This is a huge topic, and I’ll hardly do it justice here. There are a few excellent books on it, but part of the problem with how we understand the studies might be that the most nuanced books seem to be the most academically written, and likely the least read. As it morphed into popular consumption it may have strayed further from the original intention. On top of the reading, I went to a couple workshops on attachment to find the magic solution to all our relationship ills, and my big takeaway is this (for free!): if you’re a bit distant, consider being open to getting closer, and if you’re a bit clingy, try to step back a bit. It’s good advice to notice and change patterns that are a problem, absolutely, but I’m not sure it merits the number of workshops, courses, and self-help books that it’s provoked. At worst, some books actually counsel people to avoid any “avoidant or disordered people” as if there’s no saving them from their dastardly origins. Therapeutic discussions of childhood misconnections definitely have helped people better understand themselves, but I think this theory produces such volumes of celebration and condemnation because, in difficult relationships, it feels like the answer, but to parents, it feels like blame.
Attachment Theory Criticisms
Heidi Keller’s The Myth of Attachment Theory (2022) is an extremely thorough takedown of the theory. If attachment notions make you feel like a crappy parent, this book is vindicating. She explores the offense of putting it all on moms both because of the narrow focus on a single person as well as on singular causation, but her best work is in exploring the creation of a norm of interaction from upper-middle class, western assumptions around what it means to be sensitive to a baby’s needs, an analysis that was made at the time as well:
"Margaret Mead criticized Bowlby for taking a couple of ethnocentric observations of his own culture and linking them to assumptions of biological necessities — in order to conclude universality.”
Elsewhere, others say the theory doesn’t really add anything to the field since we already know that we learn how to relate from our earliest relationships. Others criticize that the predictive power from child into adulthood is overstated, that it offers ammunition for policing caregiving, that it’s about as useful as primal scream therapy and recovered memories, or that, despite inclusion in so many psychotherapy textbooks, it’s a soon-to-be-gone remnant of post-WWII propaganda created to stop women from working. Despite the original intention to show that we’re evolutionarily made to attach to caregivers, the creation of these secure/insecure labels also develops a “hierarchy of personalities,” or a right and wrong way to behave that suggests some people are defective, which is an inherently damaging narrative.
Someone who doesn’t like to be bothered at work might be convinced by a partner that they’re fundamentally flawed because they don’t appreciate ongoing texting. It’s sometimes the dynamic that’s the problem, not the people. Sometimes anxiety over the strength of the relationship is from childhood, but sometimes it’s because the relationship is actually on shaky ground. There’s potential for this theory to be used dismissively if a partner’s concerns are met with, “You’re just an insecure person,” possibly with a knife-twisting, “I can tell by the way your mom interacts with you.” A recent study suggests barely half of us are secure, which suggests we’re in need of repair from childhood issues. But, whatever happened to our behaviours being a mix of nurture and nature? There’s a lot that babies bring to the table.
My strongest reaction against the theory is that, unlike Jungian types that are intended to help us learn to accept differences, these “styles” are used to identify problems. The labels give us a far too quick and easy way to identify what’s wrong with others — or with ourselves — instead of what works in a specific connection. Echoing Keller’s concern, it’s a particularly difficult minefield for moms. We mainly agree that “refrigerator moms” don’t cause autism now, but we’re suddenly back in the thick of it with an insecure attachment “style” being due to something mom did before we could talk. The continued perfection required of mothers is exhausting! Some versions of the theory suggest that such a prompt responsiveness is required of a mother, one on one, which could imply that multiples or closely spaced children or, heaven forbid, daycare, might predicate a life of crime.
The More Harrowing Path
Before we get into the trajectory the theory took, it might help to set the stage with what other advice was out there for moms when this theory was starting to take off in the west. When I had my first baby thirty years ago, a colleague came over to demand that I stop holding my newborn so much! When I had my last, twenty years ago, my new step-mother was there to warn me that soothing at the first sound of crying will ruin my child. This more fraught alternative path also has incredible sticking power! We’re all just scrambling for a right answer to be able to do our best with our little ones, and well-meaning friends and relatives sometimes make it harder for new parents. I followed my instinct instead, which was to cuddle my babies. This alternate advice, to disattend to babies, must have affected at least a few generations.
