Question

What roles does attachment play in a child’s development?

Answer 1

• The quality of the infant-parent attachment is a powerful predictor of a child's later social and emotional outcome. By definition, a normally developing child will develop an attachment relationship with any caregiver who provides regular physical and/or emotional care, regardless of the quality of that care.
• Attachment to a protective caregiver helps infants to regulate their negative emotions in times of stress and distress and to explore the environment, even if it contains somewhat frightening stimuli.
• Attachment, a major developmental milestone in the child’s life, remains an important issue throughout the lifespan. In adulthood, attachment representations shape the way adults feel about the strains and stresses of intimate relationships, including parent-child relationships, and the way in which the self is perceived.
  
• Attachment, the affective bond of infant to parent, plays a pivotal role in the regulation of stress in times of distress, anxiety or illness. Human beings are born with the innate bias to become attached to a protective caregiver.
• But infants develop different kinds of attachment relationships: some infants become securely attached to their parent, and others find themselves in an insecure attachment relationship.
• These individual differences are not genetically determined but are rooted in interactions with the social environment during the first few years of life. Sensitive or insensitive parenting plays a key role in the emergence of secure or insecure attachments.
• Attachments motivate children to stay close to their parents, which allows the parent to provide protection, security, and care. This helps ensure that the child has all of the things he or she needs to survive.
• Bowlby suggested that there were four critical characteristics of attachment.
• First is proximity maintenance, or the desire to be near those with which we share an attachment. We enjoy the company of those we are attached to, so we strive to be near them whenever possible.
• Attachments also create a safe haven, or the need to return to attachment figures for care and comfort. During times of distress, fear, or uncertainty, we may seek out the people we are attached to for care and comfort.
• Next, attachment figures also offer a secure base for exploration. This is particularly important during childhood. This secure base allows kids to explore the world while knowing they can still return to the safety of the attachment figure.
• Finally, kids experience separation distress when parted from an attachment figure. For example, kids tend to become upset when parents have to leave them in the care of others.
• Attachment serves a number of important purposes. First, it helps keep infants and children close to their caregivers so that they can receive protection, which in turn helps boost their chances of survival. This important emotional bond also provides children with a secure base from which they can then safely explore their environment.
• The failure to form a secure attachment with a caregiver has been linked to a number of problems including conduct disorder and oppositional-defiant disorder. Researchers also suggest that the type of attachment displayed early in life can have a lasting effect on later adult relationships.