they are overwhelmed, or sick, or experiencing their own personal challenges, they are worried that their daughters and sons aren’t eating well, or are working too hard, or aren’t as happy with their lives as they possibly could be. They are willing to do just about anything to help their children achieve optimal bliss because nothing is more important to them. They say they don’t want us to worry about them, and they almost always truly mean it because they don’t want to add one scintilla to our everyday burdens.
We’ve all heard stories of mothers who, in moments of extraordinary strain and stress, have done extraordinary things like lifting too-heavy objects off children pinned beneath. I’m not surprised by those stories. There is something awesomely powerful about the mother-child bond and the love that bubbles forever in a mother’s heart. If you are the object of that love, it is an amazing and humbling thing.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the female brain reacts to giving birth and caring for a child. After birth, females are flooded with hormones like estrogen, oxytocin and prolactin, and first-time mothers are learning an entirely new set of skills, including surviving on little sleep, coming bolt awake at the first murmurings of a waking infant, and mastering the interpretation of baby cries to determine whether a child is starving, dealing with a poop-filled diaper, or just lonely for Mom’s smiling face.
Not surprisingly, the study found that when mothers are expressively loving and supportive, their children are better situated to deal with distress and to develop effective life, social, and coping skills. The children of emotionally cold mothers, on the other hand, have more difficulty dealing with anxiety. There is a limit to the developmental effectiveness of maternal warmth, however. The study concluded that over-mothering can be “intrusive and embarrassing.”
It is clear that unsustainable and unsupportable government borrowing is what led to the Greek crisis and the dire predicaments of other European countries. The choice for the United States is whether to chart a different course and start making serious spending cuts right now and or to 
