Family and Parenting 3-Book Bundle. Michael Reist
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Their shell-shocked faces neatly encapsulated the horrors that had plagued Europe for over half a decade, and the World Health Organization (WHO) was desperate to help them in any way it could. But building and staffing orphanages wasn’t enough. The WHO strove to correct not just the physical and financial hardships faced by orphans, but the psychological ones as well. They wanted to understand the effects of such profound loss on the human mind in order to better help those who suffered through it. For this they turned to the renowned psychiatrist John Bowlby.
Bowlby was the perfect candidate. An award-winning and well-educated scholar, he had experience working with maladapted and delinquent children and an avowed passion for helping disadvantaged young people. The WHO asked him to write a pamphlet on the psychology of orphans, how the loss of both parents affects children’s mental and emotional development. Bowlby accepted, and the task so captivated him that he made studying children the basis of the rest of career. Attachment theory was an extension of his original work, drawing inspiration from psychology, biology, and ethology in an attempt to explain how and why children bond with their early caregivers. Though received with some reluctance by the academic community of the day, attachment theory ultimately became the go-to model for exploring early child development.
Dr. Mary Ainsworth, Bowlby’s star pupil, reinforced his theory, amending to it various tools and strategies designed to measure and categorize the children it sought to study. Ainsworth’s research begat two intelligent and ambitious disciples: Patricia Crittenden and Mary Main. Crittenden and Main both believed strongly in the basic tenets of attachment theory, and both used the new science as a diving bell with which they plumbed the murky and shifting depths of infant psychology. It is what they found down there — or rather, how they chose to interpret it — that caused a rift to form between them.
Severed Bonds
Do you remember Sophie from the beginning of this book? She wasn’t an only child. She had a sister named Sandra and a brother named Darren, both younger than her. Though their traumatic upbringing forged a certain bond between them, the three siblings were never close. They got along fairly well, all things considered, but were all very different people.
For one thing, Sophie and Sandra reacted very differently to their parents’ fighting. Sophie, we know, cowered in her room, drowning out the noise as best she could and doing everything in her power to avoid the situation. Sandra took the opposite approach. She was a heavier sleeper than Sophie, but on nights where the fighting got heated enough to wake her she would scream and cry and beat her fists against the headboard until her parents came running, drawing their attention to her and away from each other. When things calmed down she seemed more or less content, oblivious to the subtler domestic tensions that buzzed discordantly in Sophie’s ears more or less constantly.
Sophie made self-sufficiency and people-pleasing her mantra. Sandra, on the other hand, relied on her parents for everything. She constantly mooched money, demanded attention, and whined whenever she didn’t get her way. Though she demanded constant affection, she herself was not particularly affectionate, treating her parents with a confused jumble of sycophancy, indifference, and disdain.
Unlike Sophie, Sandra didn’t take well to school. She struggled to pay attention in class and spent most of her time daydreaming and doodling. Though not one to act out, Sandra scarcely made an effort and squeaked by with poor grades. By the time she finished high school she was already married to a man four years older than her, and the only job she could find was at Burger King.
Now an adult, Sandra has three children and barely enough money to feed and clothe them. Her husband works at a warehouse loading boxes of frozen food onto trucks. He spends most of his time playing video games, ignoring Sandra pretty much completely. Sandra takes her aggression out on the children. She constantly calls on Sophie for help, but Sophie has her own problems and there’s only so much she can do.
As for Darren, he was still in the womb when Sophie and Sandra’s home life started to crumble. His mother took care of him as best she could, but some days the weight of her life grew much too heavy and she stayed in bed, ignoring his cries and flicking through channels on a small, grainy television. His father convinced himself that Darren wasn’t really his child and he offered the boy nothing but insults and barbed criticism.
At school, Darren was habitually sent to the principal’s office. He picked fights, talked back to teachers, and disrupted classes. Not a month went by where he didn’t face suspension. Twice he was held back a year for failure to complete any of the course material. In seventh grade, he was expelled for stabbing a classmate in the arm with a compass and had to enroll in another school across town. By grade 10 he was expelled again, this time for selling pot. When he was 18, he was squatting in a friend’s downtown apartment.
Darren worked briefly as a stock boy at a grocery store, but mostly he sells drugs — soft stuff like pot and pills. He doesn’t have the connections or the muscle necessary to move crack or heroin, but he doesn’t really mind. That stuff is far more dangerous to work with, and he doesn’t need to earn that much. He crashes on couches, eats fast food, and spends the rest of his cash on booze and cigarettes. He has a child he never sees with a woman who nearly had him arrested for domestic abuse.
A Tale of Two Theories
Attachment theory, as defined by Dr. Mary Ainsworth, divides 12- to 24-month-old babies into three groups based on how they act in relation to their parents — when and how they seek comfort, the affection (or lack thereof) they display when their parents hold or play with them, and the degree to which they are comfortable exploring their environment. To distinguish between groups, Ainsworth represented each one by a letter, giving us attachment types A, B, and C. Each group of babies has developed a different and distinctly recognizable strategy to ensure that their attachment figure (parent) provides them with protection, comfort, and the necessities of life. Without a successful strategy for attachment to a caregiver, babies would be hopelessly alone and vulnerable to all manner of threats — disease, starvation, predators, and exposure to the elements. Attachment is therefore an evolutionary adaptation to ensure survival.
Groups A, B, and C represent three distinct attachment strategies, each comprised of specific behaviours that children adopt in order to cope with and function in the world around them. The strategies derive from infancy but persist over the lifespan and affect behaviour and mental health into adulthood.
Type B children are securely attached. They are comfortable being left alone for short periods but happy to see their parents return. Type A children, called “avoidant,” tend to avoid contact with caregivers. They have come to expect neglect or disinterest on the part of their guardians, often because their early cries for attention have gone unheeded. As a result, they aren’t bothered by spending short periods of time on their own, nor do they seem at all excited to see their parents when they return. This is in direct contrast to Type C or “reactive/ambivalent” children, who fuss and cry upon being left alone for even a moment, but are not consoled by, and often show resentment toward, their parents’ presence. Type C behaviour is often a response to inconsistent or partial neglect — when a parent comes running at the first sound of their child in one instance, but leaves them unattended for hours in another. Type A behaviours, on the other hand, come from consistent neglect. Children whose parents never answer their cries or react indifferently to their presence learn to seek comfort from themselves, developing a fierce inward yearning for self-reliance and emotional numbness to outside caregivers. There is, we believe, another cause of Type A attachment: “Tiger” parenting. The Tiger Mother, a term popularized by Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, emphasizes control, harsh discipline, and a relentless drive for scholastic pursuits in child-rearing. Proponents of Tiger Mothering argue that children lack the capacity for self-motivation needed to achieve their best, and a firm, strict, and unwavering pressure, applied by the parent, is necessary to make children reach their full potential. The parent becomes a kind of crucible, facilitating the high temperatures necessary to smelt a child’s raw components into a strong, successful adult. However, predicating affection purely on scholastic or musical success can create in a child an overwhelming need to please others. Using affection as a reward for good behaviour is essentially a sort of Pavlovian conditioning and leaves children with a fairly tenuous grasp on their self-esteem.