Reassessing Attachment Theory: A Cultural Critique

New parents often worry about attachment to their baby - will I be able to build it? My baby cries a lot - does that mean that we aren't attached? If I put my baby in daycare, will they get attached to the daycare staff rather than to me? Based on the ideas about attachment that have been circulated over the years, these are entirely valid concerns. But it turns out that not only should we not worry about these things, but the the research that these ideas were based in was highly flawed. It's often forgotten that attachment theory was developed in the period after World War II, when policymakers were trying to get women out of the jobs they had held during the war, and back into their 'natural' place in the home. In one of his earliest papers Dr. John Bowlby - the so-called Father of Attachment Theory - described 44 children who had been referred to his clinic for stealing, and compared these with children who had not stolen anything. He reported that the thieves had been separated from their parents during childhood, which led them to have a low sense of self-worth and capacity for empathy. He went on to say that “to deprive a small child of his mother’s companionship is as bad as depriving him of vitamins.” But much later in his life, Bowlby revealed that he had conflated a whole lot of kinds of separation into that one category – everything between sleeping in a different room to being abandoned in an orphanage. And in addition to being separated, many of the thieves had also experienced physical or sexual abuse. The fear that spending time apart from your baby will damage them in some way is just not supported by the evidence. What other common beliefs do we hold about attachment relationships that aren't supported by evidence? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out! Listen in for more. Check this episode for more attachment research: What it is, what it’s not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it     Link to the book mentioned:

Cornerstones of Attachment Research (Affiliate link).

    Jump to highlights:

• (03:30) Download the free Right From The Start Roadmap
• (06:11) Dr. John Bowlby, who is known as the founder of attachment theory
• (06:40) A brief overview of attachment theory
• (08:06) What is attachment theory
• (09:44) A closer look at the word attachment
• (12:55) Five aspects out of Freud's psychoanalytic theory
• (14:32) 44 Juvenile Thieves - One of the major ideas about separation from parents
• (17:50) What is the word monotrophy
• (18:49) The four dimensions that distinguish African-American views of motherhood from American views by Dr. Patricia Hill Collins
• (20:49) Aka Pygmy tribe in Africa
• (21:37) What is PIC or Parental Investment in the child Questionnaire by Dr. Robert Bradley
• (24:19) The Strange Situation Procedure developed by Dr. Mary Ainsworth
• (30:30) White middle class mothers in Baltimore stand for what attachment should look like in families of all types around the world
• (33:36) Two main cross cultural studies
• (40:13) The cognitive thinking component of the attachment relationship
• (47:29) What is Outcomes
• (01:01:25) Summary

