Brain Development. The brain grows rapidly during the first three years of life. Experiences shape how the brain grows. When it is stimulated in positive ways, the brain forms connections related to those experiences. For example, talking, singing, and reading to children help form brain pathways related to language. Attachment affects brain development in two important ways. First, because the child feels safe and cared for, the brain can use its energy to develop pathways crucial for higher level thinking.
Second, by providing a "home base" from which a child can safely explore the world, secure attachment allows the child to have more varied experiences and therefore build more connections in the brain. Attachment to a primary caregiver is the foundation of all future relationships. When there is a secure attachment, you learn how to trust others, how to respond emotionally, and how others will respond to you Bowlby, Video feedback programmes can also be used by specially trained social care professionals to help caregivers improve their interactions with their child.
This involves caregivers being filmed when they are interacting with their child and then watching the recording with a trained practitioner, who gives them feedback and helps them build on their strengths. If parents are struggling with their own issues, it may make it harder for them to bond with their child and provide consistant and responsive care. They may have:. The NSPCC has many services that children and families can be referred to, from supporting parents and carers in taking care of their children to preventing sexual abuse and overcoming abuse.
Browse for more services. Children with attachment issues may have problems expressing or controlling their emotions and forming positive relationships, which might affect their mental health.
If a child or young person needs confidential help and advice you can always direct them to Childline. Calls to are free and children can also contact Childline online.
Children under the age of 12 can be directed to the Childline Kids website. We also have a series of posters and wallet cards you can download for free or you can buy printed versions via our online shop. These can be displayed in your setting to encourage children to contact Childline if they need to talk.
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Search Sign in My learning Self-assessment. You are here: Home » Child health and development » Attachment and child development. Attachment and child development Last updated: 10 Aug What is attachment theory and why is it important? Understanding attachment in the early years Children can form attachments with more than one caregiver, but the bond with the people who have provided close care from early infancy is the most important and enduring Bowlby, 2. HelpGuide uses cookies to improve your experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website.
Privacy Policy. The attachment bond is the emotional connection formed by wordless communication between an infant and you, their parent or primary caretaker. This form of communication affects the way your child develops mentally, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially.
In fact, the strength of this relationship is the main predictor of how well your child will do both in school and in life. The attachment bond is not founded on the quality of your care or parental love, but on the nonverbal emotional communication you develop with your child.
Developing a secure attachment bond between you and your child, and giving your child the best start in life, does not require you to be a perfect parent. In fact, the study found that the critical aspect of the child—primary caretaker relationship is NOT based on quality of care, educational input, or even the bond of love that develops between parent and infant.
Rather, it is based on the quality of the nonverbal communication that takes place between you and your child. In fact, developing your nonverbal communication skills can help improve and deepen your relationships with other people of any age.
As a parent or primary caretaker for your infant, you can follow all the traditional parenting guidelines, provide doting, around-the-clock care for your baby, and yet still not achieve a secure attachment bond.
You can hold, cuddle, and adore your child without creating the kind of attachment that fosters the best development for your child. How is this possible? Importantly, creating a secure attachment bond differs from creating a bond of love. Children need something more than love and caregiving in order for their brains and nervous systems to develop in the best way possible.
Children need to be able to engage in a nonverbal emotional exchange with their primary caretaker in a way that communicates their needs and makes them feel understood, secure, and balanced. The words bond or bonding are commonly used to describe both caretaking and the emotional exchange that forms the attachment process, even though they are very different ways of connecting with your child.
By understanding the developmental milestones related to secure attachment, you can spot symptoms of insecure attachment and take steps to immediately repair them. Obstacles to creating a secure attachment may first appear when your child is an infant. Since infants cannot calm and soothe themselves, they rely on you to do so for them. Even an older child will look to you, the parent, as a source of safety and connection and, ultimately, secure attachment.
The new field of infant mental health, with its emphasis on brain research and the developmental role of parents, provides a clearer understanding of factors that may compromise the secure attachment bond. If either the primary caretaker or the child has a health problem, nonverbal communication between the two may be affected, which in turn can affect the secure attachment bond.
Experience shapes the brain and this is especially true for newborns whose nervous systems are largely undeveloped. Fortunately, as the infant brain is so undeveloped and influenced by experience, a child can overcome any difficulties at birth. It may take a few months, but if the primary caretaker remains calm, focused, understanding, and persistent, a baby will eventually relax enough for the secure attachment process to occur.
Sometimes the circumstances that affect the secure attachment bond are unavoidable, but the child is too young to understand what has happened and why. To a child, it just feels like no one cares and they lose trust in others and the world becomes an unsafe place. If you are overly stressed, depressed, traumatized, or unavailable for whatever reason, you may not have the awareness or sensitivity to provide the positive emotional mirroring your child needs for secure attachment.
Sometimes even a healthy, caring, and responsible caretaker may have trouble understanding and initiating a secure attachment bond with their child. For more than 25 years the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of attachment has been investigated, with a special emphasis on the so-called transmission gap. Although substantial evidence has been found to support this mediational model it still leaves room for complementary mechanisms besides sensitivity because a persistent transmission gap remains visible.
Attachment, the affective bond of infant to parent, plays a pivotal role in the regulation of stress in times of distress, anxiety or illness. Human beings are born with the innate bias to become attached to a protective caregiver. But infants develop different kinds of attachment relationships: some infants become securely attached to their parent, and others find themselves in an insecure attachment relationship. These individual differences are not genetically determined but are rooted in interactions with the social environment during the first few years of life.
Sensitive or insensitive parenting plays a key role in the emergence of secure or insecure attachments, as has been documented in twin studies and experimental intervention studies. In the case of attachment theory, the nurture assumption8 is indeed warranted. Numerous findings confirm the core hypothesis that sensitive parenting causes infant attachment security, although other causes should not be ruled out, and the puzzling transmission gap may require complementary mechanisms besides parental sensitivity, e.
Parents are therefore entitled to receive social support from policy-makers and mental-health workers to do the best job they can in raising their vulnerable children. Sensitive parenting is hard work and does not come naturally to many parents, who have to find their way even if they had quite some positive childhood experiences of their own. It takes a village to raise a child, 19 so parents need to rely on good-quality non-parental care in a larger caregiving network to combine childrearing with other obligations.
From randomized experiments, we may conclude that effective interventions for enhancing sensitive parenting and infant attachment security are now becoming available that use a moderate number of sessions and a clear-cut interactive focus, starting some six months after birth. From an applied attachment perspective, young parents should be given access to preventive support programs that incorporate these evidence-based insights. Updated: September Introduction What is attachment?
Development of attachment Attachment is suggested to develop in four phases. Explaining individual differences in attachment Ainsworth et al. Research Context The basic model of explaining individual differences in attachment relationships assumes that sensitive or insensitive parenting determines infant attachment in- security. Key Research Questions Crucial research questions explore the heritability of attachment, the causal role of sensitive parenting in the development of infant attachment security, and intergenerational transmission of attachment suggesting a transmission gap.
Recent Research Results Concerning the heritability question, at least four twin studies on child-mother attachment security using behavioural genetic modelling have been published.
References Bowlby J. Attachment and loss: Vol.
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