The ties that bind for a lifetime of health.

Russek and Schwartz (1) provide a very significant contribution to our knowledge about the health consequences of parental caring. Perceived parental caring is obviously a robust predictor of health status in middle age. We need such cohort confirmations for these developmental hypotheses. This Journal has recently been using art to illustrate important points in psychosomatic medicine. For this editorial, I thought of the image of Michelangelo's Pieta, an extraordinary sculpted statement of the mother-child bond, and hence relevant to the parental caring hypothesis of Russek and Schwartz (1). Mythic metaphors will have to serve in place of a great work of art. In some religious traditions, the birth of the child-hero captures the earliest and most powerful love/bonding formulations and images. For example, as the poet John Donne puts it: " . . . perchance in the whole body of history we read of one childe, Zoroaster that laughted at his birth. . . . " (2). This is a powerful image (and imago) of the happy child! One of the implications of Russek and Schwartz's (1) work is the need for further comparative study of how religions model early attachments and the related personal imagos of the deity, or deities as love/loved objects. Ana-Maria Rizzuto's The Birth of the Living God (3) is an important example of this type of research question. In my Appalachian study it was clear that for an impoverished subculture, adult religious experience was intended to compensate for failures of parental love and other forms of social and psychological deprivation (4). Perceived parental caring can be studied in different cultural settings and times in the life span. Hopefully, scholars committed to psychosomatic medicine and related social epidemiology will develop a greater interest in what is health promotive— from early bonding and nurturance within the family to the life span approach to understanding subsequent adult health and patterns of morbidity and mortality. It is fitting to emphasize the authors' last sentence: "Therefore, although the Harvard study is limited by the selection of the simple ratings obtained in the early 1950s, the present findings underscore the importance of obtaining information about parental caring and love as part of future research and clinical evaluation." The authors are well aware of both the promise and limitations of their results. Selectively, I would like to comment further on the implications of this work for future researchers. I remind the reader of Joel Dimsdale's superb editorial, "Social Support—A Lifeline in Stormy Times" (5), in which he precisely summarizes the fundamental importance of social support and health. We have much more to learn about the health consequences of parental affection. Our ways of studying support and health still require further refinements and empirical work. In 1977 (6), we suggested the field needed to consider three interlocking processes: How are personal support needs met? How does the objective environment affect the state and quality of social support supplies? How does the variety of support mechanism work?