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen Lumanlan  00:03 Hi, I’m Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want our children to lead fulfilling lives. But it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research on principles of respectful parenting. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won’t listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head on over to your YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you’ll join us.   Jen Lumanlan  00:55 Hello, and welcome to the your parenting Mojo podcast. Today's episode is called most of what you know about attachment is probably wrong, and has been a long time in the making. I actually started looking at it for a course that I've developed with Hannah and Kelty of upbringing called right from the start. Of course, it's for people who are expecting a baby and or who have a child under one year of age and we really help you to find a path that feels right for you from the start. In the nine main course modules, you'll learn about the six parenting roles to embrace to release you from the guilt and the overwhelm by clarifying your flexible ongoing role as a parent. We look at topics like sleep, attachment, play and movement, feeding, preparing siblings, and many other topics as well. Within each topic, we look at what society says that we need to do in each situation, and how we might want to adjust our approach to fit with our values. I give you an overview of the research on each topic in about 10 to 15 minutes, so much shorter than the average podcast episode and then we look at how to actually put the ideas into practice. There's also a section in each module on troubleshooting when it seems like things aren't going the way you'd hoped. We have a community of like minded parents who are all going through the course together and to share ideas and get support in a non-Facebook platform, and you can join group coaching calls with me, Hannah and Kety as well.   Jen Lumanlan  02:15 We have parents in the course are expecting new babies; some already have one or more children and know they need to do things differently with this child. Well, for others, this is their first child coming through birth or adoption or surrogacy. Other parents already have a child under the age of one and are implementing the ideas in the course in real time. They've been able to have massive shifts in perspective to get through that tough newborn stage, even if they were already aware of and practicing respectful parenting approaches. They tell us they're jealous but excited for others that this course now exists and they wish there had been something like it available when they had their firstborn.   Jen Lumanlan  02:49 Even the parents who had never heard of doing group coaching calls before have been surprised at the intimacy and community we create in these calls and online as well. We plan to run the course three or four times a year, so you never have to wait too long for it. So if you're expecting or have a child under the age of one, or you know someone who is we invite you to download the free right from the start roadmap, this roadmap gives you a ton of information on the six parenting roles that we look at in the course. And the skills you'll need to parent in a way that's aligned with your values. This isn't just a little one page thing; it's 14 pages of information on all these roles and skills and ideas that you need to not just survive that first year, but really thrive. So you can download the free roadmap at yourparentingmojo.com/roadmap, and information about the course itself is at yourparentingmojo.com/rightfromthestart.   Jen Lumanlan  03:38 All right, so let's get into our episode. We did an episode on attachment theory a while ago where I interviewed Dr. Arietta Slade about what the theory is and what it isn't, which is attachment parenting and we'll go into that in just a bit. But I was rereading Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk's book The Body Keeps The Score a while ago and this little nugget jumped out at me actually it's a bit more than a little nugget and he says "The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper class English men who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools where they were raised in regimented same sex settings. The first time I visited the famed Tavistock clinic in London I noticed a collection of black and white photographs of these great 20th century psychiatrists hanging on the wall going up the main staircase. John Bowlby, Wilfred Bion, Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairburn and Donald Winnicott. Each of them in his own way had explored how our early experiences become prototypes for all of our later connections with others and how our most intimate sense of self is created in our minute to minute exchanges with our caregivers. scientists study what puzzles the most so they often become experts in subjects that others take for granted. (Or as the attachment researcher Beatrice Beebe once told me most research is research). These men who studied the role of mothers in children's lives had themselves been sent off to school at a vulnerable age sometime between six and ten long before they should have faced the world alone. Bowlby himself told me that just such boarding school experiences probably inspired George Orwell's novel 1984, which brilliantly expresses how human beings may be induced to sacrifice everything they hold dear and true, including their sense of self, for the sake of being loved and approved by someone in a position of authority."   Jen Lumanlan  05:17 And it's not that Bowlby was torn from the tender arms of his loving mother to go to boarding school. He was born into an upper middle class family in London, which means he was mostly raised by a nanny into nursemaids, and was allowed to see his mother for an hour a day because many parents of her class believed that too much parental affection would spoil a child. The Nanny was the consistent figure in his life until she left the family when he was almost four, and he described this loss to a biographer as one as great as losing a mother. Bowlby's father was surgeon to the king's household and an experienced loss as well. His own father had been killed during a war. John Bowlby's father was often unavailable for long periods, and a beloved godfather died during his childhood as well. So despite financial privilege, His childhood was marked by trauma and loss.   Jen Lumanlan  06:02 And so I thought, huh, that's interesting. It seems as though there's more to the story about attachment than I realize, how can this history not have influenced the way that Dr. John Bowlby, who is known as the founder of attachment theory, affected him? So I thought, huh, that's interesting. It seems as though there's more to this story than I'd realized. How can this history not have influenced the way that Dr. John Bowlby, who is known as the founder of attachment theory, develop that theory. So I took that little nugget of information away.   Jen Lumanlan  06:33 And then I started looking around for other perspectives on attachment theory, and I found! So in this episode, we're going to give a brief overview of what attachment theory is, which is kind of a bit more complicated than we might think. And as we're doing that, we're going to examine these ideas from different angles to see how much of these ideas we actually want to take on in our parenting and what we might need to shift.   