Strange Situation, page 23
In one epistolary exchange between Lamb and Ainsworth from 1974, the by-then-ex-student has requested feedback on his research on fathers in the Strange Situation, which he believed showed that babies exhibited no preference for mothers or fathers. In the letter he received in response, Mary responds not so much to his results as to his process, giving the young scholar a bit of a lashing for being impetuous and careless. She takes him to task for lacking nuance in his reading of both Bowlby and her, being dead wrong about things she has written, as well in the way he interprets his own data. However, being a secure/autonomous who always values attachment, Ainsworth ends her seven-page typed, single-spaced takedown by saying, “Forgive the avuncular (or perhaps it is maternal) tone of all of this…With my very best wishes to you and Jamie [presumably Lamb’s partner at the time].”
Ainsworth’s beefs with Lamb’s paper are of course deeply personal. And yet, her critique is significant in that it offers a clear explanation of her understanding of the role of fathers, a position that—almost fifty years and tens of thousands of studies later—still holds true, not just for the role of fathers in attachment, but about critiques of attachment theory on the whole. This letter could be sent to many a critic today.
The introduction rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed to me belligerent and contentious. It gives the impression that you are wholly critical of attachment theory and attachment research to date, whereas I know full well that you intend only to take issue with specific points in attachment theory that you either feel have been erroneous (or perhaps overstated) while at the same time you are generally working with the same framework.
If you read Bowlby really carefully it should prove a salutary lesson—as indeed it has to me. You should note…that he tends to be modest, hypothetical, reasoned, and tentative in most of his statements and arguments…
I think you have overstated the “claim” for fathers. I think your findings speak for themselves. I don’t think you have to denigrate people who have (often for purely practical reasons) focused on mothers in order to point out that fathers have been neglected. Often an understatement is more effective than an overstatement…
Now the next thing I would like to discuss is the notion of “monotropy,” which you correctly interpret as the notion that it implies that one figure usually the mother is the principal (and/or primary) attachment figure, rather than that this figure is the sole attachment figure…Time and time again in clinical studies one runs across evidence that in the “crunch” one attachment figure (nearly always the mother figure) is the figure the child most wants…
Personally, as a daughter who found her father more nurturant (as well as more interesting to interact with) than her mother, I can acknowledge that in some cases it might be the father rather than the mother who is wanted even in a “crunch.” But evidence to date, even though of an anecdotal sort, suggests that for most babies and young children it is the mother—not because she is the natural mother, but because she has been the principal caregiver…
If you read Infancy in Uganda carefully, you will see that I certainly drew attention to babies’ attachment to fathers. I expressed amazement that fathers, who having been absent for months, could return home and so quickly establish an attachment relationship…
Now let us suppose! Suppose that a baby had no principal caregiver—no mother figure. Could a father, returning home after a long absence, establish within a few days an attachment relationship that was the first that a baby had experienced? I don’t really know the answer to that. However, my hypothesis is that a baby first establishes an attachment relationship with the figure with whom he has the most and the most satisfactory interaction.
After several pages of line-by-line, very concrete critique, Mary writes:
Finally, please don’t think I am knocking this research project, or that I am opposing research on fathers. Research on fathers is long overdue, and I have freely said so over the years.
And then she can’t help herself:
Incidentally, you skipped a step if you want to do naturalistic research. You insisted that both parents be present the whole time, and of course that is one way of getting at it differentially. But, strictly speaking you should visit at all kinds of times when father is home, and tell the family to go about their usual way of doing things.
Michael Lamb went on to become a celebrated scholar and important advocate for children and families, moving the dial on fathers in deep and subtle ways; I’m sure Mary would approve. Thanks to Lamb, now a professor of psychology at Cambridge University, today research on fathers demonstrates that, in addition to the primary caregiving/attachment figure role of fathers in some families, dads have a significant role to play in children’s lives—and indeed, much attention has been given to play itself. While mothers often put in more playtime with babies in absolute terms (because of the higher “total amount of care” they put in, as Mary expressed it) “particularly boisterous, stimulating, emotionally arousing play” between fathers and children is thought to “increase fathers’ influence more than would be expected based on the amount of time they spend with their children.”
In the first chapter of the fifth edition of Lamb’s anthology The Role of the Father in Child Development, he writes, “First, fathers and mothers seem to influence their children in similar rather than dissimilar ways. Contrary to the expectations of many developmental psychologists, the differences between mothers and fathers appear much less important than the similarities.” As should be expected, “parental warmth, nurturance, and closeness are associated with positive child outcomes regardless of whether the parent involved is a mother or father. The important dimensions of parental influence are those that have to do with parental characteristics rather than gender-related characteristics.” With that said, Lamb states the heart of the matter, the ultimate Ainsworthian takeaway: “The characteristics of individual fathers—such as their masculinity, intellect, and even their warmth—are much less important, formatively speaking, than are the characteristics of the relationships that they have established with their children” [italics mine].
