Becoming attached: from Childhood to Adolescence

All grown-ups were once children…but only few of them remember it” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Attachment theory and intergenerational transmission of secure and insecure attachment

We’re all born as helpless little creatures who depend fully on our caregivers. Human infants are vulnerable beings who rely on others to keep them fed, safe and comforted.

Five decades of research show that our earliest emotional bonds with the person most responsible for our well-being can directly affect the nature of our future relationships. Babies whose caregivers can regularly be relied on for comfort and devoted attention tend to have more stable relationships later on. Infants whose caregivers are less attentive are more likely to have more difficulty forming healthy relationships as adults.

Attachment theory is one lens we can use to better understand who we are and why we behave the way we do with the people we love.

The most famous study comes from a 1969 experiment called the Strange Situation, which gave rise to the four styles of attachment we know today. In the study, babies and their birthing parent played in a room together. The parent left and then returned a few minutes later. The baby’s reaction was then monitored.

From that study, the four attachment styles?were identified:

Secure attachment: One group of infants protested or cried on separation, but when the mother returned, they greeted her with pleasure, frequently stretching out their arms to be picked up and molding to her body. They were relatively easy to console. Ainsworth labeled this group “securely attached”.

Anxious attachment: One group of anxious babies, called “ambivalent”, tended to be clingy from the beginning and afraid to explore the room on their own. They became terribly anxious and agitated upon separation, often crying profusely. An ambivalent baby typically sought contact with his mother when she returned, but simultaneously arched away from her angrily, resisting all efforts to be soothed.

Avoidant attachment: The second group, called “avoidant”, gave the impression of independence. They explored the new environment without using their mothers as a base, and they didn’t turn around to be certain of their mothers’ presence, as those labeled securely attached did. When the mother left, the avoidant infant didn’t seem affected. And on her return, he snubbed or avoided her.

Disorganized attachment: Babies had more erratic or incoherent reactions to their parent leaving or returning, such as hitting their heads on the ground or “freezing up.”

The baby’s reaction to their parent’s departure and return says a lot about how the baby is used to their caregiver attending to their needs. And those experiences as youngsters are likely to affect the way they relate to others in their adult lives.

In succeeding studies attachment researchers found that without intervention or changes in family circumstances, attachment patterns formed in infancy persist. At age two, insecurely attached children tend to lack self reliance and show little enthusiasm for problem solving. At three and a half to five years, according to their teachers, they are often problems kids, with poor peer relations and little resilience. At six, they tend to display hopelessness in response in imagined separations. Reliable, statistically verifiable information like this-about what infants need in order to feel secure and how they are likely to feel and behave in later years if they don’t get it-had never before been available.

Parents, too, were examined. Mary Main, a former student of Ainsworth’s and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the way parents remember and organize their own childhood experiences is a powerful predictor of which attachment group their children will fall into. This was the first research bolt to show intergenerational transmission of secure and insecure attachment in order to distinguish between adults who have retained the negative legacy of their childhood and those who have worked through it. your attachment style has a big impact on the attachment you’ll form with your own children.

If you interview a birth parent and determine their attachment style, you’ll have a good sense of how their infant will attach to them. We raise our children the way that we best know to relate to people, so your attachment style can easily be passed down and repeated over generations.

They Are Leaning Out for Love

?If attachment theory is correct, the insecurely attached child has developed a strategy of dealing with his mother’s unavailability or inconsistency. The ambivalent child is desperately trying to influence her. He is hooked by the fact that she does indeed come through on occasion. He picks up that she will respond sometimes perhaps out of guilt-if he pleads and makes a big enough fuss. And so he is constantly trying to hold on her or to punish her for being unavailable. He is widely addicted to her and to his efforts to make her change.

The avoidant child takes the opposite tack. He becomes angry and distant. His pleas for attention have been painfully rejected, and reaching out stems impossible. The child seems to say, “Who needs you-I can do it on my own!” Indeed, some parents unwittingly promote such grandiosity in the child. If the mother can convince herself that her child is vastly superior to other children, she has an excuse for her lack of nurturing attention: This kid is special, he barely needs me, he’s been doing his own thing practically since she was born.

In such cases the mother’s lack of nurturance likely has its own tragic reasons (often originating in the neglect that she experience), when she herself was young. Needs and longings that she has long repressed make her angry, depressed, or disgusted when she sees them in the child.

Meanwhile, if she, too, is somewhat grandiose, the idea of superior kid, who has no needs, will reinforce her own sense of superiority. This style of nonrelatedness can thus pass down through the generations, along with the values that conveniently support it (“Our family believes in independence; we’re not namby-pambies”).

