How Important Is a Secure Attachment?

Families, communities, and nations are stronger when infants, children, teenagers, and young adults have a secure attachment to parents. Erik Erikson theorized that a positive outcome in infancy is based on the quality of caregiving in the early months of a child’s life. When a parent promptly and sensitively relieves a baby’s discomfort, holds a baby gently, and patiently waits as the baby drinks enough milk, an infant develops a sense of trust in their caretaker and their environment.

Ethologist John Bowlby recognized that an infant animal’s attachment to its caregiver promoted survival. He was impressed by Konrad Lorenz’s study of baby goslings imprinting on a human being, and he did a famous study with baby monkeys. He created a “wire mother” that provided milk for the baby monkey and a “cloth-covered wire mother” that did not provide milk. He found that the baby monkey would go to the wire mother long enough to fill himself with milk. Then he would cling to the cloth-covered wire monkey for comfort until he was hungry again.

Bowlby theorized that an infant human has built-in behaviors that help to keep a caretaker close to them for protection and support.  He speculated that the relationship between infant and mother begins with a set of innate signals with which the baby calls the mother to him. From birth to six weeks, the built-in signals are grasping (fingers, hair, clothing), smiling, crying, and gazing into her eyes. He recognizes her by her smell, voice, and face, but he is not yet attached to her.

Two of my daughters brought their new babies home at the same time. One was a newborn, and the other was three months old. One day, the mothers left the two babies with me for a few hours. They had expressed milk and frozen it to enable me to feed their babies, with each having several containers of milk in the freezer. When the older baby was hungry, I warmed some milk and offered it to her, but she would not even accept the bottle. I kept offering the bottle, but I finally got the message: the milk did not come from her mother. I went to the freezer and carefully chose another container of milk (one mother’s milk seemed to be more skim than the other), warmed it, and fed it to the baby without any further problems. She could tell by the smell of the milk that I was trying to feed her foreign food!

According to Bowlby’s theory, an infant has no preference as to who is holding them or taking care of them for the first six weeks. They recognize their mother’s voice, smell, and face, but they are not yet attached to her. Six weeks to six months old, babies begin to prefer their main caretaker – usually the mother. They respond differently to their mother than they do to a stranger. They trust her to respond to their needs, but they do not yet protest her absence.

From the time a child is six months to two years old, their attachment to their caretaker is evident. They often develop separation anxiety and become upset when their trusted caretaker leaves the room. Separation anxiety does not always occur and depends on temperament.

I noticed separation anxiety most with my fourth child, who is also my most sensitive child. Even though her three older siblings were surrounding her, she cried whenever I left her sight. This is the same child as a two-year-old that I found lying on the kitchen floor behind me as I was cooking dinner. As a five-year-old, she sat beside me drawing and cutting as I prepared Primary lessons. As a young adult, she was still sitting on my lap from time to time. I loved every bit of it!

By the time that a child is two years old, they can understand some basic factors about the coming and going of their caretaker. They can predict her return, and their anxiety decreases.

Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues are famous for conducting a study known as the Strange Situation, which is a technique for determining the quality of the attachment of a child that is one to two years of age to their caretaker.

The technique had eight steps: 1) mother and child are introduced to a playroom with toys, 2) parent sits while baby plays and uses the mother as a secure base from which to explore; (3) a stranger enters the room to talk with the mother, and the child reacts to an unfamiliar adult; 4) the parent leaves the room, child has separation anxiety, and the stranger responds to the child; 5) the parent returns and comforts the child, and the child responds to the reunion; 6) the parent leaves the room again, and the child has separation anxiety; 7) the stranger enters the room and offers comfort to the child; the child responds to the stranger’s offer; 8) the parent returns, greets her child, and offers comfort, and the child reacts to the reunion.

Researchers have identified one secure attachment pattern and three patterns of insecurity with a few babies unable to be classified.

·         Securely attached infants (about 65% of the babies evaluated in the Strange Situation): The babies used their mother as a secure base from which to explore. They became visibly upset when the mother left. They actively greeted her upon her return, stayed close for a moment, and began exploring again.

·         Insecure-avoidant infants (about 20% of the babies in the study): The babies appeared quite independent throughout the experiment. They rushed to the toys when they entered the room. They explored without using mother for a secure base. They did not get upset when she left or seek her proximity upon her return. If she tried to pick them up, they avoided her, turned their bodies, or averted their gaze. Maybe they had experienced a painful separation which caused emotional difficulty.

·         Insecure-ambivalent infants (about 10-15% of the babies in the study):  They were clingy and did not explore much. They were extremely upset when the mother left and ambivalent when she returned – reach out to her and then push her away.

·         Disorganized/disoriented infants (about 14-24% of the babies in the study): During the Strange Situation study, there were some babies that did not fit into the three types described above. In the 1980s Mary Main and Judith Solomon examined 200 such cases and noted that the babies had peculiar behavior when the mother returned. They walked toward their mother but averted their faces or went into a trance-like state as though they did not know how to approach their mother. Researchers wondered if this behavior pointed to physical abuse.

My oldest grandchild – a boy – exhibited insecure-avoidant behavior for a short period of time. At one year of age, his father took him from Texas to Utah to go skiing and to visit family for a week, while mother stayed home to work. I happened to be in Salt Lake City helping with my first granddaughter and watched him for a day. When my daughter went to the airport to get them, my grandson would have nothing to do with his mother. After a few heart-breaking seconds for his mother, he warmed up to her again.  The experience was painful enough for her to share it with me.

The way that a baby attaches to their primary caregiver affects them as an adult. Mary Main and her colleagues conducted what they called an Adult Attachment Interview. They interviewed mothers and fathers about their early memories. They focused on the openness and flexibility with which the parents responded to make a correlation with the way babies were classified in the Strange Situation. The main types that they found are as follow:

·         The secure/autonomous speakers spoke openly and freely about their own early experiences, and they tended to have securely attached children.

·         The dismissing of attachment speakers spoke as if their own attachment experiences were not important, and they tended to have insecure-avoidant children.

·         The preoccupied speakers seemed to still be struggling to win their parents’ love. They were so needy that they had difficulty responding to the needs of their babies.

The bottom line is that babies need someone with whom to form a secure attachment. They need to be able to trust that their caregivers will respond to their needs. If they do not make a secure attachment, they will most likely have problems with relationships as older children, teenagers, young adults, and parents. When babies make a secure attachment, they begin the process of strengthening their families, communities, and nations.