There's a concept
called attachment which you've probably heard about;
a close emotional bond developing between
an infant and a caregiver. Now, stereotypically that's the mother
but we now know a lot more about family possibilities than we ever have
and it turns out you don't have to have a biological mother and a biological father
in a perpetual relationship of happiness to have decent
and loving child-rearing experiences,
right? A grandma could raise a kid, a grandpa could raise a kid,
foster parents could raise a child, adoptive parents could raise a child,
a sibling could raise a child. What matters is that you have a caregiver idenitfied.
Usually, of course, that falls to the mother, right?
So there's that double-standard. Women, you got to go out and make a career but also
watch after the baby all the time, right? Be the primary mother
and bread winner. That's a tough set of roles to try to conquer
but that doesn't mean a guy couldn't do it. In fact, many do
and it's very rewarding to be a caregiver for children if you're
wired to do that because not everybody is cause there's individual differences
in everything. So you've got a caregiver and you're hoping for
a close emotional bond to form. Now, there's a reason why we want the bond to
form.
It seems just so natural but you all know that not everybody is gonna be
naturally attached to children. Not everybody feels
compelled to be the best mom or dad they can be.
Many people do and as we'll see David Bowlby would argue that the species kind of
wires us to do that on average,
to feel compelled to care for the children. If we can get a close emotional
bond that's positive
then it forms a secure attachment base
for child development. Secure could even be thought of as a safe base.
If you see a kid, a little kid
I see this in my niece now
when you first get there to visit she's like this
over by mom or grandma or whoever she spends most of her time with her caregiver right.
Now it's like baby you know me, we hung out together, we played, but not yet,
right? Hangs out first until people get together
and see how the caregivers respond to the situation.
Caregivers are happy to see you, every thing's cool, then they start getting a little braver
and next thing you know they're hanging out playing with you just like they did
last time
because they feel comfortable but if you've got a kid and you go to a park for
example
and you sit down, you're like okay little kid, have a good time play in the park,
they don't run off and go play usually, they kind of go like this, they're like
they see all that stuff they want to play on but then they kind of go like that
Oh! Leaf! And they come right back to safe base right?
Tag! Everything's cool baby, it's good.
and they go a little farther, right?
Keep looking back to make sure base stays there and they come and hang out with a kid.
If they get hurt, what do they do? Run back to base or they cry so base comes to them,
right? So they have this experience in the world of
secure base of operations, right? They can explore the world with relative safety
because somebody's got their back. The caregiver is there for them
and it allows them the freedom to interact with the environment
and to potentially have a more enriched learning experience
but you don't always get that. Sometimes you're
base of operations is not a safe or consistent
safe base of operations and you can get insecure attachment and there's two
subtypes broadly speaking of insecure attachment,
one of which is anxious. They're anxious kind of all the time. These kids are pretty high
strung.
Now it's not to say that caregiver causes this
or that the child is born in a way that fates them to this existence
but when you get a situation where reciprocal determinism makes it such
that the kid
doesn't feel all that secure around the caregiver, but they flip out when the
caregivers gone and they don't get
easily comforted when the situation is resolved
and the caregiver comes back and the other kind
is this ambivalent type.
They're uninterested around the caregiver. They don't even seem upset when the
caregiver goes away. Well, that's unusual.
Statistically speaking, it would be unusual for a kid to just be
totally ignoring the caregiver, whether they were there or not there in
toddlerhood,
right? Early childhood development, you'd expect most children
to be bonded to parent or caregiver.
Now how are you going to operationalize something like this?
Study it empirically. Well,
Mary Ainsworth came up with this thing called a strange situation
to measure attachment. She was creative. She needed a reliable and valid way to
measure this to understand it better
to see what the outcomes were in the moment
and then to see how that affected people down the road.
Well it turns out this affects people down the road. This has effects that
could last into adulthood
whether you have a secure attachment and that's about sixty percent of the people,
66 percent of the people
or an insecure attachment where the rest are kind of divided between these 2 categories
but there are times and different people and different caregivers in your life
with whom you might be more securely attached or more insecurely attached.
We're really talking about the primary caregiver
and what it is that you would do, she would have a mother bring a toddler in, usually it was
mothers,
right, and then they would come into the room,
the room is a research room. It's got toys in it
and it's got a stranger in it. That's weird for kids but
if the parent is cool with it then the kids usually cool out and they hang out,
right? Well then what does the parent do? They leave them.
They walk out the door and close the door. Now,
that bothers securely attached kids.
Oh goodness! Secure base has gone away.
They start crying, they start getting uncomfortable
and then the stranger comes forward. The stranger is a research assistant, they are
of course very caring loving people
but that doesn't make any difference. It doesn't matter if they come over and they're
like
baby it's going to be okay. Your mom's going to come right back. Everything. You just calm out.