Jen Lumanlan  06:54 And before we get started with that, I do want to acknowledge the monumental contribution of Dr. Robbie Duschinsky to this episode. He published a book in 2020, called Cornerstones Of Attachment Research and I have to say, I've never seen anything quite like it. Each of the five main chapters is between 60 and 100 pages long, and each chapter has an average of 500 references. So we get the usual tour of the peer reviewed literature, but we also get details like "In a four day workshop in 1985 at the University of Washington, Mary Ainsworth sat on the floor to be as close as possible to the screen, as Mary Main showed her tapes coated with the new disorganized classification", Dr. Duschinsky got access to John Bowlby's his private archives. So we hear about the notes that Bowlby himself made in the margins of the personal copies of the books that he owned on this topic, Dr. Duschinsky, he compares the illustrations in the original manuscript of a peer reviewed paper, with the ones that were finally published, and reports on delays in doctoral dissertation completions on related topics due to maternity leaves. This book represents a simply staggering amount of work and it's all brought together in an incredibly readable style.   Jen Lumanlan  08:05 Okay, so let's get started on what attachment theory is. The first thing we always need to say when we're discussing attachment theory is that attachment theory is not attachment parenting. To the extent that if you mention attachment parenting to a researcher who's working on attachment theory, you invariably get responses accompanied by winces and groans. We did mention this in our last episode on attachment, but it's important enough that it bears repeating here. So Dr. Bill and his wife Martha Sears had already developed some ideas about parenting that they had called "immersion parenting". But Martha Sears said that "At a talk one time in Pasadena, a grandmother came up to bill and said she thought the term immersion mothering was a good one because some moms find themselves in over our heads. When he told me this, I realized we needed to change the term to something more positive, so we came up with a AP meaning attachment parenting. Since the attachment theory literature was so well researched and documented by John Bowlby and others" There' s a citation for that quote in the references for this episode. And so the reason that the Sears were able to ride on the coattails of Bobby's authority was because Bowlby had made a lot of ambiguous and over general statements about the dangers of separation, and the need for mothers to spend time with their babies. In essence, Bowlby and Sears were involved in a circular relationship that perhaps neither one realized - Bowlby used words like attachment that people would recognize and be drawn toward to support the popular appeal of his ideas, and Sears use Bowlby's words to make parents think that attachment parenting was based on academic research, which made it more popular with parents and it became a self reinforcing circle. So let's take a closer look at that word attachment.   Jen Lumanlan  09:47 Bowlby started out by observing infant primates and notice that they try to get close to an adult when they're alarmed or are separated by crawling or by smiling or crying to draw the adult closer and Bowlby thought Bringing the adult closer would remove whatever stimulus the infant was considering a threat or discomfort. Bowlby believed human infants are born with the same capacity to look for a familiar caregiver when they're alarmed or separated, he wrote: "When given an opportunity, all infants without severe neuro physiological impairments will become attached to one or more specific caregivers". And we'll look more critically at that idea in just a bit, but let's take it at face value for now. If the caregiver can then respond in a way that removes the threat or discomfort, what is called a secure attachment relationship is formed. And it is important that we refer to it as an attachment relationship, not just attachment. If we just say attachment, we're applying that the child is attached to the mother, while saying attachment relationship emphasizes This is an interaction between two people. The mother's emotional attitude and sensitivity are crucial to the child's development. And if she's not physically or emotionally available, then the attachment relationship will not develop successfully. And the research does assume the primary attachment relationship is with the mother, one of Bowlby's early texts said: "Little will be said of the Father child relation, his value as the economic and emotional support of the mother will be assumed". And so we'll come back to that idea in a bit as well.   Jen Lumanlan  11:12 Dr. Duschinsky observes that the way the word attachment is used in everyday language is different from Bowlby's usage, and he actually used it in at least two different ways. And then it's again used differently by the researchers who have come after Bowlby. In everyday usage attachment means being bound or connected to something else, either physically or emotionally. Bowlby used it in a broad sense, meaning any and all intimate relationships and also in a narrow sense meaning a specific set of behaviors and states that help a child to communicate that it needs attention from a caregiver and as an illustration of the kinds of uses that have shown up over the years. One psychologist Dr. Michael Rutter, noted that attachment meaning inbuilt predisposition, means that children show attachment, meaning discreet behaviors within attachments, meaning dyadic relationships, and how does this happen? attachment a hypothesized internal controlling mechanism.   Jen Lumanlan  12:06 So having one word being used in so many different ways makes it seem like everyone who uses it is getting what they need out of it, and even Bowlby admitted by the 1980s that he was only continuing to use it for historical reasons. Even though he meant he needed to clarify what sense of the word he meant every time he used it. And in fact, apparently he never even wanted to develop a theory at all. He once said that when he was younger, he envied the clinical intuition and grace of his colleagues who helped patients even when they didn't use a particular theory. And other peers help patients even when the theories they used weren't actually very helpful. Bowlby himself noted that he tended to apply theories to understand his patients problems, which could sometimes work well. But when the theories didn't work, he didn't know how to proceed, so he decided to develop this new theory. He had initially trained as a psychoanalyst and pulled five aspects out of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. #1. Infants have a complex social and emotional life. #2. Early experiences can have lifelong implications, #3. Mental representations of early experiences impact later behavior and development. #4. Defensive processes play a role in affect regulation, and #5. That the loss of an attachment figure at any age represents an emergency.   Jen Lumanlan  13:20 But the reason to develop new theory was the flaws that Bowlby noted within psychoanalytic theory, a lack of acknowledgement of what were the actual family experiences that shaped the child's experiences, an excessive reliance on sexual explanations for challenges people were facing. Attachment theory was also shaped by Bowlby's experiences with his own children, as he noticed they would come to him when they were scared, which went counter to the commonly accepted idea that children would go to their parents when they wanted something positive like food. One important implication of these ideas was that they refuted the approach Bowlby's own mother had taken and that you can't really spoil a child by showing them physical affection, and that in fact, children he'll feel confident that they are loved would be less anxious about separation. And when...