Attachment theory is having a breakout moment
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Perhaps surprisingly, the relative incidence of different attachment styles, as measured using Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, varies dramatically across cultures (Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). Consider, for example, the substantial cultural differences shown in Table 6.2. The majority of German infants studied were measured as insecurely attached (mostly avoidant, or Type A). Japanese infants showed no avoidant attachments whatsoever, and they were almost three times as likely as their American counterparts to show anxious (Type C) attachments. Finally, one group of Israeli children showed almost 10 times as many anxious attachments as Swedish children. Because the procedure used in the Strange Situation is relatively straightforward, it does not seem that these variations can be explained by simple methodological discrepancies in how the assessments were conducted (Harwood et al., 1995; Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988).
From "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior", p. 236
It seems that the article is stating that one's attachment system is developed primarily in their first year of life? If attachment theory is true, I would've guessed that the first ten or twelve years of life would all contribute.
> [many people] are insecurely attached because their early experiences were suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening)...
If the first year is the formative year for one's attachment disposition, the meaning of "overbearing" is much different than say, it would be for a ten year old or early teenager. I'm curious what period of life these studies were looking at.
As a child, I lost my mother to cancer and my father was alternatively abusive or absent. I carried those scars forward into adulthood.
Therapy grounded partly in attachment theory helped me and I'm glad to see it gaining ground as a useful tool to help people.
In the past two years, the best money I've spent has been A) therapy focused on "mindfulness" and attachment theory & B) supporting myself (instead of working for a paycheck) in order to find compelling work.
Those two things are about equal (today) in terms of money spent, but the former added up much more slowly than the latter.
I'd add, I think the word "mindfulness" is awful and over-hyped. But when the definition of Mindfulness is "judgement free situational awareness", I find that it's a compelling and incredibly helpful practice.
One other thing, I strapped myself into a 'brainwave game' the other day at some science museum. My mindfulness practice typically starts with feeling the bottoms of my feet in my shoes, or the socks bunching up between my toes and the ball of my foot. The data coming out of the brainwave exhibit was displayed on a monitor & moved a ball across a table (magnets?). Immediately after beginning to focus on my feet, the ball shot across the table & the output on the monitor shot to its highest level & stayed there. I didn't see anybody else with the ability to do this while I watched other folks use the exhibit. So that was cool... but I don't know if that qualifies A as money well spent or not ;)
We link personality with mind as a society. Admitting to a sickness of the mind is a prelude to admitting to a sickness of personality.
I take great pains to manage my illness and practice good hygiene. It's more upkeep for me than maybe for others and I'm forever going to shoulder this burden. I have good days and bad days. Part of the therapy is learning how to distinguish the actions I take because of past feelings from those sourced from my true self. It's not always easy.
Habitual reactions of trust and mistrust are formed at this early age.
But these are just feelings. Children older than babies can start working around them, as their relationships become more complex. They can develop strategies to resolve problems. Find compromises. Work on tensions in their inner life.
Those capabilities are learned over the course of the childhood and they are essential tools for children to grow up and eventually be free of the dictate of their emotions.
(Educational scientist here, psychology was part of my studies. I'm not a psychologist, though.)
Don't stress yourself. If you're loving your kid and are able to physically show it, e.g. you're able to cuddle your son, hold him when something bad happened etc., then you have the first major factor in check. You should be the calm and readily available ressource for emotional warmth if the kid needs it.
The second factor is consistency: Identical child behaviour should produce identical parental reactions. E.g. "Look dad, I built something awesome!" shouldn't generate a "Oh great!" on day one and "I don't want to see that crap, I'm tired from work" on day two. The same goes for negative behavior. That makes it easier for the child to grasp the external actions as results of own behavior, thus easing the development of self-efficacy. It's perfectly fine to be stressed out from work, BTW! It should just be clear for the kid that this is not the kid's fault.
The difference with helicopter parents: It's perfectly fine for the kid to throw a tantrum if it's not getting that muffin just before lunch. If your reasoning is rational and consistent, it's fine to enforce that calmly. And it's fine for the kid to be pissed. It's perfectly fine for the kid to do risky things on the playground. If the kid hurts itself, comfort it, and that's it.
By the way, at 2 1/2 years old, any "bad parenting" that your son received can still be corrected by adjusting your behavior accordingly. Insecure attachment is simply caused by the child not trusting the caregiver enough, so none of it is "set in stone", trust can always be earned through consistency.
In addition to reading the linked article below (highly recommended), maybe you could also sign up to take an attachment test with your child? Not sure exactly how this works, but it would give you honest feedback.
You can also look through this guide on "how to raise nurtured children"[1] and see if anything interests you.
Every action parents have or have not taken had not ever been interventionally verified in a solid trial.
"Solid trials" would only confirm what the article I linked is saying. Have you checked it out? Today's parents can't afford to wait for studies that won't exist for decades more.
Attachment research is full of problems, and I see it as irresponsible for the NY Times to present this area in this way.
Here's the problem: typically, attachment theory and research is focused on a dyadic-level variable as if it's disentangled from the individual-level variables that are part of that dyad. At some level, it's fine to talk about system concepts, but a dyad only has two parts, so focusing on the parts is very tractable.
Why is this a problem? Because a lot of phenomena that are really about the child, or the parent, get folded into some nebulous concept at the dyad level. It's a form of formal hand-waving that allows you to avoid hard questions about who is contributing what to a relationship by simply ignoring the distinction. "Attachment styles" is no better, because now you're just talking about a personality trait as it manifests in a relationship context.
