Not exact matches
The studies reported in Infants in Institutions» make it clear that simply providing good physical care without opportunities
for strong emotional
attachments to
meaningful adults permanently cripples the child in his ability to establish relationships of intimacy and trust.
Regarding your point about acknowledging that
for many people, living single is a
meaningful, productive, healthy experience, filled with secure
attachments to the important people in their lives - we did point out (more than once) that single people have just as many secure
attachments as coupled people, and the same overall
attachment profiles as coupled people (this was also part of our hypothesis).
Still, they never seriously entertained the possibility that their original model was wrong, and that perhaps
for many people, living single is a
meaningful, productive, healthy experience, filled with secure
attachments to the important people in their lives.
Equally, strong emotional
attachment to a worthless project, or a project which does not have a care
for others, will not make such activities
meaningful.
Considerable evidence now exists (
for a review, see Lamb, 1997a) that documents that most infants form
meaningful attachments to both of their parents at roughly the same age (b to 7 months).
Infants also form «
meaningful attachments» to their siblings, grandparents, and others who might care
for them as well.
Although it is an entirely normal behavior and a beautiful sign of a
meaningful attachment, separation anxiety can be exquisitely unsettling
for us all.
The impact of
attachment in terms of biology and neurobiology has also been documented in recent studies.7, 18
For example, it is through
attachments relationships, that young children first learn to link emotions to external events in a linguistically
meaningful manner.
For example,
Attachment theory, developed by John Bowlby (Bowlby 1983), focuses on the close, intimate, emotionally
meaningful relationship that develops between infants and their mothers or primary caregivers.