They are upset because the primary attachment figure left.
And you can give them a few minutes with that and then the
attachment figure mother comes back in.
If they're securely attached, they calm down really quickly, right?
Secure base is back. Nothing bad happened but
I feel reassured and then they can pretty quickly go back to playing in the
environment and they'll
exhibit comfortable behaviors again. The anxious kids are anxious
to begin with. They're coming in, the mother comes in, they're looking around like oh my
god this is bad. Doesn't matter whether the mom seems at ease or not at ease,
the kid seems not at ease, and when you leave the room, when the
caregiver leaves the room they flip out.
They lose it, they're screaming. They're upset
and they are inconsolable, right? Now the researcher hasn't got a chance to
calm this kid. The other kid might react a little bit but they're not
going to be comfortable.
These kids are not comforted but what's interesting is when the caregiver comes
back in the room
they do not quickly calm down. They remain upset for extended periods of
time.
This ambivalent insecure attachment,
these kids just seem to be semi- independent of the parent to begin with.
They walk in and they just go, oh, toys!
and they don't even notice the parents gone, they don't care, they don't seem to be
registering that
and that, you think, well that's independent right? Well, it can be
okay. Anything can be okay. Nothing fates somebody
in one way or another that is irreversible in human experience
but I had the experience once, I was eating with my family at the MacDonald's
and this little kid pops up, she's like hello
and I'm like hey. I like kids. What's up? She's like, hi.
What are you eating? Fries. OK, I'm looking around and they're ain't
nobody around here. Where's this kid's parent, right? I don't see any body. This kid's like,
I'm gone.
Now the parents probably around the corner. She went back around. I guess she got back with
that parent
but man, that's dangerous, right?
Because I just go, hey, you want to take a ride, she goes, yep
and then you're gone. Right? So it pays to be a little anxious as a child
because that means you engage environments with caution
and caution can be, right, important.
And so you have David Bowlby, who I alluded to
who said that I think in an evolutionary sense, if you remember us going back to the
functionalist
William James, right, that we are biologically programmed to love
behaviors that babies are biologically programmed to emit.
Now, if you're being honest about a baby
it screams, it cries, it slobbers, it shits itself, it pees everywhere,
it's a mess. It's not really a lovable ball of goo.
But if you're inclined to babies, you're like, oh it's a baby, you make a mess, did you
make a mess?
I'll clean that mess up and what, they're so cute.
They got these big whopping heads. No, that's a beautiful little head, look at your beautiful little head.
So Bowlby says, well what we do is we have this biological programming that attaches
us to these children
because without that attachment they will die,
and without our love and comfort, they won't make it. So, that's the idea
of attachment both in the application and in the biological routes, you all have a
great day and I will see you all
Wednesday.
Harry Harlow and his monkeys. Harry Harlow had some monkeys.
He did a thing that nobody ever did before. He started studying a concept
called love.
Nobody studied love before. In fact, the prevailing wisdom of the day was if
you got kids,
you don't want to be too coddling with them. You don't want to touch them too much,
you don't want to cuddle them too much, you don't want to be too quick to respond to their cries
because that'll make them soft,
right, so the prevailing wisdom in the forties and the fifties was,
you know, be less responsive, don't be unresponsive to your children
but don't be overly responsive to your children because that was thought to
promote resiliency,
right? Tough kids who can handle being deprived of a little something or another but
nobody studied love because primarily
it was a subject that does not lend itself to operationalization.
It is hard to empirically verify something so nebulous a concept as love.
So he didn't actually verify love per se, what he did was he looked at proxy
variables
with primates and what he did was not
a good thing from the monkeys point of view and some people would
legitimately critique Harlow
as being a little bit abusive of the animals if not outright abusive of some
of the animals that he worked with.
But what he found out working with these animals held up empirically over time
and gave us some empirical justification for this concept of love because what people
were saying in the behavioral realm,
psycho-dynamics were talking about the breast and the baby
fusing as one and you remember, well, you don't remember, we'll talk about
psychoanalytic theory a little bit more. We talked about it a little bit,
but we'll go into that in the personality chapter where he's talking about really
that infants didn't see themselves as distinct from the mother cause they're fused to the
breast because they didn't have formula or bottles back then,
and it was just that you have to have it to survive, you have to have a wet nurse if
you're mom
can't lactate. Somebody's got to feed you and then that became a crucial
variable and then you see that the behaviorist will say well that's not really love this bond
between
the mother and the child. That's reinforcement.
We'll talk about that in the next chapter, right? That's just you need to have sustenance
and when you're hungry this person provides it so of course you're
going to be more likely to hang out with this person, you show
some kinds of behaviors that might look like affection but it could be explained
by just primary reinforcement mechanisms.
