Facts About Attachment Bonding

A child’s attachment to a significant caregiver is the single most influential event in the development of the child’s personality. It’s the source of the child’s sense of security, self-esteem, and self-control. But the impact of a first attachment goes far beyond emotions. It shapes how well the child remembers, learns and gets along with others. A secure attachment (or its weakness or absence) wires a child’s brain in a set pattern.

How can one aspect of early childhood hold so much power for the span of a lifetime? And how do child psychologists know what they know about attachment? This article answers both questions.

John Bowlby (1907-1990) did his naturalistic observations of children more than a half century ago, but subsequent research has only fortified adherence to his perspective among psychologists. Bowlby was a British physician and a trained psychoanalyst who accepted Freud’s central tenet of the importance of a person’s early childhood experiences in the formation of personality. To Freudianism, Bowlby added a detailed analysis of the specific interactions that create a secure versus insecure early attachment between a mother and her child. And he drew on ethology to make evolution the organizing principle to account for how these interactions spring from the survival instincts of both mother and child.

It’s in Their Smile

How can anyone resist such a face? A baby’s smile and kewpie pie cheeks are indeed irresistible to most adults. Bowlby pointed out how this visual charm operates as a brilliant adaptation (not unlike baby cubs, kittens, or birds), nearly guaranteeing essential affection, comfort, and food will come a baby’s way. Meanwhile, a mother’s innate drives to succor and protect her newborn are usually enough to make her play her part in this highly reciprocal relationship.

In what Bowlby called the “human attachment system,” babies have a large repertoire of highly effective signals to ensure they receive what they need to survive and thrive. When they’re not smiling, they cry and fuss, or they coo and grab at their mother’s face, hair, and breasts. They also track her every move around the house just like a duckling follows its mother through tall grass.

Babies are sociable by the age of 3 months, but they usually save their biggest smiles for the significant caregiver in their lives; adults who mirror these smiles right back. By calling these behaviors adaptive, Bowlby made the point that they are inborn. The baby’s purpose, he said, is to stay physically close to the most important source of his independent survival.

Bowlby noted that newly hatched geese and ducklings develop a preference for the first moving object they see, a process called “imprinting.” Similar to these birds, human newborns prefer moving objects and often recognize their mothers within days of birth. However, full bonding on the part of a human baby takes much longer than other animal species, at least six months longer than a duckling. Fortunately, human parents usually pick up any slack in the bonding process. After only a few minutes with a newborn, mothers and fathers typically say they’re goners, already “in love.” Sounds pretty adaptive, doesn’t it?

Attachment and Locomotion

In a baby’s sixth or seventh month, she has reached prime time to solidify her attachment with a primary adult, usually mother. In another bow to ethology, Bowlby noticed that this timing coincides with the start of a baby’s crawling. This suggested to him a link between independent locomotion and the completion of the baby’s process of attachment which began at birth. Of course, it takes a baby a lot longer to climb out of his crib than it does for a chick to hop out of the nest. Before chicks and toddlers go wandering too far away, instinct makes sure that they know where “home base” can be found.

Safety and exploration are the two competing goals in a baby’s earliest years. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores develops the intelligence and skills needed to successfully grow. These two needs often oppose each other. Which is why Bowlby and his successors believe that a child develops an internal “thermostat” to monitor his level of safety in the environment. When he gets too far from home base, an internal alarm bell sounds.

It’s a familiar dynamic where a child ventures away from mother (either by crawling or “toddling”) until some impulse prompts him to turn around and check to see whether mother is still close by. If she’s still where he left her, he may keep going. Or he may come back to touch base before restarting his exploration. The attachment bonding process permits children to regulate their urges to explore or to cling to that special adult by internalizing what Bowlby called “working models” of their caregivers. One such working model in the previous situation is “It’s okay. Mom will be there if I crawl farther.” Another might be “I can’t go too far, she may leave me [el] it’s too scary.” Babies form one or another model based on their mothers’ behaviors over time.

The Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Striking images of some very unhappy, even self-destructive monkeys convinced many doubters about the importance of early animal and human mother-child bonding in the 1950s. These photos came from Harry Harlow’s (1905-1981) famous series of Rhesus monkey experiments. Harlow separated a group of infant monkeys from their mothers and raised them with two types of substitute mother figures. One was made of bare wire; the other had a soft cloth cover over a wire form. Harlow’s research questions were:

1) Would infant monkeys form attachments to the inanimate mother substitutes?

2) Would they receive any observable emotional comfort from either kind of substitute mother?

The infant monkeys did form an attachment, but only with the cloth-covered wire mother surrogates, not the uncovered wire forms. Interestingly, both types of surrogates provided food by way of a bottle attached to the wire. This told researchers that the bonding they observed between the infant monkeys and the cloth-covered surrogates was not solely based on nourishment. Something else was behind the bonding.

The baby monkeys in Harlow’s experiments habitually clung to the cloth-covered wire “mothers” in a manner strikingly similar to how they would hold on to a real monkey mother. The experiment provided a convincing demonstration that the critical ingredient in attachment formation is not food but “contact comfort.” Because they were gentler to touch, these softer surrogates were the next best thing to a mother monkey.

Harlow’s results altered the psychoanalytic view of how the mother-child bond is formed, making skin-to-skin physical contact as important as the oral gratification received by newborn babies while being nursed or bottle fed by their mothers. Harlow’s study also went against the position of the behavioral theorists who emphasized food itself as the primary reinforcer of a baby’s behavior.

Harlow’s rhesus monkey experiments strongly inferred that serious negative consequences occur when a human baby is deprived of a strong bond with a mother figure in the first year of life. Bowlby then confirmed this hypothesis with his observations of children in post-World War II orphanages.

Other insights gleaned from these experiments concerned the long-term negative impact on the monkeys’ emotional and physical health as a result of this deprivation. To compensate for a missing mother, these monkeys would suck obsessively on their own bodies. They remained huddled in corners, rocking themselves, with distant looks in their eyes. Later, when placed with other monkeys, they became hostile, aggressive, and rarely mated.

Later experiments with other monkeys helped clarify the importance of timing for human mother-baby attachment patterns. Monkeys who spent at least three months with their mothers before being separated showed less severe behavioral abnormalities than those separated from birth. Monkeys separated from their mothers at the age of 6 months showed no long-term negative behaviors. Researchers concluded that there is a sensitive or critical period for bonding between monkey mothers and infants which lasts for six months. In humans, this critical period is believed to last three years, with any deprivation suffered in the first year of life considered the most harmful.

Making a Secure Attachment

Even with mother and child instincts and parental awe to move things along, attachment is not an instantaneous process that begins and ends in the delivery room. It’s more like a dance which begins before birth and continues throughout a baby’s first year. Although the mother is usually the primary object of a baby’s attachment, the likelihood is equally strong with whoever provides consistent and affectionate care of a baby – whether father, grandparent, or an adoptive parent – and can form the same secure attachment with that baby. Factors that increase a secure attachment include:

1) A single primary, regular caregiver for the baby’s first six months, rather than a series of irregular caregivers.

2) Synchronized routines for eating, sleeping, and stimulation with that caregiver, especially during a baby’s first few months.

3) Consistent smiling, touching, and affection by the primary caregiver.

4) Acting consistently in response to the baby’s distress with comfort, warmth, and competency.

A caregiver’s sensitivity to a baby’s distress is important, but too much of a good thing is counterproductive. Research shows that when super-attentive mothers responded instantly to their baby’s every gurgle, cry, and hiccup, their children became less securely attached. The lesson: children react poorly to smothering. It hampers their independence and inhibits the process of learning to self-soothe.

The Chemistry of Attachment

Another perspective on attachment is revealed by the biochemistry behind parent-baby bonding drives and behaviors. Using brain scans and tests of hormone levels and heart rates, researchers can now see the biochemical results when a secure attachment is made and when it fails to take place.

A Mother’s Chemistry

A woman’s hormones prepare her for giving birth, and then ready her for feeding and nurturing a newborn baby. During pregnancy, her brain circuits are literally rewired, and her senses attuned to the extra physical and emotional demands of caring for a newborn. As a result of her evolutionary instincts that manifest in this intense chemical preparation for childbirth, she will focus nearly all of her attention and energy on this tiny person until its survival is assured.

For humans, and throughout the animal kingdom, the hormone oxytocin is fundamental to the first mother-child bonding that occurs after a baby is born. Much of what is known about the role of this hormone in creating and maintaining human bonds comes from animal experiments. Female rats and sheep (ewes) given injections of oxytocin will even take care of young rats and young lambs they’ve never seen before.

In human labor and childbirth, a mother’s uterine contractions trigger the brain to release a flood of oxytocin and the neurotransmitter dopamine. The pain-suppressing effects of these hormones are essential after a woman has experienced anywhere from 6 to 36 hours of labor. When the baby is born, they create a residue of euphoria as chemical flooding peaks in the first minutes following birth[md]often coinciding with the first time the newborn is put to his mother’s breast for suckling.

It is well known that a mother who has decided to have her baby adopted should not touch the infant, because the act of touching and smelling the baby causes her to release oxytocin. This causes many mothers to reconsider their decision to make an adoption plan.

During the last month of pregnancy a mother-to-be starts producing the hormone that prepares her for nurturing and lactation: prolactin. This hormone causes milk to be secreted from her breast. Oxytocin assists by enabling the milk let-down response in a woman’s breasts and sensitizing the new mother to her infant’s touch. In fact, the baby’s touching of his mother’s breast with his hand or lips causes oxytocin to be released. During nursing, oxytocin surges, bringing pleasure and relaxation to the mother and deepening the mother/baby bond.

A Father’s Chemistry

The latest studies have shown that when a man becomes a father, his brain goes through changes, too. Soon after hearing the news that he’s about to be a father, a man starts to produce cortisol, a stress hormone. Cortisol levels tend to spike around four to six weeks after a man hears the big news, and then they decrease as the pregnancy progresses. Then, about three weeks before the baby arrives, his testosterone levels fall by about 30 percent, making him more cooperative, less competitive, and more likely to show his softer side.

For men, the hormone vasopressin plays a key role in preparing for a baby’s birth, helping them make the emotional connections required by new fatherhood. Also, during the last few weeks of his mate’s pregnancy, a man’s prolactin level rises by 20 percent. It’s not clear what effect prolactin has in a man, but it is thought to have an indirect impact on his falling testosterone levels. After his child’s birth, his estrogen level, a nurturing influence which is normally very low in a man, increases. The point of these changes appears to be to make fathers more maternal in their behaviors, at least more than their normally high levels of testosterone will allow. About six weeks after birth, a man’s hormone levels begin to return to normal. Higher estrogen, along with lots of skin contact with his baby, triggers the release of oxytocin in a man. All this chemistry helps reinforce a father’s newfound cuddling and cooing behaviors.

At the same time, fathers interact with babies and toddlers in different ways than mothers. A father is more likely to jiggle or rock babies in a playful, rhythmic fashion, while women use firm or light touching to soothe and contain them. As children grow older, a father tends to take a more rough-and-tumble approach to their physical care, and to be more challenging and less sympathetic than a mother. Research shows that both approaches are good and necessary for developing children. When the primary attachment is made between mother and baby in her baby’s first six months, research has shown that they both typically begin to form much closer relationships with fathers and siblings soon thereafter.

Chemistry of Insecure Attachment

Like her mother, when a baby receives affection and loving attention, she enjoys the calming effects of oxytocin. A lack of nurturing touch early in her life can create a negative neurochemical pattern in her brain, based on those early disappointments. With negative expectations brought to future attachments, this child may react to the increase of oxytocin caused by physical or emotional intimacy with fear, not with an anticipation of pleasure.