The notion of training a baby with inattention has long roots with John Mirk’s 15th century admonishment that children should be seen and not heard. In the 1890s, Emmett Holt told moms to let their baby cry and never play with them. I mean, just because they’re not allowed to work in factories anymore, doesn’t mean we should coddle them! In 1916, the same year John Dewey started encouraging teachers to follow a child’s cues for readiness to learn, William Sadler reinforced the concern with holding and bouncing babies:
“The young and growing nervous system of the child is decidedly injured by this constant jolting and jiggling, to say nothing of the ‘spoiling’ effects of this practice … [which] also lays the foundation for ‘wrecked nerves’ in later life.”
This attitude towards parenting seemed to peak in the 1920s, after WWI. Anne Fullerton’s Handbook of Obstetric Nursing for Nurses, Students, and Mothers warned about turning children into tyrants from too much attention; a US Department of Labour pamphlet on Infant Care warned that babies should learn that crying will only cause parents to ignore them, and behaviourist John B. Watson cautioned moms against showing children any affection:
"If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. … Put it out in the backyard a large part of the day. Build a fence around the yard so that you are sure no harm can come to it. Do this from the time it is born. … Let it learn to overcome difficulties almost from the moment of birth. The child should learn to conquer difficulties away from your watchful eye.”
After WWII, in 1962 Walter Sackett said it’s unpatriotic not to impose strict schedules on babies, including imposing solids by two days and black coffee by six months:
"If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism.”
Moms aren’t just ruining their children, they’re destroying the political system with their leniency! Even into the 1980s, Richard Ferber suggested that children won’t self-soothe if parents are there to comfort them. These alternatives to continuous maternal attention seem intended to train children for an individualistic society.
Attachment Studies
Cassidy & Shave’s Handbook of Attachment (2018) does a phenomenal job outlining the science of attachment, but the book that redeemed the theory for me is David Wallin’s Attachment in Psychotherapy (2007). But let’s also look at this path within the context of other theories at the time. This is a bit long because there was a lot going on!
In the 1850s, Darwin pivotally changed the way we understand the natural world. In the 1920s, Piaget documented stages of child development, and William Blatz taught “security theory,” that kids develop lifelong security from time with parents. In 1935, Konrad Lorenz’s experiment with geese was the start of understanding parental imprinting. Then in 1945 René Spitz’s study of babies in orphanages who failed to thrive due to a lack of nurturance despite having enough to eat, made it clear that parental attention is necessary for survival. The following year Benjamin Spock famously told moms they can’t spoil a baby by holding it and attending to it: “A mother’s prompt responsiveness to infant crying early on led an infant to cry less in later months rather than reinforcing a tendency to cry.” He reassured moms, “You know more than you think you do” (swoon). He also encouraged parents to have a less rigid eating and sleeping schedule and be more attuned to the baby’s needs than the clock. Requiring good manners isn’t harmful so long as parents aren’t “chronically disapproving and make no allowances for a child’s age and individuality. This kind of severity produces children who are either meek and colourless or unkind to others.”
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| Harlow's monkey study |
The official originator, John Bowlby, studied Darwin, and was reacting against Melanie Klein’s work on Freudian drives in children. In 1950, Mary Ainsworth, a student of Blatz, joined Bowlby to investigate the effects of maternal separation on children. In 1951, Bowlby studied 44 juvenile thieves and concluded that a prolonged separation from their mother (over six months) before age five has a profoundly negative effect on children, leaving some completely “affectionless.” He concluded that children’s actual lived experiences affect them more than any unconscious drives. Ainsworth followed her husband to Uganda where she observed families in their homes over 9 months and noticed that infants use their mom as a secure base, always looking back to them as they played. In 1957 Harry Harlow discovered that rhesus monkeys prefer to cling to a cloth frame without food over a wire frame with food, which furthered the burgeoning idea that bonding with parents was for nurturance more than food.
In the 1960s, Ainsworth moved to the states and observed 26 moms in home visits, and noticed babies were less upset when they left the room than in Uganda due to cultural differences of expectation of the Ugandan moms always being present. Then she set up the Strange Situation Procedure (SSP) to do a more rigorous experiment on 23 babies to discern three distinct behaviour types: secure, avoidant, and anxious from 20 minutes of observation:
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| from The Life Span by Broderick & Blewitt, 2020 |
It’s how the child reacts to mom’s return that determines their category.