But then moreover, some other people said well let's put this to the test and
who are you going to turn to to put that to the test? Well, Harry Harlow
gets him some monkeys. Cute little things, little rhesus monkeys. I love
monkeys.
Baby monkey. I call my babies monkey. My babys are 29 and 17.
I don't call the young one monkey no more. He don't like that shit.
But my daughter, she's 29, she don't care.
I still call her baby monkey cause monkeys are cute and they're sweet
and he took these baby monkeys as soon as they were born
away from their mothers. Never to see them again, right?
Because he was going to test this notion of bonding, of attachment, which is what we
talked about in the last lecture, right?
He wanted to see whether it was really the feeding process.
So he randomly assigned his monkeys in an experimental design that you could not
do with humans, it would be
utterly unethical, and some would question the ethics of using these
these monkeys in this way
but what he did was he put half of them in a condition
where they have this terry cloth mother, all of them have these two
alternatives, this pseudo-mother, right, this surrogate mother
has a round monkey head with big eyes and ears and a bigger mouth and it's terry
cloth
and it's soft and then the other
quote-unquote mother got a block head, little eyes, and it's all wire
and so the alternative was either this one provides the
nutrients or this one provides the nutrients, you got to eat,
right? So now you're looking at this and say well if it's all about primary reinforcement
and this is the mother that provides the nutrients, right,
that's the one it would hang out with more. That's the one it would cling to,
that's the one
it would look like it had affection for and bonding for but that ain't what happened.
The monkeys being fed by the wire mother would only go
to the wire mother to eat and then they'd go back to the cloth mother
especially when it's in fear, what you see is this baby monkey is hanging out on this monkey,
terry cloth covered, and is reaching over for that bottle.
It would rather be on that soft, that soft cloth that
mimics fur but isn't really fur. And thus he looked at this thing as contact
comfort.
Something about that soft touch that seems to be critical or necessary for
the bonding.
It isn't just food or it would be over there and then he would scare the monkeys,
he'd have these little,
y'all know the little monkey goes ding ding ding ding as it bangs on the thing the little
mechanical wind-up toy. Well he would show them that and they would freak out and they would
run back to the
cloth mother, even if the wire mother was where it got all its sustenance from.
So, kind of an aversive way to do it
and moreover he took it even further which gets into
development into parenthood. He took these monkeys that were not raised by actual
monkey mothers,
allowed them to grow up and then put them in monkey pens to see how they would mate,
the mating behavior.
They didn't mate. They didn't know how to mate. So people go well that's just innate, right, that's
just reflex, that's just instinct,
of course they'd know how to mate. They didn't have the social skills
to actually mate. So he went one step further and created a thing called rape racks
which sounds as nasty as it is and he would
he would have those monkeys bound while other monkeys
who were in heat would then inseminate these female monkeys
who were raised without a mother who had no social skills and
were unable to mate themselves to see what would happen
when they themselves become mothers. Would they then instinctually be able to raise
their kids?
They didn't. They didn't know how to do it. So it gives you this kind of
parallel analog to human beings like a human being
raised in abusive and neglectful environment
may not become a natural parent,
right? It seems that for monkeys where everybody's like well it's all about instinct, monkeys just
know what to do,
well they don't just know what to do. They have to be raised in environments
that also capitalize on their abilities and teach them
what to do for them to be normal, functioning,
social monkeys and parental monkeys. Now you say well that's all good and well
for monkeys but what about people? Well,
we've been talking about being able to survive being born prematurely.
That's because we have all kinds of heroic medical measures
and we can isolate the child in an incubator and provide it with respiration
until it's able to breathe on its own
etc, etc, provide it with nutrients and early on in the process of developing
these procedures it was thought that you shouldn't touch the child
because you would introduce germs potentially, right? They have a
compromised immune system, you better keep it as sterile as possible,
don't touch these kids!
But then somebody saw these results that Harlow was getting and said
huh, maybe it's important to touch, apparently
it's important just for a monkey to touch terry cloth. Let's see what happens if we
of course maintain sterile conditions
but touch the children. Touching the kids
actually produces weight gain.
Premature infants who were not massaged, they were looking at 14 weeks
and premature infants. Three pounds is very, very small,
very, very vulnerable. What do you want these kids to do aside from develop
surfactant and develop the
ability to breathe? You want them to gain weight, right?
just touching these kids causes them to gain weight
apparently, right? So what do you got there?
Contact comfort. Something about that human contact or from monkeys the monkey
contact
is actually being played out in physiological
terms, right, and so now it is what
protocol to touch the kids, right? You massage the babies.
Now you don't think the baby's going, man, I wish somebody would massage me,
they don't think like that as we'll see with cognitive development and Piaget
but touching them, which is a proxy to love, right?
He was the first person to try to study that concept
and that's what he came up with.