A central tenet of attachment theory is that a person’s relationships in adulthood stem
from a history of attachment, dating back to our earliest relationship.
That is, the bond we formed with our mother, father or other caretaker after birth.
Our first relationship is often thought to set the stage for future relationships as
we grow and move forward.
So then does this mean that if you experienced bad relationships in childhood that you are
doomed to have continued terrible relationships throughout life?
There exist different theories of thought regarding this of which we will examine in
order to best answer this question.
First, we must look at it from the very beginning, starting with the first relationship we’ve
ever had.
At birth, we immediately recognize our mother’s scent and the sound of her voice from being
inside the womb.
It is a familiar welcome into a new, unfamiliar world of life.
So, from this point, how do our first attachments evolve?
In 1964, Rudolph Schaffer and Peggy Emerson studied 60 babies for the first 18 months
of life in order to uncover the answer to this question.
They examined factors such as separation anxiety, stranger anxiety and social referencing or
the extent that a child looks to their caretaker to check how they should respond to something
new.
They found that a baby’s attachments develop in four stages.
From birth until six weeks of age, a baby is thought to be asocial, meaning that they
will react and smile to different stimuli, whether it be social or non-social.
For instance, they might smile at a toy just as much as they smile at mother.
From six weeks to 7 months of age, infants go through the indiscriminate attachment phase.
They prefer human company though most will respond equally to any caregiver.
After three months old, babies will start preferring familiar faces over unfamiliar
ones.
Specific attachment starts from 7 to 9 months of life.
This is when babies start having a strong preference for a single attachment figure,
such as mom.
The baby looks to mother for security, comfort and protection.
It is during this time when babies become uncomfortable around strangers and cry when
separated from their mothers.
Some will express more anxiety than others.
Nevertheless, the presence of separation anxiety is evidence that an attachment has been formed.
This initial attachment usually fully develops by baby’s first year.
Strongly attached babies tend to have mothers who respond quickly to their demands whereas
weakly attached babies have mothers who fail to interact.
Finally, multiple attachments begin to form at 10 months onward when babies gradually
grow more independent and form relationships with more than just mother, including other
people and family members.
Psychologist Erik Erikson developed his theory of psychosocial development, which discussed
potential conflicts that can erupt during this time in life.
According to Erikson, from birth until the first year, we go through a stage of life
known as trust vs. mistrust.
As infants, we need to be able to trust that our caregivers will be there to provide us
with our basic needs.
If our needs go unfulfilled, we may grow up to be suspicious and mistrustful.
Erikson formulated a total of 8 stages but for the sake of not wanting to overwhelm or
bore you with too many theorists’ stages, we won’t go into that now.
Instead, we’ll discuss monkeys, rhesus monkeys to be exact.
At one point, behaviorists believed that babies formed an attachment to whoever fed them.
Food was thought to be the basis for an infant’s love.
This was disputed by Harry Harlow’s study of rhesus monkeys in the 1950’s and 60’s.
He separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers to examine their attachment styles
in different ways.
By today’s standards, this study would of course be considered highly unethical, but
it was groundbreaking for the time.
It taught us a lot about the primary motivating factor behind attachment.
Harlow placed the baby rhesus monkeys in cages with two surrogate mothers, one that provided
food but was made of wire and another covered in soft, comfortable cloth.
The results of the experiment showed that the monkeys preferred and spent most of their
time with the comfortable mother even though it did not provide them with milk.
The monkeys only went to the wire mother when hungry then quickly returned to the cloth
mother.
When frightened, the monkeys took refuge with the cloth mother.
This experiment reaffirmed the idea that infants bond to touch and cling to a caretaker for
emotional support, not just for nourishment.
Overall, however, the monkeys that were separated from their mothers and had grown up with the
surrogates were shown as adults to be more timid, easily bullied by other monkeys, had
more difficulty with mating, and had a higher struggle interacting with other monkeys.
In this way, the lack of care at a young age showed a lower quality of life for these little
guys.
This was mainly due to social deprivation during critical stages of development.
World War II, unfortunately, had also provided us with an abundance of information about
the consequences of mother-child separation on development.
John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, was the first to attempt to chart the adverse
effects of maternal deprivation.
Many of these children had experienced mental and social problematic behaviors.
Like the monkeys who grew up without a living caregiver in the proceeding Harlow experiment,
the orphaned children from the war experienced a lower quality of life and tended to revert
inward, withdrawing into themselves for emotional comfort.
Psychologist, Mary Ainsworth, was a student of John Bowlby.
She applied his lessons and came up with categories of relationships and attachment styles.
She did this by devising an experiment in the 1970’s called the “Strange Situation.”
This experiment observed babies in a room with their mothers and created an awkward
situation for the child to examine the strength of the relationship with their mother.
The baby would start off in the room alone with mother then a stranger would enter the
room and take a seat.
After some time, the stranger would begin interacting with the child with mother still
in the room.
When given a cue, the mother would then get up and exit the room, leaving the child alone
with the stranger.
The child’s reactions would be monitored before the mother would return.
The response was measured to determine what type of attachment style the child had with
mother.
Babies who had a secure attachment style with their mothers felt comfortable to play around
the room using their mothers as a secure base as long as she was present in the room with
them.
When the stranger first entered, the secure baby was initially unsure but looked to mother
that it was okay and became reassured.
When the stranger attempted to play with the child, the baby engaged but remained close
to mother.
