- You are here :
- Home
- » Info centre
Info Centre - Secure and insecure attachment
Life with a new baby can be bewildering, particularly in terms of making decisions about styles of parenting. Many new parents worry about how they are relating to their baby, from recognising their needs and developing a good bond, to fears about spoiling their baby by responding to their cries.
Of course, controversy over babycare methods has long been with us, as Channel 4’s Bringing Up Baby series in 2008 – where 50s, 60s, and 70s parenting styles were pitched against one another – demonstrated only too well. And yet, the picture is more complicated for parents nowadays, and the concerns perhaps more acute, since it is only in recent years that a significant body of research into infant development and attachment has been available.
But fear not – a look at this research can offer some relief from all the soul-searching and even give confidence to parents who have begun to question how they respond to their baby.
Attachment theory
In the 60s, the psychoanalyst John Bowlby proposed what has become known as ‘attachment theory’. In this, he suggested that not only do we all need to form close emotional bonds with those who care for us, but that the quality of this bond, or attachment, depends to a large extent on the quality of care that we receive as babies.
Babies who develop what is called a ‘secure attachment’ have learnt to expect a carer who is generally sensitive to their feelings – someone neither over-stimulating nor too remote – who can help the baby get herself back on an even emotional keel after any upsets or excitement.
Around a third of children are thought to develop an insecure attachment, however, and may, as children and as adults, be more likely to form unstable relationships, to find emotional closeness difficult to achieve and may struggle to draw on potentially supportive social relationships.
Babies who are insecurely attached tend to respond to stressful situations with a range of what are called ‘attachment behaviours’ whose aim is to achieve or maintain a sense of security. For example, a baby who doesn’t seem anxious when separated from her carer, and who doesn’t really try to get near her carer when she returns, may be trying to keep her carer nearby in light of her experience that distress may cause the carer to reject her (‘avoidant’ attachment). Equally, a baby who is highly distressed by a separation and inconsolable when her carer tries to soothe her may be trying to maintain the attention of a carer who is only intermittently responsive (‘resistant’ attachment).
Stress
Healthy newborn babies respond to stress by producing high levels of a hormone called cortisol. Research has shown that over time high levels of cortisol can have an adverse impact on brain development.
When babies are cared for sensitively and responsively, stressful situations become much less likely to provoke such high increases in cortisol. This is thought to happen as a result of children coming to expect that their crying and appeals for physical closeness will result in their carers helping them.
Responsive or spoiling?
Some parents worry whether responding to their babies each time they cry or are distressed will result in their babies becoming ‘spoilt’. However, the research about this is very clear: it’s impossible to spoil a baby.
Up to around one year old, a baby isn’t developed enough psychologically to control intentionally the behaviour of those caring for her by crying. Rather, babies cry in response to the discomfort of being hungry, wet, dirty, in pain, alone, or out of contact with others.
So if a friend or a relative tells you that youmight be ‘spoiling’ your baby by responding to her distress, they are actually crediting your baby with skills and capacities she doesn’t (and cannot) yet possess!
Being thoughtful
Researchers have discovered that adults who are able to reflect upon their own experiences in a coherent way, who can understand why their parents behaved as they did and why they themselves behave as they do, are the most likely to have babies who are securely attached.
What seems to be key to the development of this knack for coherent reflection is one’s own parents being ‘authoritative’ rather ‘authoritarian’ (bad news then for strict disciplinarians), the manner in which one’s parents talk about emotions and the degree to which negative emotions are tolerated and spoken about in the family.
Gaining perspective
Researchers in one study investigated how mothers responded to their babies’ distress after their babies received an injection. They found that the mothers whose response to the baby’s distress included displays of feeling that were at odds with the child’s current feeling – for example smiling, questioning and ‘mock’ distress – were best able to soothe their babies.
It has been suggested that this difference between the mother’s and the baby’s response ensures that the baby recognises the mother’s emotion as similar to, but not identical with, her experience. It follows from this that because the carer does not simply respond identically to the baby’s emotion (for example, by getting angry that the baby is angry, or being overwhelmed by the baby’s own sense of being overwhelmed), the baby experiences the carer as being someone who has a sense of perspective, someone who can cope.
Perhaps this explains why research has shown that parents who are quickest to respond to their babies’ distress are more likely to have babies who are ‘avoidantly’ attached, since the understandable need to soothe their baby’s distress immediately can feel, to the baby, as if the parent is struggling to cope with the distress themselves.
Of course, though, it can be extremely distressing to parents when their baby cries, and it can make parents feel useless and desperate that nothing they try makes any difference. But crying isn’t personal and though it may be difficult to believe, it won’t last forever. Stepping outside of the room for a moment, and remembering how other mums have told you they have felt in similar situations, may help to place what can feel overwhelming into perspective. This is very different from, say, shutting the door on your baby’s cries (again, an understandable response, but one which arguably might also stem from a feeling of being overwhelmed by a baby’s distress).
However, there is a large amount of middle ground between these two poles. After all, researchers have demonstrated that even the most sensitive caregiver is insensitive to their child’s state of mind over half of the time! So although you may feel pressure to understand your baby perfectly, don’t beat yourself up that you aren’t always sure what your baby wants. Doing your best to think about how your baby might be experiencing you and the world around her, and trying to steer a path between being too fussy or intense or too distant – in short, being good-enough (in the way meant by the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott who coined the term ‘good-enough mother’ in the 50s to convey the idea that caregivers only need to be good enough for their babies to thrive) – is all anyone can ever ask of you.
Page lasted updated 2008.