Instead of the warm and fuzzy feelings activated by oxytocin, stress chemicals are triggered. Cortisol, the chemical that keeps us alert and helps us deal with stress, seems to be the main culprit at work here. Sometimes cortisol is necessary, for example, in the morning when its concentration is highest to help us wake up. But cortisol’s dampening effect on oxytocin is a less positive thing when you wish to be calm and open to human connection. Either of these lifelong positive and negative biochemical patterns begins in baby’s first year.

Attachment Styles

In the 1970s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth built on Bowlby’s theory of attachment by creating a now famous series of controlled laboratory experiments with mothers and babies, called the “strange situation” experiment. The goal of these experiments was to figure out the detailed patterns and styles of behavior that cause either a secure or insecure parent-child bond.

Two concepts are central to these experiments:

1) Stranger anxiety – Wariness or fear of unfamiliar adults, shown by most infants between the ages of 6 and 24 months

2) Separation anxiety – Distress that infants between 6 and 24 months experience when separated from their primary caregivers

Normally anxiety is not viewed as a positive experience. But in the case of children younger than three, fears toward strangers and separation from a mother are healthy and appropriate responses. In fact, they provide evidence of a child’s positive, secure relationship with a mother or other primary caregiver.

To closely observe attachment behaviors between mothers and babies in a more controlled setting, Ainsworth scripted eight episodes to test mothers’ and babies’ responses to certain stresses. The dual focus throughout is on the baby’s response to the mother’s absence and the presence of a stranger, and on the mother’s responses to her baby. Ainsworth’s now-famous and commonly used “strange situation experiment” involves 1-year-old babies and mothers from a variety of backgrounds and ages.

The Strange Situation Experiment

There were eight stages in Mary Ainsworth’s strange situation procedure. After each stage listed next, the behavior of a securely attached baby is noted. Stages two through eight last about three minutes each:

1) Introduction – An assistant introduces mother and baby to the room while mother holds her baby. 30 seconds.

A calm baby is held by mother.

2) Unfamiliar room – Baby is on the floor with toys available to play with, mother sits nearby.

Baby may be wary of the new room, but uses mother as a base of security, maintaining eye contact with her while playing with toys.

3) Stranger enters – An unfamiliar female knocks, enters the room, speaks with mother, and then goes to play with baby.

Baby may show “stranger anxiety” and clearly prefers mother to playing with stranger. While mother is present, baby may allow stranger to approach and play nearby.

4) Mother leaves – quietly, leaving baby with stranger who goes and sits in mother’s chair.

Baby shows separation anxiety and renewed stranger anxiety. May accept some comfort from stranger but clearly wants mother back.

5) Reunion of mother and baby, stranger exits. Mother comforts baby. And if baby wants to continue playing with toys, does so.

Baby seeks contact and comfort from mother. Baby clings to mother. Baby may continue to play after receiving comfort.

6) Mother leaves again, saying “bye-bye” on her way out, leaving baby alone.

Baby shows renewed separation anxiety and distress.

7) Stranger enters again joining baby who is still alone, sits in mother’s chair, then calls or goes to baby.

Baby may show more anxiety toward the stranger and clearly prefers that mother returns.

8) Reunion of mother and baby, with mother picking up baby and stranger leaving.

There’s joy for baby upon reuniting with mother. Baby wants to hang on to mother.

Observing Attachments

Ainsworth found that secure attachment relationships tend to be associated with mothers who hold their babies frequently, and with mothers who hold their children long enough so that they appear satisfied when they’re put back down. Securely attached babies are aware of their mother’s whereabouts and confident that she will return after leaving the room. If they’re distressed, securely attached babies usually obtain quick comfort after being held by their mothers. Other qualities of a secure mother-baby attachment include:

1) Mother is sensitive to calls and signals of distress from baby and responds quickly.

2) Mother goes along with the interactions and games that are initiated by baby.

3) Mothers adjust baby’s feeding and sleeping schedules according to the baby’s rhythms.

4) The relationship is mutual, not dominated by the needs and moods of the mother.

Based on her observations, Ainsworth concluded that “indifferent parenting” led to insecure attachments between mothers and babies. Other researchers have subsequently added data from observational studies to show that obtrusive and over-stimulating parenting styles can also lead to insecurely attached babies.

Mothers of insecurely attached babies were found to frequently be anxious and irritable. The most extreme of these mothers showed little interest in their children, handling them in a mechanical fashion, and behaving otherwise resentfully toward their babies.

Four Attachment Styles

From thousands of controlled observations of mothers and children, Ainsworth formalized a system for rating attachments, using four categories.

1) Secure /65 percent – Uses mother as home base; prefers her to stranger; may show distress at her leaving; seeks physical contact when reunited with mother.

2) Insecure-avoidant / 20 percent – Doesn’t prefer mother to stranger; avoids contact with mother when reunited.

3) Insecure-resistant / 10 percent – Shows ambivalence toward mother; seeks contact, then

resists it; doesn’t avoid contact with mother; some show anger; some are passive.

4) Insecure-disorganized / 5 percent – Acts confused or dazed; may be calm, then angry;

often will remain motionless; shows apprehension; sometimes is resistant or avoidant

Whether avoidant or resistant, insecurely attached babies learn that their caregivers will not respond sensitively to their needs. As a result, in times of stress they may reject their mothers’ attempts to comfort them by looking away or showing anger and frustration.

Babies who exhibit insecure-disorganized attachments sometimes have parents who are neglectful or abusive. Often, researchers found that these parents had unresolved difficulties with their own parents and may have been abused as children. Their pregnancies were often unplanned and unwanted. In less severe cases, disoriented insecure behavior can occur when a mother displays anxiety or sends mixed signals to her baby.

Obstacles to Attachment

The most often-cited obstacles when developing a secure attachment are the quality of the mother’s care-giving and the compatibility of the baby’s temperament with the mother’s temperament.

Maternal Depression

Depressed mothers often miss and ignore a baby’s signals of distress. They also have a harder time entering into a synchronous relationship with their child. With a depressed mother, babies’ first become angry at their mother’s lack of attention and responsiveness, perhaps crying harder and for longer periods. But over time, these babies begin to match the mothers’ depressive symptoms. As mentioned earlier, by the age of 6 months, babies internalize a specific working model of their mothers as either responsive or nonresponsive, and their brains rewire to reflect this experience.

It is estimated that 13 percent of pregnant women and new mothers develop situational depression as a result of new motherhood. Any existing low level depression or susceptibility to it can be aggravated by the hormonal shifts, added stress, and sleeplessness that accompany having a baby. Post-partum depression is an insufficiently recognized factor that can inhibit the development of a secure attachment in a baby’s first six months.

In a pioneering study at Columbia University, psychiatric epidemiologist Myrna Weissman showed that when mothers of grade school children were successfully treated for depression, the depressive symptoms in a significant percentage of the children also dramatically improved. The study’s key finding is that depressed children’s improvement came without direct treatment of the children.

Mismatched Temperaments

It takes two people – an adult and a baby – to form a secure attachment. Stella Chess described three different expressions of temperament: “easy,” “slow-to-warm-up” and “difficult”. A friendly “easy” baby who is more likely to approach than withdraw from novelty in her environment has been found to have an easier time becoming “securely attached.” A “slow-to-warm-up” baby requires more inducement to draw into a relationship. A “difficult” baby requires more time.

Some recent research has leant a more integrative approach to the question of which factor is most likely to inhibit attachment: the quality of a mother or other primary figure’s care-giving, or the baby’s possibly difficult temperament. The major finding was that the quality of care-giving a baby receives is most predictive of whether the child forms a secure or avoidant attachment as measured in a strange situation test. However, the baby’s temperament appears to be decisive in determining which type of insecure attachment is formed. Temperamentally fearful children tended to form resistant attachments, where they kept their distance from mother but protested strongly. More outgoing babies with unresponsive mothers formed avoidant insecure attachments where they protest less but were content to ignore the mother in favor of a stranger.

