Attachment 101
Photo by Thomas Verbruggen on Unsplash
We’ve all heard it, but what does it mean? “Attachment” is an inborn system in the brain that evolves in ways that influence and organize motivational, emotional, and memory processes based on relationships with significant caregiving figures (say that ten times fast). The attachment system motivates an infant to seek proximity to parents and other primary caregivers in order to establish communication with them. In particular, the aid caregivers can give in reducing uncomfortable emotions, such as fear, anxiety, or sadness, enables children to be soothed and gives them a haven of safety when they are upset. These repeated experiences become encoded as expectations, and then as mental models, which serve to help a child feel an internal sense of “security” in the world. Studies of attachment have revealed that the patterns in attachment relationships during infancy are associated with emotional regulation and social relatedness, as well as the development of self-reflection and narrative.
The Facts:
The earliest attachments are usually formed by the age of seven months, with the first year of life being a critical period of development.
Nearly all infants become attached.
Attachments are formed only to a few persons:
These “selective attachments” come from social interactions with attachment figures.
Selective attachments lead to specific organizational changes in an infant’s behavior and brain function.
Changing conditions will change a child’s, adolescent’s, or adult’s attachment as development unfolds across the lifespan:
Patterns established early in life have a major impact on functioning, but the individual’s experiences continue to influence the patterns of attachment. This means new relationship experiences have the potential to move individuals toward a more secure form of attachment at any stage of life.
There are four major attachment styles/patterns:
Secure – Parents who are emotionally available, perceptive, and responsive to infants’ needs and mental states have infants who are most often “securely” attached.
Avoidant – Parents who are emotionally unavailable, imperceptive, rejecting, and unresponsive are associated with “avoidant” attachments.
Resistant/Ambivalent – Parents who are inconsistently available, perceptive, and responsive, and who tend to intrude their own states of mind onto those of their children, tend to have children with “resistant” or “ambivalent” attachments.
Disorganized/Disoriented – Parents who show frightened, frightening, or disoriented communication during the first year of life tend to have children with “disorganized” or “disoriented” attachments.
These patterns of relating between parent and child have significant influences later in life. So what does this mean for parents? According to Dr. Dan Siegel, we can foster secure attachment if we remember the following 4 "S"s. Our children need to be:
Seen - Deep and empathic perception; sensing the mind behind their behavior.
Safe - Avoiding actions and responses that frighten or hurt them.
Soothed - Helping them deal with difficult emotions and situations.
Secure - Helping them develop an internalized sense of well-being.
Still interested? Check out these great reads from award-winning educator and child psychiatrist, and my personal guru, Dr. Dan Siegel: