What is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory is a hot topic these days. You can find countless influencers on Instagram and TikTok describing their understanding of it. Unfortunately, many of these folks present a narrow, incomplete, and sometimes flat-out misinformed view of attachment. At times, they even weaponize attachment against people they do not like or with whom they have had traumatic experiences. Nevertheless, they aren’t wrong about the importance of attachment in our lives. Let’s try to clear up some of the misinformation by exploring what attachment is and how it forms in childhood. In another post, we’ll discuss the four primary styles of attachment.
Attachment is a term that describes how we bond with others—how we develop and lean towards or avoid emotional closeness. John Bowlby, who is usually credited with the creation of attachment theory, explains attachment as one of several behavioral systems we evolved to ensure our own survival.
When we’re infants, we can’t yet meet our own needs. In order to survive, we have to develop bonds with our caretakers so that they provide us with food, shelter, and love, meeting our biological and psychological needs. Bowlby recognized that when infants feel fear, distress, or discomfort, perhaps because they are hungry or have a wet diaper or need physical touch, they quickly turn to their parents for support. This can take the form of crying, reaching out, calling for, or crawling and following their parents. If the infant’s parents are able to recognize and meet the need the child is expressing with those behaviors, they can soothe the infant’s distress and calm their nervous systems. Infants don’t have the ability to fully regulate their own emotional states, so they depend on their parents to help them regulate. When parents are able to attune to and respond to their infants’ needs, the foundations for secure attachment develop. If parents are unattuned, insecure attachment starts to develop.
Attachment development continues as infants grow and begin to physically explore their world. Secure attachment develops when parents can act as a safe haven for their children. When children start to venture out and explore, the unfamiliar world may scare them. When this happens, they run back to their parents for soothing and reassurance. If their caretakers can respond supportively, then the child’s nervous system is calmed and they can go back out and continue to explore. When caregivers are able to meet their children’s needs enough of the time, secure attachment develops. On the other hand, if parents are unavailable, dismissive, inconsistent, or frightening in their responses, then insecure attachment is the likely outcome. To learn more about what secure and insecure attachment styles look like and more details about how they develop, take a look at my post The Four Styles of Attachment.
For a great example of how parents’ responses to an infant’s needs affect their emotional state, take a look at a demonstration of Tronick’s Still Face Experiment below: