Attachment Part One: The dance of relationship

This is the first feature of a multi-part series on the concept of attachment by Dr. Susan Goldberg, an internationally recognized researcher in the area of attachment. Over the course of her long career at The Hospital for Sick Children, she has published numerous articles and books in this field.

By Susan Goldberg, PhD

As parents, we want to protect our children from harm. In our role as protectors we tend to think of the obvious provisions of food, warmth, and protection from illness and danger.

But what if we consider safety from the child’s perspective? For a child, a very real sense of danger can be brought about by situations that seem innocuous to an adult. In response to perceived threat, a distressed infant or child will naturally express his or her need for comfort and security. The way in which a parent responds to such signals teaches a child about the predictability and safety of his or her world. With time, children learn whether they can count on a parent to provide comfort and security. This, in turn, affects their expectations that the world is either a safe or dangerous place to be.

Research in the field of attachment suggests that a child’s sense of safety and security is as important to emotional and social well-being as actual safety is to physical well-being. The development of a sense of protection is directly related to the quality of the infant-parent relationship. Empirical research over the past three decades has confirmed our intuition about the critical importance of early relationships, and how a parent’s role as an attachment figure might be one of the more important factors for a child’s future emotional well-being.

Attachment versus bonding

People tend to be familiar with the notion of bonding but less so with the idea of attachment. In fact, the two are quite different. The term bonding refers primarily to the emotional bonds that form between parents and their children, initially as a result of the events surrounding birth and delivery. By contrast, attachment theory focuses on the child's feelings towards the parent.

What is Attachment?

Babies need a special person called an "attachment figure" to make them feel safe and secure. This will be very important in shaping how they relate to other people in the future.

Attachment involves two components in the infant-parent relationship: the child’s need for protection and comfort, and the parent’s provision of timely and appropriate care in response to these needs.

Attachment behaviours occur when an infant is emotionally distressed, physically hurt, or ill. In response to a threat to safety a child will stop his or her activity and seek close contact with caregivers. Attachment behaviours also include efforts to maintain contact with the caregiver by, for example, clinging to caregivers or sitting on their lap, and any other behaviours that signal needs for comfort, such as crying.

Think of the process of attachment as a kind of dance between infant and parent. In other words, attachment is not solely concerned with a caregiver’s behaviour toward an infant. How the infant signals and responds to the caregiver is a critical part of the process. The infant’s signal is responded to in a particular way by the parent, which in turn is interpreted by the child. Depending on the nature of the parent’s response, the infant modifies his or her behaviour. Very early on infants learn how to manage their distress or regulate their emotions depending on their caregiver’s responses.

Thus, in this complex dance, different styles of attachment develop. Infants learn to expect certain responses from their caregivers based on the reactions of their caregivers over time. By the end of the first year of life, a child’s expectations or internal working models of relationships with caregivers are established and may prove difficult to change.

Origins of attachment theory

Attachment theory has its origins in a number of sources. In the 1940s, children raised in orphanages were found to exhibit unusual social and emotional behaviour. Other researchers observed the behaviour of animals in natural and laboratory settings. Many animals demonstrate preferential behaviour toward a figure they are exposed to during a critical period soon after birth. Infant monkeys raised with surrogate mothers, wire frames with bottles to provide milk or covered with terrycloth to provide comfort, spent more time with the terrycloth surrogate, showing that importance of pleasant, tactile sensation – affection — was more important than food. Although all monkeys showed abnormal social behaviour in later development, those with wire frame surrogates only were worse off.

These studies and observations formed the basis of later theories of attachment. John Bowlby, a British child psychiatrist, was the first to put forth a formal theory of attachment. Mary Ainsworth expanded and confirmed many of Bowlby’s ideas by observing infant-parent interactions in the field, and in a laboratory setting.

Attachment styles

Ainsworth developed the strange situation paradigm, a laboratory method used to measure the quality of attachment between caregiver and child. This procedure involves several separations and reunions between an infant or young child from a caregiver or a friendly stranger. The way the infant behaves at reunion with the caregiver is the main indicator of the quality of attachment.

From this simple but very powerful naturalistic experiment, Ainsworth identified three general attachment patterns. A secure pattern involves a positive response on the part of the child during reunion with the parent. The majority of children fall into this category. In contrast, an avoidant child does not seem to be bothered by a parent’s absence and will often snub the parent on reunion. A resistant attachment style is characterized by infant distress upon separation and the child’s reluctance to explore his or her environment even in the presence of the parent. The resistant child also does not respond to the parent’s attempts at soothing. A fourth category was later added for children who seem to have no strategy for coping with separation or reunion. These children are considered to be disorganized with respect to attachment.

Parents who are consistently available, sensitive to their child’s signals, and receptive and accepting of the child’s distress tend to have securely attached children. Parents of insecurely attached children tend to be less responsive to their children’s signs of distress and need for comfort and protection. These parents are unavailable either physically, psychologically or emotionally or tend to be insensitive or unpredictable in their parenting style.

Tips on How to Respond to Your Baby

There are many things you can do to respond to your baby when he is hurt, ill, or upset. If you respond to your baby now in ways that make him feel loved and secure, it will give him confidence that someone is on his side.

When a parent does not respond appropriately to a child's need for comfort, it is not necessarily the fault of the parent. There are instances when a parent, because of their own grief or needs, simply is not capable of being sensitive to his or her infant’s needs in a particular situation. Other parents simply are not able to read a child’s signals and thus respond inappropriately.

These four major infant attachment patterns have been shown to be independent of a child’s temperament. In other words, attachment style concerns the relationship between the child and caregiver rather than the personality of either. This means that a child might show insecure attachment with one caregiver and secure attachment with another.

Steps toward healthy attachment

Research has shown what many parents seem to know intuitively — that being consistently available, sensitive and receptive to a child’s signals helps promote healthy attachment. The following are general strategies for parents to consider when responding to their child’s signals of distress or need for comfort and protection:

• Pay attention
  Learn to recognize your infant’s signs of distress.
• Be responsive
  Let your child know that you are aware of his or her distress and respond to it appropriately.
• Be consistent
  Consistent responding to your child’s need for comfort creates a sense of security in the child.
• Be accepting
  Accept rather than judge or discount your child’s emotional distress and discomfort.
• Provide comfort
  Soothe and comfort your child in response to distress.

Attachment patterns develop in the caregiver-child relationship to meet the child’s very powerful and basic need for comfort and security. How caregivers respond to their child’s distress has lasting implications for his or her emotional and social development, future relationships, even future parenting styles. As parents and caregivers, it is so important to be aware of the important role we play in this complex dance, as we help our children develop a healthy sense of social and emotional well-being.