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Assessing Attachment...
"Peek-boo," he says.
"Peekaboo," his father answers, spreading one big hand in front of his face and trying to get breakfast ready with the other.
"Peeka-peeka-peeka-peeka," he chants, beaming with delight.
"Peekaboo, I see you. There's my boy!"
By the time children are two, it seems easier to judge whether they are securely attached to their caregivers. You can see it in smiles that light up their eyes, in playful exchanges that celebrate a history of loving care. But as researchers seek to elaborate the role of attachment in early brain development, they must be more systematic in their approach. They need a theoretical framework that can help them explore what attachment means, how it comes about, and how it can be measured. The challenge is to bring hard science to bear on a necessarily "soft" concept.
An infant's physiology and behavior are regulated from the start by the moment-to-moment give and take between child and caregiver. Young children benefit when caregivers are able to read and respond to the signals they send. Neuroscientists can now detect the effects of a caregiver's warm, responsive care - or its absence - on the brain's biochemistry and architecture.
Researchers are confirming that attachment is a two-way process. This view has not always held sway. Existing scholarship on parent-child attachment springs largely from the work of John Bowlby, whose emphasis on attachment as a crucial component of early development has been immensely influential over several decades. Bowlby observed numerous babies as they interacted with their mothers. He described a control system in which babies, beginning at about six months of age, use a range of behaviors (such as smiling, babbling, crying, or visual tracking) to draw a caregiver's attention or protest separation.
In recent years, researchers have extended (and in some cases, challenged) Bowlby's theories and methods. They generally agree that babies play an active role in forming attachments, but they tend to place more weight on the regulatory role of a caregiver's sensory characteristics and behaviors.
In the seventies, Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues showed that mother-child pairs differ in the quality and intensity of their attachment, and that these variations can be measured. Ainsworth devised innovative strategies for observing children, mothers, and strangers relate in a series of brief, highly structured interactions, and then gauging and classifying different types of attachment. She identified three types of children: avoidant/insecurely attached; ambivalent/insecurely attached; and securely attached.
Today, researchers tend to assess attachment with methods that require more extended, in-depth observation of children and caregivers in more natural settings. For example, the Attachment Behavior Q-Set, developed by Everett Waters and Kathleen E. Deane, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, presents an observer with a set of cards, each containing a simple statement about a specific interaction or behavior. A card might read, for example, "When child finds something new to play with, he carries it to mother . . ." After several hours, the observer sorts the cards into piles that range from "most characteristic" of the child's behavior to "least characteristic."
The Q-Set method identifies three kinds of relationships that refine Ainsorth's typology. A child with a secure attachment exhibits specific behaviors that reflect a trusting relationship with the caregiver. A child with an anxious/resistant attachment is not comforted by the caregiver. When picked up, for example, she may resist by arching her back, biting, screaming, or whining. When a child has an anxious/avoidant attachment, she tends to behave as if the caregiver were not in the room.
Many intervention programs include home visitation, and visitors need tools that can ehlp them assess, as objectively as possible, child-caregiver attachment. Carollee Howes of the University of California at Los Angeles has developed assessment tools for use in the Children First program, including an Adult Attachment Interview and an Adult Involvement Scale.
Intensive research into the neurobiology of attachment is now underway. Efforts to understand and measure attachment should benefit greatly from collaboration among researchers in diverse disciplines-including neuroscientists, child development experts, psychologists, and anthropologists. Collaboration should lead to new insights into children's attachments with fathers, grandparents, child care providers, and other caregivers. In addition, it promises to shed light on how attachments are formed and expressed in different cultures.
Rethinking the Brain: New Insights into Early Development, Copyright 1997, Families and Work Institute
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