There's more tangible problems with this area of research too, because it almost never sufficiently controls for (1) background genetic and environmental variables together, and (2) individual-level variables that might better account for "attachment".
To be clear, I am not saying that there's no such thing as bad parenting, or that it's all about the child, or that parents don't have any effect. I'm also not even saying that people don't feel attached, or that there aren't relationship-level phenomena. I'm only saying that attachment theory as it currently exists is very problematic theoretically and methodologically. Criticizing such research is politically very unpopular (because doing so leads you to be cast as anti-child or anti-family), so the field persists.
It's very much in the same ballpark as psychoanalytic theories in the 60s: something that is fundamentally flawed, but has a kernel of truth, so becomes ubiquitous.
My advice is to approach your child as a parent, as you think best under whatever circumstances you find yourself in, and don't worry about attachment--it's an epiphenomenon.
Your remarks seem to focus on the question of what causes the observed variation, and you point out there are various factors, including the temperament of both the infant and the parent, and the larger environment, that are important for attachment.
I am thinking that is correct, but I find it hard to believe that the parenting skills the parent learned from his or her parent are not usually also quite important.
That matters because it implies that parents ought to be trained in attachment skills, and that when there is a problem with attachment there is a good chance training could help. Would you agree?
And the "nurture" that matters is your peers, not your parents.
Skeptical? I highly recommend this book-length treatment of the research literature: https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-U...
Unless they are doing twin & adoption studies (hard!), attachment researchers are conflating parenting practices (these warm and loving parents had a warm & loving kid!) with genetics.
Is you tried raising a disabled child or one with extreme variant of personality you would know that such conditions tend to enact sets of behaviour in the environment and parents. Generally not conducive to proper upbringing one way or another.
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/
the standout thing in there being the definition of 'well-attached'
Attachment theory is a psychological model. It proposes that during early childhood, we learn how to respond "within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones, or perceiving a threat." We learn this by modeling the behavior of our parents.
Attachment parenting is a parenting philosophy (not a consistent theory) invented and spread to a popular audience in the 90's by evangelical christian pediatrician William Sears. It proposes that mothers should maximize physical contact with her infant by wearing the baby during the day, co-sleeping at night, breastfeeding, and responding immediately (or pre-emptively) to all crying. The philosophy recommends women stay in the home to focus on child rearing in this way for the first three years. After that, motherhood should be their "supreme career." After the philosophy was formulated, Sears made an ex post connection to attachment theory, but is otherwise unrelated.
One of them is a respectable scientific theory; the other is a very lucrative fad of anti-woman, patriarchal bullshit with no basis in science.
It seems like parenthood is itself more than a full-time job...
Attachment _parenting_ is a fad parenting philosophy with no basis in science. It's founder, William Sears, explains that after coming up with the philosophy out of whole cloth, he made the connection to attachment theory.
You can raise a securely attached (in the scientific sense) child without following Sears' evangelical christian "attachment parenting" rulebook. Lots of people do.
"Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin...
"Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439
I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.
"Three Laws of Behavior Genetic and What They Mean", http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf
"Why Do People Believe that Birth Order Has Important Effects on Personality?", http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm
Anyway, her mom from the get-go has had her wear both dresses, pants, snowsuits, a big variety of clothing.
The other day she refused to wear pants. "If I don't wear a dress, nobody will tell me I'm pretty!". A 2.5 year old. It's crazy how much kids pick up in such a tiny period of time.
Hi Harold.
This is why princess dresses and girls clothes in that awful shade of purple/pink are so popular.
Now that they are three, this has morphed into him wearing his Batman costume from Halloween whenever he gets a chance--even though he's going through a growth spurt and the costume now has old man utility belt.
I guess maybe he just likes to dress up. His sister is the opposite, she will wear the same outfit day after day unless we make her change. Kids are all different.
Feeling feminine may be very important for some girls and less for others, and has much more to do with personality than with "culture". Stymieing that isn't in the child's interest. Not saying this is the case for your friend, but something to keep in mind.
When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.
That being said, where it applies, it's provides a nice explanation of interaction patterns in relationships.
I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"
On the paywall thing please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.
And that is just the start. Once it's been shown that bad parents have permanently bad kids, how do you demonstrate causality? Maybe there is a bad people gene that they all have. Maybe the cause is the physical effects of stress during pregnancy. Or the effects of alcohol consumption: no doubt that correlates with the kind of parental behaviour that's being blamed. Sure, you can look at adoption, twins, etc. At that point, we're talking about a really impressive series of experiments, which deserve a bit more than, "it's been scientifically verified," even in a newspaper story.
So, I agree we can't hold everyone to a super high standard of "show me the data!" However, I do think we should be moving further in that direction.
Anecdotally, in this field it is especially important. Parents get enough crap as it is. Most of it completely unsubstantiated. So, please, less of that crap. If there is advice that can help. Give it and the circumstances that it could help in. If there is a new line that people are investigating, discuss it. But don't over reach on what is capable. Present hypotheses as falsifiable assertions that people are researching. Not as assertions that are merely waiting to be validated.
Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents?
These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.
Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked?
Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.
People thought about these questions a lot. It was called the eugenics movement, and such ideas were widely accepted by intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians worldwide in the early 20th century. Eugenics laws were widely implemented. There are good reasons such views became unpopular and remain so today.
You cannot credibly claim that society has avoided thinking about these questions.
To advance the argument that it should, as you seem here to want to do, you need first to show that the state might plausibly do a better job than individual parents.
I eagerly await your attempt to overcome effectively all the recent historical evidence on the subject, from the Chinese one-child policy to the American eugenics movement. Good luck!