It has to be acknowledged that this defence against hurt is not confined to the professions. It is used by all human beings as a way of dealing with persistent threats to comfort, becoming deaf or blinkered as the situation requires. But when it becomes insidiously effective in the caretaking professions, a consequence is not only reduced stress for the worker but the sense that the problem itself seems less pressing. Even the literature comes to have less meaning than in student days when it was first learned that separation from the mother into hospitals and residential institutions commonly results in overwhelming distress - in protest and despair. These phrases, so evocative when first encountered during training, come in time to be barriers against the empathic pain they once aroused.
Familiarity gives a palatable gloss to the case material.
A degree of fatalism enters in. The problems may seem too immense, and the detriments inevitable and unavoidable. In this situation it is not only that the children are cared for in ways which are detrimental to their good social and emotional development. Their caretakers, mostly young girls with little intellectual understanding of the problem but with affection for children, are also denied the conditions of work that would fully utilize their potential to be good substitute mothers. They in turn tend to become defended against disappointing relationships with the children and frustrated in the expression of their mothering concerns.