As far as actual studies of attachment and the Strange Situation with fathers are concerned, one meta-analysis of the research indicates that the link between quality of paternal care and attachment security, “though robust, is clearly smaller than that generally found for mothers,” but the source of this disparity is unclear. Some have suggested that because of the way the Strange Situation is set up, it favors a certain type of care, one that privileges maternal comfort over paternal activation. An alternative procedure was even developed: the Risky Situation, by researchers Daniel Paquette and Marc Bigras. They found:
By having the same parent–child dyads participate in the Strange Situation (SS) and in the RS, researchers were able to demonstrate that the RS appears to evoke specific relationship patterns. Moreover, parental stimulation of risk-taking, the central construct of the RS, was shown to play a significant role after controlling for child characteristics (sex and temperament). These results suggested that the RS has the potential to make a significant contribution to the study of the human relationship.
Other recent studies delving into the specifics of how fathers and children develop their attachments have shown that, for instance, fathers’ pathways to attachment security—play and caregiving—were mitigated by something as simple as whether or not it was a weekend or a workday. And another tracked the testosterone (T) in fathers in the Strange Situation. The researchers found that, while men’s T did decline more when their children were distressed in the Strange Situation than when faced with a “teaching task,” which suggests that T is linked with caretaking, this physiological response occurred within a host of other factors, such as the father’s empathy score, his marital feelings, and his infant’s reactivity. The authors also found that “fathers of daughters were more sensitively engaged than fathers of sons, consistent with previous research comparing fathers’ sensitivity during interactions with toddler girls and boys.”
What a tangled web of biological interdependence we weave.
And while the research on attachment has not yet ventured into the variety of family constellations people create today—two fathers, two mothers, an extended mix of bio and adopted parents—study after study assessing the outcomes of children raised in gay and lesbian families have come to the same conclusion: these children are thriving, sometimes even more than children from hetero families. So even though we don’t have the attachment studies to prove it, I think it’s fair to extrapolate that sexuality and family structure are in no way factors in attachment.
The same goes for the cross-cultural assessment of attachment. While different cultures skew differently in terms of the patterns that are likely to appear (for instance, in some African cultures, the avoidant patterns appear to be nonexistent), and attachment behaviors themselves are context-specific (for instance, babies and parents in Uganda don’t kiss like Westerners do), the verdict is indeed in: attachment is real, and it is influenced by sensitive parenting, which occurs within an infinitely complex web of culturally specific causes and conditions.
What’s more, attachment patterns in individuals have been found to affect our conditions, for instance, our health, the onset of puberty, and our brains—big-time. This line of ever-refining is still a matter of exploring the ways our environment (how we were raised, aka “nurture”) affects the individual’s body and mind (our nature). The recent documentary Three Identical Strangers brilliantly explored this question through the harrowing story of identical triplets separated at birth by asking us to choose a side: Why were these triplets who spent their lives apart so much alike? Was it a matter of nature or nurture? In the end, we see that in some important ways they weren’t so much alike after all, and we were asking the wrong question all along.
Interestingly, this film draws our attention to the importance of a child’s relationships with his or her parents in their development. Though the filmmakers don’t use the word “attachment,” we can understand it that way; I certainly did! And, even better, the focus in this film was on the relationship between three sons and their adoptive fathers. The mothers were in the background.
NATURE/NURTURE IS NOT A THING: ATTACHMENT AND EPIGENETICS
Some of the most stunning research to come out of the twenty-first century has been in the field of epigenetics, the study of the role the environment plays on our genes. Even the most basic reading of epigenetics reveals the fact that nature and nurture are, in fact, not two distinct forces but instead always intersecting. Epigenetics helps us understand attachment ever more deeply.
When Dr. Nadine Burke Harris finished her residency in pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, she wanted to work somewhere where she could really feel like she was making a difference. So when, in 2007, she was recruited by the California Pacific Medical Center to create a clinic in a “high risk” area of San Francisco, a neighborhood called Bayview–Hunter’s Point, she was thrilled. In her book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, she writes about how, as soon as she started her work there, she began to see that “something medical was happening with my patients that I couldn’t quite understand.”
