The Oedipal phase

fisch

My son is obsessed with me. It's adorable and annoying all at the same time. I'm curious if any other same sex couples have experienced this with a son. I figure this stage usually changes around 5 or 6 years but I've not yet seen how it changes in a same sex parent household. Assuming there is usually a transfer to the male in the house. I wonder if our son will transfer to my wife, who is slightly less femme then me, but also his non bio mom. Does the Oedipal
Complex occur in adoptive families too? Anyone have first hand experience? A degree in ECE?

EMG_REL

That is fascinating! I'm looking forward to reading responses. R and H just left for the day, and she was commenting on what a Mama's boy he's becoming (Mama is me, and I am the non-bio mom). He chooses me over her almost every time lately. It's not Oedipal yet (I don't think), and I would actually not be able to comment on which one of us is more feminine; I think she has more masculine mannerisms, but we're both more on the feminine side. Anyway, after that rant that didn't help you at all, I'm curious what everyone will say.

pb

Both my kids did this and they switched off parents. Paige did have a father in her life and it didn't change anything. It is/was just a stage for both Beckham and Paige. It seems to break for a bit then it starts all over again. Good luck. I can give my much more tech answer but my premise is the same

K&H

Okay, so bear in mind that this is my field and Im likely to get totally sidetracked and tangential. Also, I only have my phone, so pardon the typos.
The "Oedipal phase" theory is just one of many ways of trying to understand the ways others think. Freud was really one of the first people to think about how our experiences and thought processes have an impact on our adult life, but he was certainly not the last. His theories have to be understood in the context of their time as well. At that time, children were thought to be very short adults. Exactly the same except for physical size and ones expectations of them should be the same. Therefore, Freud thought that they should have sexual impulses just like adults as well. He took this assumption and expanded on it to delineate different stages to explain that children were slightly different, and ended up moving through a process to become mature functioning adults. This was all very shocking for his time. The mere idea that children had individual reactions to events and this could impact things later was an entirely new idea.
Now, aside from and beyond Freud, there are many different ways of looking at children's development. Bronfenbrenner (who helped create Head Start) believed in an ever windening circle of influence and interest. In this mindset, an infant is wholely consumed with the mother for the first period of life. This later expands out to the rest of family, close community, larger community, and eventually the world and mankind as a whole.
Other theorists expanded upon the initial idea of the effect of early years and an entire school of thought called Object Relations came out of it. This is where we get the generally accepted idea of a "lovie" or transitional object as a substitution for the missing mother. Also in this concentration of area would be attachment theory and the idea that a well attached child will explore a new area and people but look back to the mother from time to time to check that she is still there. This idea comes from the thought that all experiences build on each other. As a child has learned to trust and know the mother, then they can reach out and trust and know others.
(ok, I got completely lost in the tiny screen of my phone here, so bear with me.)
If you take these ideas as general ones, you could see how it would make sense that a child would "switch" their interest from one parent to another. Now, if you want to, you could say that it is sex dependent and make meaning out of the opposite sex parent argument. But I personally don't think that sex of parent or child has as much to do with expanding development. I think that a child encorporates their primary parent, then expands to "learn" their secondary parent, and then becomes confident in taking on an ever widening world. I can agree that it could look as though the child was attached to the primary parent, then moved on to the secondary, and then achieved some sort of mastery of those relationships and moved on to others. If you wanted to, you could understand this through the Oediapl or Electra ideas, but they are certainly not the only way of looking at things.
All this is basically to say that it is developmentally perfect for your son to be obsessed with you, and at other times obsessed with his other parent. Even without a man in the house, he will be just fine and have plenty of experiences and relationships to grow and learn from.

(I hope that made sense and was helpful, I tend to get both long winded and simplistic at the same time, so apologies if it was just annoying or strange!)

em'smoms

Just want to say that my 4 yr 8month old girl is COMPLETELY obsessed with me, especially over the past year or so, not sure if my pregnancy and birth of new baby has anything to do with it and she has always preferred me (I am bio mom) over DP, but lately it seems to be more so- always coming up and hugging me and telling me how much she loves me, wanting to snuggle and touch me all the time, etc. So maybe it is just a developmental stage??