Insecurely attached children are believed to be relatively open to change throughout their early years. Avoidant children, for example, will seek attachments with teachers and other adults, and if they are lucky, they will find a special person who will provide them with an alternative model of relatedness. Recent research has shown that if a child is securely attached to his father (or to another secondary caregiver), that will be the greatest help in overcoming an insecure attachment to his mother. Even if it’s only an aunt the child sees occasionally, the knowledge that she cares will keep a different quality of relatedness alive in him. Studies of resiliency indicate that a child’s having had such a person in his life can make an enormous difference in his ability to believe in himself and overcome adversity.

But the insecurely attached youngster often has difficulty finding such an alternate attachment figure, because the strategies he has adopted for getting along in the world tend to alienate him from the very people who might otherwise be able to help. The behavior of the insecurely attached child, all puffed up or easily deflated-often tries tire patience of peers and adults alike. It elicits reactions that repeatedly reconfirm the child’s distorted view of the world. People will never love me, they treat me like an irritation- they don’t trust me, and so on.

Even the mother who has sought therapy, who has found a stable mate, who has overcome distracting financial problems- who is now able to be more nurturant-may have a hard time reaching the child who has adopted such survival strategies. She may find it hard, for example, to persuade him to give up his angry estrangement and be open to receiving love from her again; or to let go the clinginess, the guilt, and the power of struggles, and trust that she has changed, that she will not neglect him this time, that he can let her be a separate person and she will still be there for his needs. Getting such a message across requires the patience and consistency to persist until the child builds up a new set of expectations, or, if you will, a revised internal working model.

Parents of insecurely attached children consistently misinterpret their behavior. Parents often think these anxiously attached kids don’t love them. They think the kid is rejecting them. The mother of ambivalent kids thinks: “He doesn’t like me” and so forth.

Ideally, insecurely attached children need to be reached by adolescence, because it is in childhood that change is the most easily accomplished without therapeutic intervention, when a steadfast parent or an available reach, can turn the child around.

Main began by examining the parents of securely and anxiously attached children to see what correlations she could find. She used a sample of mothers and fathers of six-year-olds whose attachments had been assessed ac twelve or eighteen months. In the course of a cleverly devised and very demanding sixty to ninety minute interview, which seems to evoke in adults some of the same feelings that the Strange Situation evokes in infants, she asked the parents to describe their childhoods and their important relationships. She later analyzed the interview transcripts (or variations in the ways they responded. Four patterns emerged.

One group, which Main labeled “autonomous,” easily remembered early experiences with their parents and clearly saw them as telling. They seemed self-reliant, objective, and able to incorporate painful memories into their discussion. Main was confident that these adults either had had secure attachments as children or had somehow been able to rework insecurely models in order to achieve a more balanced and realistic view of what it means to relate to others. To the extent that their childhood experience was bad. They were able to acknowledge it and had insights about its effects. In some cases they could understand and forgive their parents. Their children were for the most part securely attached.

?? A second group, which Main described as “dismissive of early attachments,” tended to be indifferent to their deepest feelings about relationships. They remembered little of the childhood bonds and offered idealized portraits of their parents. “hen probed, however, dray recalled incidents that contradicted this perfection, with details chat suggested parental neglect or rejection. These detached adults typically presented themselves as strong and independent, but they were in many ways reminiscent of avoidant children, still unable to (ace the reality of their early disappointments and hurt. The majority of their children showed an avoidant attachment pattern.

?? The third group, which Main labeled “preoccupied with early attachments,” came across as somewhat confused and incoherent about their relational past. During the interview they tended to became flooded with intense negative memories, which brought forth feelings of anger and dependency chat they could not easily manage. The childhood struggle with their parents, and their ongoing efforts to please them, seemed palpably present. Their children tended to display an ambivalent attachment pattern.

?? A fourth group of adults corresponds fairly consistently with the fourth “disorganized”-group of children. Adults in the fourth category are typically found to be suffering from unresolved childhood traumas, such as physical abuse or the loss of a parent.

?? Main has found that her assessment of adults corresponds to the attachment classification of their children 76 percent of the time. Another study has found a match-up of 85 percent. The work of Main and her students on the transmission of attachment patterns may bring us closer to understanding the process by which our parents became a part of us- It helps explain why we seem to go though life maddeningly constrained to one of four roles mother, father, self with mother, self with father-in our relationships with others.