It started with the proliferation of diagnoses of ADHD and asthma, which at first appeared to be pretty typical childhood ailments, but were appearing in large numbers. But it wasn’t long before “day after day I saw infants who were listless and had strange rashes. I saw kindergartners whose hair was falling out…Kids just entering middle school had depression.” And in some cases, as with her young seven-year-old patient Diego, kids had stopped growing. When Diego’s mom brought him to Dr. Burke Harris, he had asthma and eczema, was suspected of having ADHD, and was in the fiftieth percentile of height—among four-year-olds.
Burke Harris was struck by the sheer number of serious health concerns her young patients faced, and, at the same time, the violence and harshness they were exposed to. When Burke Harris asked one of her young patients’ mothers if she had noticed any triggers for her asthma (pet dander and cockroaches being the usual suspects), her mother answered, “Well, her asthma does seem to get worse whenever her dad punches a hole in the wall.” And this young girl was not alone.
Burke Harris’s young patients were dealing with a litany of traumas—“parental incarcerations, multiple foster-care placements, suspected physical abuse, documented abuse, and family legacies of mental illness and substance abuse.” Diego, the boy who inspired her book, had been sexually abused when he was four—the same year he stopped growing—a terrible event for the whole family that led to a cascade of unfortunate responses, including his father’s guilty feelings and subsequent abuse of alcohol. Burke Harris writes, “For a long time the possibility of an actual biological link between childhood adversity and damaged health came to me as a question that lingered for only a moment before it was gone.” But then she learned about the ACE study.
ACE is an acronym developed by a team from the Kaiser Permanente group in Southern California. It stands for adverse childhood event. The way an ACE score is tabulated is simple: Ask yourself these questions, on behalf of yourself or your child, and for each yes, you get one point. The total number of yeses is your ACE score.
Prior to your 18th birthday:
Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often…swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you? Or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often…push, grab, slap, or throw something at you? Or ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?
Did an adult or person at least 5 years older than you ever…touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way? Or attempt or actually have oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?
Did you often or very often feel that…no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special? Or your family didn’t look out for each other, feel close to each other, or support each other?
Did you often or very often feel that…you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you? Or your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you or take you to the doctor if you needed it?
Were your parents ever separated or divorced?
Was your mother or stepmother often or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her? Or sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? Or ever repeatedly hit over at least a few minutes or threatened with a gun or knife?
Did you live with anyone who was a problem drinker or alcoholic, or who used street drugs?
Was a household member depressed or mentally ill, or did a household member attempt suicide?
Did a household member go to prison?
One day, the psychotherapist who worked on Burke Harris’s cases with her showed her a well-known 1998 article called “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” Burke Harris writes, “Before he could even shut the door I was halfway through the abstract. I was only partway through the first page when I experienced a jolt of recognition. Here it was. The final puzzle piece…”
Before becoming a physician, Burke Harris earned a degree in public health. She talks about one of the parables in that field, taken from the nineteenth-century cholera epidemic, which was finally traced to a well. This was long before we knew about the presence of germs. For her, the point she took from the story was this: “If one hundred people all drink from the same well and ninety-eight of them develop diarrhea, I can write prescription after prescription for antibiotics, or I can stop and ask, ‘What the hell is in that well?’ ”
In the case of these terrible symptoms appearing in so many of her traumatized families, she started to wonder: What was in the “deepest well”?
What the ACE study found was that, first of all, ACEs are incredibly common. The authors surveyed more than seventeen thousand people—30 percent were people of color, and 70 percent were college-educated. In this population, 67 percent had scored one ACE, and 12.6 percent had four or more. Even more remarkable, the authors found that the higher one’s ACE count, the worse his or her health will be. Specifically, “the more ACEs a child is exposed to, the higher the risk of developing chronic illnesses. In children, exposure to ACEs can increase likelihood of chronic diseases such as asthma. In adults, exposure to ACEs dramatically increases the likelihood of 7 out of 10 leading adult causes of death including heart disease and cancer.” What she was seeing in her exam room was making sense. She came to believe that the underlying condition of many of her patients, including Diego, the toxin to which so many were being exposed, was adversity. They were drinking what is now known as “toxic stress” from the well.
As Burke Harris continued her work with patients, reading, studying, trying to understand everything she could about the way toxic stress was affecting the kids in her practice, she began to notice how common intergenerational toxicity was among her families. A depressed mother gave birth to a child who soon got diagnosed with “failure to thrive,” a medical term that describes the forlorn infants left in orphanages—sad, withdrawn, not growing. ACEs galore. A great-grandmother brought in her granddaughter’s child. His mother was in jail, many in the family struggled with substance abuse, and now the boy, named Tiny, was in trouble at school, acting out.
