Flowers Fall: Field Notes from a Buddhist Mom's Experimental Life, December 2008

A Detached Look at Attachment Parenting

by Bethany Saltman, November 24, 2008

The other day I was with a bunch of moms I didn’t know very well and one mentioned to her friend that she was decidedly not into “attachment parenting.” She shot a look at me, assuming, it appeared, that I decidedly am into it, and that I might have some big reaction. While I appreciate her desire to define herself in relation to this übercrunchy parenting style, since I’ve learned more about the history of attachment research, I wonder if she is more into it than she thinks.

Most of us take for granted the notion that babies need love to thrive—not just food and shelter, but touch and a bond with a particular person, usually a mom. However, this belief has actually been hard-won in the last 50 or so years. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Freud theorized that human beings are made up of intrapsychic drives, meaning we are born with our needs, urges, and conflicts lodged within our own unconscious minds. This is a massive simplification, but it seems that for Freud, other people were more like objects in our instinctual race to be gratified than related figures. So a mom could screw her kid up for life (not much has changed in that regard) through hasty toilet training, et cetera, but anyone could be a stand-in for Mother, because basically the kid just needed to get his or her needs met. Or not.

In the 1950s psychoanalysts began to question this model, noting that when children were removed from their mothers through hospitalization, they suffered terribly. They were fed, warm, kind of comforted, and somewhat stimulated, so what could be the problem? In Robert Karen’s excellent book, Becoming Attached (Oxford University Press, 1998), he traces the development in psychology toward realizing that mother and child are, in fact, biologically attached, and how disrupting that attachment impairs a child’s development. Big time. Children, contrary to the behaviorist thinking of the time, love their mothers for reasons other than the conditioned response of affection for the food source, the big boob.

John Bowlby, a psychoanalyst and pioneer in attachment theory, was inspired by research about how goslings were instinctively imprinted to the first moving object they saw upon hatching—their mamas—even though the babies could feed themselves. And then there’s the famous experiment where the baby monkeys clung to the terrycloth-covered wire monkey even though the plain, unadorned wire monkey dispensed the food. The little primates chose snuggles over chow.

These findings were controversial. The idea of children instinctively attaching to their mothers seemed silly to many of the so-called experts. Then along came Mary Ainsworth, who had been meticulously studying mothers and their babies around the world and noted that a mother’s relational, “attachment style” shaped a child’s sense of security and capacity to self-soothe. And Ainsworth found that the more responsive the mother, the more secure the baby. Responsiveness did not lead to wussiness, as many thought at the time, but to independence.