Then in 1967, D.W. Winnicott, of “good-enough mother” fame, wrote, “If the mother’s face is unresponsive, then a mirror is a thing to be looked at but not looked into.” The reaction of the mother to the baby must be an accurate reflection and “marked” (clearly a response to the baby’s state rather than an expression of her own) or else the child thinks he caused mom distress instead of feeling understood by mom. Winnicott explained that only children who can express anger and see that the parent can cope with it without provoking the parent’s own rage or fear, can learn that the parent is a separate subject with their own mind. So it’s vital for children to have an opportunity to express emotion and have it contained. This may be a welcome change for anyone raised with the “Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about” mentality.
Ainsworth’s work was published in 1979, and she cautioned:
“This is not to insist that the organization of attachment is fixed in the first year of life and is insensitive to marked changes in maternal behaviour or to relevant life events occurring later on. Nor is it implied that attachments to figures other than the mother are unimportant as supplementing or compensating for anxieties in infant-mother attachment.”
Even earlier, Ainsworth said that her studies shouldn’t be considered unidirectional since babies also affect how their caregivers behave with them:
“The mother’s contribution to the interaction and the baby’s contributions are caught up in an interacting spiral. It is because of these spiral effects — some vicious and some virtuous — that the variables are so confounded that it is not possible to distinguish independent from dependent variables.”
Sometimes mothers were too distracted to pick up on cues, but some babies provide fewer cues. Belsky and Rovine (1987) furthered this interactionist theory: “the child’s innate temperament may, in fact, influence the way their parent responds to them.”
Ainsworth also explained that, “cultural context must be taken into account when assessing the security versus insecurity of attachments.” And later said:
“I have been quite disappointed that so many attachment researchers have gone on to do research with the Strange Situation rather than looking at what happens at the home or in other natural settings — like I said before, it makes a turning away from ‘field work,’ and I don’t think it’s wise.”
It’s also been pointed out that the power of the study is in looking at the percentages to watch for larger trends rather than focusing on the individual children since, “some infants who receive sensitive care look anxiously attached, and some who have neglectful parents look secure.” Ainsworth makes this mother-child interaction and lack of causation very clear in her work, but that hasn’t sufficiently translated to many current self-help books or lectures.
In 1984, Mary Main and colleagues developed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) to classify people into an autonomous, dismissing, preoccupied, or, her new addition, disorganized category. The test asks adults a series of questions about their childhood and current relationships, but looks less at the descriptions and more at how coherent their narrative is. Everett Waters and colleagues, in 2003, found a 64% rate of correlation between the SSP and AAI over 20 years. An attachment leaning stays stable for most people, but is open to revision in light of experience and sometimes for unknown reasons. But some people who showed a secure attachment to mom in a 20 minute test as toddlers were later found to be insecure in other relationships, and vice versa. A lot happens after our earliest years that can dramatically affect us.
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| An amalgamation of results with approximate estimates. (click for clarity) |
We can watch children and pretty easily notice who pulls back a bit from others, who hangs on, and who seems comfortable, and Alan Sroufe found a troubling trend of teachers treating securely attached kids in age-appropriate ways, but infantilize the ambivalent kids, and being controlling and angry with avoidant ones: “Whenever I see a teacher who looks as if she wants to pick a kid up by the shoulders and stuff him in the trash, I know that kid had an avoidant attachment history.” However, when teachers were instructed to instead seek out ways to be close to a more avoidant child “he gradually changed his behavior and formed a close bond with them.” Noticing how we intuitively react to people can be useful to change harmful dynamics.
In 1997 Patricia Crittenden, who studied under Ainsworth, developed the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (DMM). She argues that attachment isn’t a “style,” but a flexible self-protective strategy, and she views disorganized as more of a combination of dismissive and preoccupied tendencies than a separate category. Karlen Lyons-Ruth, in 1999, wrote about the need to help parents and teachers to help kids develop secure, flexible, and coherent internal working models by being receptive to the whole range of children’s experience, initiating efforts at repair when relationships are disrupted, scaffolding emerging ability to articulate experiences, and being willing to engage with the child, set limits, and challenge them with age appropriate expectations.