From childhood to adolescence

Adolescence is the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood that occurs between approximately ages 12 and 19. The physical and psychological changes that take place in adolescence often start earlier, during the preteen or "tween" years: between ages 9 and 12. Adolescence can be a time of both disorientation and discovery. The transitional period can raise questions of independence and identity; as adolescents cultivate their sense of self, they may face difficult choices about academics, friendships, sexuality, gender identity.

They may grapple with insecurities and feelings of being judged. Relationships with family members often take a backseat to peer groups, romantic interests, and appearance, which teens perceive as increasingly important during this time. The transition can naturally lead to anxiety?about physical development, evolving relationships with others, and one's place in the world. Mild anxiety and other challenges are typical.

During middle to late childhood a child's cognitive and social abilities improve, their knowledge base expands, and they become increasingly involved with peers. Parents are expected to grant their children more autonomy. This can be a challenging period for both parents and their teenager.

Adolescent attachment formation is a complex and seemingly critical developmental consideration. While the knowledge base regarding adolescent attachment is modest, several important trends are emerging that have clinical, research, and forensic implications. Most notably, adolescence represents a phase of development in which an individual's range of attachment figures is thought to expand dramatically to include friends and romantic partners. Separation/reunion appears to be a less salient indicator of attachment formation in this population. Rather, the recollections and manner in which the adolescent conceptualizes and speaks about their close attachment relationships appears to have greater relevance when attempting to assess attachment formation in this population. The development of secure versus insecure attachment in adolescence appears multi-factorial and strongly familial and environmentally driven. As would be expected, secure attachment in adolescence is associated with a range of positive individual and social indicators of adjustment while insecure attachment is closely associated with internalizing disorders, externalizing disorders, personality disorders, and social problems. Further, insecure attachment likely impacts an adolescents' ability to benefit from psychotherapeutic support, as issues of trust and a tendency to perceive helping gestures with hostile intent are more likely to invade the therapeutic process. Negative treatment outcomes may be more likely in cases where the treatment provider demonstrates attachment insecurities. At the same time, however, it seems clear that adolescents who demonstrate insecure attachment are frequently in the most desperate need of a positive, safe, close experience with a consistent adult figure.

How can parents stay connected?

As parents, we can no longer keep them by your side and protect them. We no longer can protect them every single day. We have to start to let them go. How do we do that? Why is it so important to their development? Eric Erickson as people develop, they go through many stages of development. During adolescence, children are in a stage of identity vs role confusion: it begins at the age of 12 until 18. During this time, teenagers are trying to identify who they are and are trying to establish their independence. This constant struggle of them trying to become independent yet their parents are trying to keep them protected creates many of the conflicts that parents see in their home with their teenagers.

So what do parents do? How do you protect them, yet let them be independent? And how do you let them start to become and develop their own identity?

If your teenagers starts to fail his class, when you as a parent ask them what’s going on they might start to blame the teacher, external factors…when you’ve noticed they’ve been spending a lot of times with their friends or on social media. The point is, when you speak to them, think about how it was like when you were 15, 16 years old and all of what you felt when you were an adolescent: the struggles you had, the difficulties of finding yourself and what that meant. How would you have wanted the adult in your life to respond to you? It may seem like a great time to start with well, when I was your age…or hey we never had this problem with your older sister. But in that moment, when your child is talking to you, the most important thing is to listen to what they have to say. When you engage into this active listening with them, it encourages them to speak more and tell you more what’s going on with them. As they talk to you, there’s two things that you need to establish:

1)??? What you need to say “I’m here for you”

2)??? The question you need to ask “What can I do to help?”

As you grow alongside your adolescent, you are no longer going to be a leadership of your child but create a partnership with your child. When you tell your child “I’m here for you” it starts creating that partnership with your child. And when you say “What can I do to help?” It encourages them to pause and think about what they need. It starts creating independence and it starts creating that collaboration with your child.

There’s also a lot of education that can be done. When they were a child, you taught them a lot of things: how to feed themselves, dress themselves, ride a bike, how to be safe when they cross the street. When they grow older. They still need a lot of teaching, even though they fight you on it: that’s the paradox of dealing with adolescents: they rebel against the boundaries that they need to feel emotionally safe. They still need to be taught how to manage their time when they’re learning, they still need to learn how to manage their money when they get a new job, how to drive, and how to care for themselves when they engage into new relationships.

It’s important as they grow that you keep parenting, loving and caring for that child but in a different way. Adolescence is hard…it’s hard on the kids, hard on the parents but if you remember to stay connected you teach them one of the most valuable lesson in life: that relationships are difficult at times, that we hurt and we get hurt as well but that it's possible to repair the relationship with the ones we love because we, as human beings, can be imperfect and yet still deeply connected.

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