Babies are just as likely to form secure attachments with fathers as mothers if the father is the primary caregiver. Summing up the data from studying 710 babies in 11 studies, the percentage of secure versus insecure attachments was 65/35 for fathers and 65/35 for mothers. The type of attachment formed also tended to be alike from one parent to the other.

Is Early Attachment Destiny?

The existing research shows that babies who form secure primary attachments to their mothers in the first year turn out better, meaning they display more favorable development outcomes later in childhood. Here’s a sampling of that research.

Securely attached children at age 12 to 18 months when measured at 2 years of age were found to:

1) Be better problem solvers.

2) Be more complex and creative in their symbolic play.

3) Display more positive and fewer negative emotions.

4) Be more popular with their playmates.

Each of these findings was made in a controlled setting comparing 2-year-olds who had the benefit of secure attachments to those found to be insecurely attached to their primary caregivers.

Longer-term studies paint a similar picture. Children who were securely attached to their caregivers at 15 months of age were re-examined in follow-up studies at ages 11 to 12 and ages 15 to 16. Among the findings were the following:

1) Those who had been securely attached as toddlers were described at the older ages as socially more popular, more curious, and self-directed.

2) Those insecurely attached at 15 months were socially and emotionally withdrawn, and less interested in learning. They also tended to be unenthused about surmounting challenges.

These studies showed that the type of secure or insecure attachment that exists between parent and child in the first few years tends to be the same in the child’s grade school and high school years. Other research has shown that a secure relationship with another person – father, grandparent, adoptive parent, or daycare provider – can somewhat offset the negative consequences of a poor attachment with a mother.

One reason why John Bowlby used the term “working models” to describe how young children internalize their earliest relationships was to emphasize that a child’s working models could change. They could improve (or deteriorate) as a result of later relationships with teachers, romantic partners, or close friends. But even with these caveats, don’t fail to understand the importance of a baby beginning life with a secure bond to a significant adult.

Attachment and Working Mothers

Although many people would like to hear a definitive statement about the positive or negative effect of daycare on young children, there are few absolute or simple answers to this question. However, there is evidence for parents to consider when making individual decisions.

From the research:

1) Separations from working mothers and placement in daycare generally do not prevent babies from establishing a secure primary attachment. This is true if the mother and father are sensitive and responsive care-givers when they are home with their child.

2) Babies younger than 6 months placed in full-time daycare face an elevated risk of forming an insecure attachment, and, in one study, they had lower scores on school readiness at 36 months.

3) One large nationwide study found that time spent in daycare added to the risk of a child’s forming insecure attachments only when it was combined with mothering that was less sensitive and less responsive.

4) High-quality daycare helps buffer young children from the negative effects of being separated from their parents.

5) Even when daycare is less than optimal, a child’s outcome depends more on the quality of care received at home.

6) A mother’s attitudes toward working outside the home and placing her baby in daycare are extremely important in shaping the attachment she forms with her child. Any sort of resentment negatively affects the mother-child bond.

If there’s any ideal scenario to be garnered from the existing data it is this: a mother with a positive attitude who spends the first six to seven months as a full-time, stay-at-home mother stands the best chance of forming a secure attachment with her baby.

Of course, public policy and business practices are not as supportive of mothers making this choice in the United States compared to other Western countries. Using the same measurements discussed in this chapter, those societies which provide longer paid maternal and paternal leave and supply subsidized childcare, have higher rates of securely attached children. In Great Britain and Sweden, 75 percent and 74 percent of babies respectively were securely attached, compared to 64 percent in the United States. For low-income Americans, the number of securely attached babies is 50 percent.

The Least You Need to Know

1) Attachment between babies and a significant adult is an instinctual process with life-long implications.

2) Within a secure attachment, a baby finds safety and the will to explore her world, developing an internal thermostat to keep both in balance.

3) Babies and mothers in “strange situation” research studies are rated on four different styles of attachment that range from a secure attachment to avoidant, resistant, or disorganized insecure attachments.

4) Babies younger than 6 months in full-time daycare are at a higher risk for developing an insecure attachment compared to babies with at-home mothers.

Source by Jack C Westman

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