Wallin highlights at length Peter Fonagy’s work on the intersubjective relationship of attachment that focuses on the importance of kids being able to reflect on their inner experiences from interactions with others in order to establish a core self. Overreacting and underreacting caregivers can get in the way of this. On top of this, we have neurobiologists, like Allan Schore and Daniel Siegel discuss it all with reference to the autonomic nervous system. In the first year of life, it’s the emotional right-brain that develops first, shaped by social and emotional experience, and requires an attentive caregiver to help regulate it (apparently, unless you’re left handed). Rupture in relationships is very common, so ongoing repair is key. Wallin writes,
"We grow not only through experience of ‘fit’ but also through experiences of separateness and difference … episodes of disruption and repair are a vital part of learning to balance the needs for self-definition and relatedness.”
After taking courses lauding the theory without explicitly explaining what to do with it, Wallin’s book elucidates the goal of the therapist to be attuned to their client in a way they may not have previously experienced. Somewhere along the way, we need someone who gets us.
The Takeaway
I'm wary of putting people in boxes unless it's for a tool that really benefits us, but there's much to gain from these studies if the categories can be understood relationally instead of personally. That baby that couldn't be soothed by mom might have been fine with another caregiver or on a different day, and mom might have elicited the optimal results from a sibling. People are complex and life is too unpredictable and chaotic for people to be well managed under orderly compartments. Like Han says in Burnout Society, we have an "impoverished attachment, which is characteristic of the increasing fragmentation and atomization of life in society." We definitely need to see each other more.
Even if the science isn’t hard and fast and needs to be understood more generally, at its best the theory counsels all caregivers to be more receptive with children, noticing their cues and responding to them, falling in the middle ground between directing and neglecting them, in order to develop a secure foundation. It suggests to all of us to show we’re listening to one another in order to further develop or repair interpersonal dynamics. Unfortunately, at its worst, when the intention and outcome is misunderstood, it can lead to pathologizing one another around a perceived norm of the idealized “secure person” and blaming our moms for any struggles we have in current relationships. Parenting is hard, and relationships are hard, and I think many want the theory to improve our chances out there. We like labels to help make sense of ourselves and others. They feel so certain, and it can feel so validating to recognize ourselves in a description — to feel seen, but sometimes labels can be more of a distraction than a solution.
It might feel like nothing revolutionary, but we can see how necessary it was to try to prove that kids need warm, reflective attention from caregivers, that parents should aim to create a secure base and safe haven for children, paying attention to them and responding to them without being at them too much, yet while challenging them with age-appropriate demands. Now it feels obvious to say, but a solid, positive relationship beyond childhood can change how we relate to people. Any longterm relationship where one person can effectively keep their shit together (stay regulated), and mirror back the experience of the other in a way that helps them feel understood and valuable can affect how we function in the world. I think that’s true for most of us, at least. A lot of this feels like common sense, but maybe that’s because we’ve been immersed in the development of this path for a century. It could have gone the other way! And it wouldn’t hurt to help parents and teachers understand it all further.
For caregivers, how much you pick up your kids might not make or break them, but paying attention to their signals can definitely benefit them. Stay away from the extremes of feeding newborns solids and of performing perfect attentive reflection, and don’t forget to enjoy your little ones. For teachers or therapists or any other helpers, responding like a person with a range of emotional reactions to mirror and mark other people’s feelings without being reactive or stoically detached, seems key to kindle a burgeoning self-identity. We can notice our reaction to certain types of people who might provoke more coddling or irritation in us and aim to temper our response. And in romance, like the workshops say, notice any patterns of distancing or clinging that have become a problem and try doing less of what isn’t working.
Overall, we will make mistakes, and they can be repaired.
One thing I didn’t find in scouring all these resources, however, is advice for parents, teachers and kids on the autism spectrum who might not present or receive this important mirroring effectively and whether that has any bearing on what might look like avoidant behaviours. Attachment theory opens a whole other can of worms around the minimal level of overt emotional response and eye contact required for adequate attunement. What is good enough?
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