For example, if a toddler has a very
strong attachment to his mother because of his age, a court may be reluctant to award substantial visitation time to his father.
A child who weans gradually is able to maintain his
emotional attachment to his mother very easily, rather than needing to cuddle an inanimate object such as a soft toy or blanket.
The emphasis
on attachment to the mother has shifted to an emphasis on the primary caregiver (which may not be the mother) and it is now recognised that children can form multiple attachments.
As a Lactation Consultant, my background and experience (as a mother of three and a Mother Infant Health Care Provider for more than 20 years, and through my past and ongoing education) tends to line up more closely with Sears and Sears, Leidloff, and many others about our being a Constant Contact species
with attachment to mother first, which leads to how we then attach to others.
Results showed that change in mean level of quality of
attachment to mother appeared to be nonlinear for boys, whereas mean level of attachment of adolescent girls to their mothers showed a linear decline.
We also know that the quality of the child's
attachment to the mother does not predict the quality of the child's attachment to the alternative caregiver (Howes and others, 1988).
It was thought that
attachment to the mother occurred because she supplied food and became the object of the infant's attachment through association with feeding and the reduction of other primary needs.
Rutter argues that these problems are not due solely to the lack of
attachment to a mother figure, as Bowlby claimed, but to factors such as the lack of intellectual stimulation and social experiences which attachments normally provide.
Children generally develop healthy, secure
attachments to mothers who competently and regularly respond to the child's needs by, for example, feeding the child when the child cries.
An infant may therefore have a primary
monotropy attachment to its mother, and below her the hierarchy of attachments my include its father, siblings, grandparents, etc..
This hypothesis is an extension of Crockenberg's (1981) finding that the relationship between social support and infants»
attachment to their mothers varied according to the infants» temperament.
Each of these three traditional patterns of attachment are considered to represent organized strategies for dealing with the stress of separation from the parent in a strange environment (Main, 1990),
although attachment to the mother has repeatedly been found to predict less favorable outcomes than does secure attachment in later childhood (see Cassidy and Berlin, 1994, and Main, 1995, for an overview of the foregoing studies).
Research from the University of Minnesota has shown that children age 2 and up who lack
secure attachments to their mothers have higher rushes of cortisol during even mildly stressful events, such as getting a vaccination shot, than do youngsters with strong parental bonds.
In his youth, Warhol was something of a sickly child: he was not popular at school and as a result developed a
strong attachment to his mother, spending long periods in bed, drawing pictures and collecting photos of movie stars.
Many of the babies from the Schaffer and Emerson study had multiple attachments by 10 months old,
including attachments to mothers, fathers, grandparents, siblings and neighbours.