Attachment and parenting

• Attachment


  An affectional tie that one person or animal forms between himself and another specific one – a tie that binds them together in space and endures over time
• Attachment


  • Selective – focus on specific individuals
  • Involves physical proximity seeking
  • Provides comfort and security
  • Produces separation distress
• Attachment behaviours


  • Preferential attention
  • Touching
  • Clinging
  • Crying and calling for in absence; smiling in presence
• Development of attachment


  1. Pre-attachment (0 - 2 months)

  2. Attachment-in-the-making (2 - 7 months)

  3. Clear-cut attachment (7 – 24 months)

  4. Goal-corrected partnership (24 months onwards)
• Strange Situation


  Standardised assessment: how infant uses caregiver as a secure base for exploration, and comfort after a mildly stressful event
• Classifications of attachment security


  • A: Secure (Approx. 60-65%)
  • B: Insecure – Avoidant (Approx. 20%)
  • C: Ambivalent – Resistant (Approx. 14%)
  • D. Disorganised (Estimate unclear ~ 5%?)
• Secure attachment


  Predicts curiosity & problem solving, social confidence, empathy & independence, lack of behavioral problems, decreased risk of anxiety disorders
• Criticisms of the Strange Situation


  • Often very 'mother' based
  • Attachment type commonly not the same with fathers
  • Implications that mothers should stay home
  • Role of depression little considered
  • Different cultural norms can lead infants to behave differently
• Prediction of attachment is not always found
• Early attachment doesn't predict attachment later in development
• Attachment Q-Sort


  Set period of observation of children by someone familiar with that child, ~100 Items sorted by observer according to child's attachment related behaviours
• MCAST


  Manchester Child Attachment Story Task, Story stem vignettes with dolls (child, carer)
• Child Attachment Interview


  Adult Attachment Interview
• Overall criticisms of attachment theory


  • Commonly categories of attachment
  • Simple causal relationship?
  • What about resilience?
  • Complex developmental pathways
  • Dynamic processes through life course
  • Insecure attachment is not neglect
• Attachment theory proposes carers' sensitive caregiving, not children's endogenous characteristics, determine attachment security
• Tabula rasa


  An absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate
• The blank slate notion is considered doubtful, nature and nurture and their interplay are so important
• Infants come into the world with reflexive, sensory, perceptual and affective capabilities, allowing them to play an important part in forming their social relationships, including relationships with carers
• Newborns orient towards social interactions
• Infants under 3 days old can imitate specific facial features, but this effect has not been reliably replicated
• Mutuality


  Reciprocity during interactions, 'dance' between infant and carer - both involved in initiation, regulation and termination of interaction
• Temperament


  A precursor to personality but not directly equivalent, includes surgency, orienting/regulation, and negative affect
• Temperament is heritable and there is gene-environment interplay, including evocative or reactive gene-environment correlation
• There are likely biological bases related to how easy a child finds it to develop an attachment
• Origins of individual differences in early attachment


  • Genetics: modest influence
  • Environment: Maternal deprivation hypothesis, Carer's mind-mindedness
• Secure attachment in adolescence


  Associated with diverse measures of the current parent-adolescent relationship and psychological adjustment
• Attachment is clearly an important construct, but children are unlikely to be 'blank slates'
• Bronfenbrenner: '"It can be said that much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time."'
• Dadds & Rhodes: '"Parenting is the clean water of healthy psychological development"'