Family and Parenting 3-Book Bundle. Michael Reist
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the approval of others, creating a person not unlike Sophie: outwardly successful, but inwardly pained.
Type B children are well-adjusted for today’s world, while Type A and Type C children adopt alternate strategies to assure attention from their parents. These strategies are initially adaptive, meaning they improve a child’s ability to form attachment relationships with their caregivers. But as children grow, those once-advantageous behaviours of infancy become trap doors of childhood. These trap doors swing open perilously beneath their feet as they attempt to navigate their widening social and emotional landscape.
For Type A children, this means that indifferent behaviour in infancy can lead to excessive people-pleasing in childhood, promiscuity in the teenage years, and an externally assembled adult self, in which the individual’s entire personality is derived from his or her interactions with others. Externally assembled individuals equate praise with self-worth and criticism with self-hatred. Their self-esteem is as capricious as a flag in the wind, held aloft by the breeze and changing direction with each passing gust or zephyr. For Type C, the path embraces contrasting yet ultimately connected aspects of internalizing and externalizing behaviour, ranging from aggression and passivity in milder forms to sadism and seduction, and finally, in extreme forms, rabid paranoia.
We can see these trends in Sophie, a classic Type A child, and Sandra, a typical Type C. Both are haunted by their past, but each woman’s burden takes a distinct shape. Sandra suffers more overtly, her fractious behaviour making relationships difficult and sabotaging her education, leaving her unequipped to function in society. Ostensibly, Sophie did much better. Type A individuals are often outwardly successful people, as their need to please others and thirst for self-sufficiency and approval find natural outlets in career-building. But their drive comes at a price. Type A people find it extremely difficult to trust others, yet at the same time desperately seek their positive regard. We saw as much in Sophie, whose successful teaching career masked the many psychological issues festering beneath the surface: her obsessive people-pleasing, her postpartum depression, and her recurring bouts of crippling anxiety. A harsh word from a student or colleague would slice her to the bone.
Mind you, not every Type A or Type C child will stray to the corrosive fringes of this continuum. Neither Sophie nor Sandra is doomed to a life of rabid paranoia; with professional help and family support, they may even grow more secure over time. Patricia Crittenden’s Dynamic Maturation Model of Attachment eschews rigid boundaries of “normal” and “abnormal.” A person can veer a little to either side their whole lives and still be okay. Nor will their attachment strategy necessarily remain in any one place on the continuum. No developmental authority stamps “Type A” or “Type B” onto one’s baby-self psyche, neatly categorizing the individual for life. Crittenden’s model emphasizes fluidity and movement, as seen in its popular depiction as a wheel. Type B balanced comfortably at the top, a buffer on either side. Proceeding clockwise brings you farther into reactive/ambivalent Type C territory, while moving counter clockwise elicits more and more avoidant Type A behaviour. Go too far in either direction and you wind up at the bottom of the wheel, in the dark and vicious mires of psychopathy.
Mary Main, on the other hand, takes a more rigidly defined, categorical approach to attachment theory. In place of Crittenden’s fluid extremes, she created a separate attachment category altogether, called disorganized, or Type D. Disorganized attachment is, somewhat paradoxically, the strategy of having no strategy at all. According to Main, it occurs when children perceive their parents as aggressive or frightening figures, but also as their only source of comfort and security. The schism produced by these conflicting perceptions breeds confusion, anxiety, and, ultimately, what appears to be disorganized attachment.
Crittenden and Main would probably diagnose Sophie and Sandra the same way, but would butt heads over how to classify Darren. Main would consider him an obvious Type D, while Crittenden would place him somewhere far along the Type C end of the behavioural spectrum.
This might seem like a fairly small point of contention, but it has placed a divide not just between the two theories, but between their major proponents. Crittenden’s Dynamic Maturation Model has been castigated as an unfounded corruption of Ainsworth’s original theory, while Main’s disorganized attachment has been described as a lazy catch-all for behaviours that, ultimately, adhere to either Type A or Type C strategies. And that, really, is the crux of the matter. According to the Dynamic Maturational Model, all attachment behaviour is “organized,” in that children invariably interact with their caregivers in a manner they deem most conducive to their survival. These strategies, though damaging in the long run, are not mere aberrations. They exist for a reason. Even in infancy, children know to look out for number one.
Now any parent whose young child has managed to lay their hands on a pair of scissors, or toddled gleefully toward a busy road, or reached idly for the handle of a pot of boiling water will regard this claim with understandable incredulity. Children, especially young ones, are walking maelstroms of calamity. However, this behaviour stems not from a deliberately foolhardy or self-destructive impulse, but from incomplete neural development. Their little brains simply haven’t matured enough to properly assess risk. Yet even infants know enough to know they’re helpless, and that their survival depends wholly on their ability to charm the enormous, benevolent, and deeply strange creatures that have thus far deigned to feed and clothe and shelter them. Human babies can’t rely on their wits or speed or protective poisons or appendages; they lack any conventional means of self-defence. Their only chance of surviving those tumultuous early years is to forge a bond with their caregivers strong enough to keep them out of harm’s way.
Children will adopt whatever behaviour will best serve them in those first few years where they have only the tiniest modicum of control over their lives, even if it causes innumerable problems for them down the road. This idea is the underpinning principle of the Dynamic Maturational Model. In Patricia Crittenden’s view, all attachment behaviour is adaptive — while an infant may be classified as insecure in the DMM, that child has adapted perfectly to its environment. Mary Main, on the other hand, believes that children do sometimes get it wrong, and in situations of extreme and unrelenting stress, they may behave in a reckless, irrational, and detrimental way.
Which side do we take in this particular feud? As our stance on nature versus nurture should indicate, we aren’t much for “sides.” Our opinion is that, as is often the case when two theories are presented and neither can be easily discredited through observation or analysis, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Which does not mean both Crittenden and Main are half wrong — both of their views may be correct. They would simply, in that case, be incomplete. Like two artists standing on either side of an object, each puts metaphorical brush to canvas and reproduces with skilled strokes the object’s dimensions, colour, texture, and features as they see them. Both artists paint a stunning picture, reproducing the object perfectly while completely ignoring any aspect of its opposite side. Their paintings may look entirely different, but the object displayed on either canvas is one and the same.
So, in short, we take neither side. We see no practical reason why we should have to. Despite their disagreements, Crittenden’s and Main’s theories are not all that different from one another. Both emphasize the influence of early child behaviour on adult development; by extension, both focus almost exclusively on nurture. Their reasons for doing so are not unfounded — both theories are backed by extensive research showing strong correlations between parenting style and child attachment behaviour. Among the general population, roughly 15 percent of children display some characteristics of disorganized attachment (or what Crittenden would refer to as extreme Type A or C attachment); among maltreated children, that number is 80 percent. Clearly parents have an enormous influence over how their children learn to deal with other human beings — after all, they are the ones on whom children first hone their social skills. However, a small but growing body of research suggests that, though they may sometimes have to shout to be heard, genes still manage to get their say.
The Return of the 7-Repeat
Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg turned their attention once again to the DRD4 7-repeat allele, although this time they were interested in