When mother left the room, the baby cried and was inconsolable when the stranger tried
to comfort the child.
The baby was at ease once the mother returned.
This type of reaction in the child showed a secure attachment style because the baby
was easily reassured once the mother returned into the room and quickly returned to play.
A secure attachment implies that, in the home, the parents are emotionally available, perceptive,
and responsive to the infant’s needs.
This is the best kind attachment that is said to lead to healthy adult relationships later
on in life.
A securely attached child-parent relationship is said to be present in 55 to 65% of cases.
So, what about in the rest of the population?
Aside from secure attachment, Mary Ainsworth devised 3 other forms of attachment known
as avoidant attachment, ambivalent attachment, and disorganized attachment.
With an avoidant attachment style in the strange situation, the baby did not use mom as a secure
base and often did not even flinch when mom left the room.
When the mom returned, the baby acted as if she was not even there and just continued
playing.
The child was mostly indifferent to whether she was in the room or not.
This style is said to be present in 20 to 30 % of cases and is thought to occur when
parents are emotionally unavailable in the home, unresponsive and neglectful.
The internal working model is as such, “mom doesn’t respond to my emotions so I will
just try to be more independent.”
The infants protect themselves by dissociating contact with the normal need for connection.
Emotions are more repressed using a “deactivating” strategy with regard to attachment.
This may lead to a greater likelihood of aggression later in life.
Ambivalent attachment occurs in 5 to 15% of cases.
In the strange situation experiment, infants with this attachment style were more alert
of the whereabouts of mother while playing in the room.
They were very clingy and became very upset when she left the room.
Upon mom’s return, however, the baby was not comforted.
Instead the child reacted with fits of anger.
In the home, this attachment style implies that the mother is inconsistently available.
Meaning, when she is available, she is often preoccupied with something else or not completely
attuned to the infant in her responses.
Infants with an ambivalent attachment style are often more anxious, clingy and demanding,
which characterizes their adult relationships later in life.
Finally, in the disorganized attachment style, prevalent in 20-40% of cases and up to 80%
in situations of abuse, infants were not soothed by contact with the mother.
They displayed disorganized patterns of behavior, whereby they might move towards mother as
she left the room then away, then freeze or go into a corner.
In essence, their reactions were scattered and all over the place.
In the home, this attachment style is thought to stem from physical or sexual abuse histories,
psychologically disturbed parents, or parents with substance abuse issues.
Clearly this kind of relationship is not functional, producing a situation of “fright without
a solution,” whereby the caregiver is a source of danger instead of comfort.
This results in a disorganized state of mind for the infant, creating difficulty with relationship
formation later in life.
What the strange situation study shows us is that patterns of interaction that children
have with caregivers shape their developing minds, leading to various models of relationship
formations.
These early bonds color our relationships throughout life by forming an initial framework
to go by and build on.
Insecure attachments when young tend to cause difficulty for future relationships which
may lead to overall dissatisfaction in our lives.
We should mention, however, that it is possible for children to have a different attachment
style with another caregiver aside from the mother, such as the father.
So, it is entirely possible that a child could be insecurely attached with the mother but
securely attached with the father.
But attachment style may not all be entirely the fault of the parents so if you fell into
one of the three insecure categories, don’t go blaming mom and dad just yet.
An alternative theory proposed by Kagan in 1984 discusses the role that the child plays
in attachment in that the child’s temperament may have different impacts on how parents
respond.
This theory was supported by research from Fox in 1989, finding that babies with an “easy”
temperament, or those who follow steady eating and sleeping routines while being accepting
of new experiences, are more likely to develop secure attachment styles with their parents.
This has to do with being more agreeable and therefore easier to bond with.
Another temperament style, known as “slow to warm up,” characterized those babies
who took a while to get used to new experiences.
Babies with this temperament style are more likely to have insecure-avoidant attachments.
Then we have babies with a “difficult” temperament who function on irregular eating
and sleeping schedules while rejecting or being stubborn to new experiences.
These babies are more likely to have insecure-ambivalent attachments.
This shows us that attachment doesn’t go one way but is instead based on a combination
of both the parents’ and child’s behavior.
So, does early attachment style determine your relationships and quality of life in
adulthood?
If you were in one of the three insecure attachment styles as a child, don’t fret.
There are plenty of theorists who don’t believe that attachment style cements your
fate.
There are basically two perspectives on whether attachment styles in early childhood are permanent
or not.
The prototype perspective of attachment claims that early experiences continue to play an
influential role in attachment behavior throughout our entire lives.
But the revisionist perspective provides hope for those who were insecurely attached, asserting
that early representations of relationships can be modified by new experiences over time.
In this second perspective, early attachment style may not necessarily reflect patterns
of relationships later in life.
One article by Chris Fraley explored mathematical models of each of these two perspectives in
a longitudinal study in order to obtain data from meta-analysis to better understand which
one was more accurate.
The results indicated that attachment security was moderately stable across the first 19
years of life.
Farley notes, however, that his study has many limitations.
Thus, it may be best to interpret the findings with a certain degree of scrutiny.
What category did you fall under as a child?
What about now?
Do you find your relationships now are impacted based on your early attachment style with
your parents?
We realize it’s a lot to soak in so take your time and then let us know in the comments!
Also, be sure to check out our other video Sociopath vs Psychopath - What's The Difference?!
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