Bowlby's theory

• Bowlby’s theory

  Bowlby (1958) proposed that human in infants have an innate tendency to form attachments to their primary caregiver, most often their mother.

  Bowlby’s theory of attachment has a number of parts, which can be broken down into the following

  A: Adaptive

  S: Social Releasers

  C: Critical Period

  M: Monotropy

  I: Internal Working model
• Bowlby - Adaptive

  Attachments are Adaptive.

  This means they give our species an ‘adaptive advantage’, making us more likely to survive. This is because if an infant has an attachment to a caregiver, they are kept safe, given food, and kept warm.
• Bowlby - Social releasers

  Caregiving is also an evolutionary behaviour

  Infants are born with certain characteristics which elicit care giving. These are called social releasers.
• Bowlby - Social releasers

  Babies have Social releasers, which ‘unlock’ the innate tendency of adults to care for them.

  These Social releasers are both:

  • Physical – the typical ‘baby face’ features and body proportions, being cute
  • Behavioural – e.g. crying, cooing

  Social releasers activate the adult attachment system

  Bowlby recognise that attachment was a reciprocal process. Both mother and baby have an innate predisposition to become attached and social releasers trigger that response in caregivers
• Bowlby - Critical period 

  According to some research, babies have to form the attachment with their caregiver during a Critical period.

  This is between birth and 2½ years old. Bowlby said that if this didn’t happen, the child would be damaged for life – socially, emotionally, intellectually, and physically.

  Bowlby viewed this more as a sensitive period.

  If an attachment is not formed at this time (2 years old), a child will find it much harder to form one later.
• Bowlby - Monotropy

  Bowlby believed that infants form one very special attachment with their mother. This special, intense attachment is called Monotropy. If the mother isn’t available, the infant could bond with another ever-present, adult, mother-substitute.

  He believes that the more time a baby spent with this mother figure, the better.
• Bowlby - Monotropy

  He put forward two principles to clarify this:

  1/ The law of continuity = the more constant and predictable a child’s care, the better the quality of attachment

  2/ The law of accumulated separation = the effects of every separation from the mother “add up and the safest dose is therefore dose zero” (1975: page 255)
• Bowlby - Internal working model

  Through the monotropic attachment, the infant would form an Internal working model.

  The child forms a mental representation (IWM) of the relationship with the primary attachment figure.

  This IWM serves as a template for what relationships are like
• Bowlby - Internal working model

  A child whose first experience is a loving relationship with a reliable caregiver will tend to form an expectation that all relationships are loving and reliable. If a child whose first relationship involves poor treatment may expect such treatment from others

  The continuity hypothesis therefore states that an infant’s IWM will influence his/her later adult relationships. Infants who are strongly attached are more likely to have socially and emotionally competent relationships in later life
• AO3 - Evaluation 

  One strength is that there is evidence support for the IWM.

  The idea of IWM predicts that patterns of attachment will be passed from one generation to the next. Bailey et al. studied 99 mothers; those with poor attachment to own parents were more likely to have one-year-olds who were poorly attached

  This supports Bowlby’s idea of IWM of attachment as it is being passed through families.
• AO3 - Evaluation

  One weakness of Bowlby’s theory is that monotropy can be considered to be a socially sensitive idea.

  Feminists like Erica Burman have pointed out that this places a terrible burden of responsibility on mothers, setting them up to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in the rest of their child’s life. It also pushes mothers into certain lifestyle choices like making the decision not to return to work when a child is born. 

  This is a weakness because the theory can be seen to be unethical if its key assumptions are seen to negatively discriminate against women/mothers.