Family and Parenting 3-Book Bundle. Michael Reist

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      Mary Main, on the other hand, takes a more rigidly defined, categorical approach to attachment theory. In place of Crittenden’s fluid extremes, she created a separate attachment category altogether, called disorganized, or Type D. Disorganized attachment is, somewhat paradoxically, the strategy of having no strategy at all. According to Main, it occurs when children perceive their parents as aggressive or frightening figures, but also as their only source of comfort and security. The schism produced by these conflicting perceptions breeds confusion, anxiety, and, ultimately, what appears to be disorganized attachment.

      Crittenden and Main would probably diagnose Sophie and Sandra the same way, but would butt heads over how to classify Darren. Main would consider him an obvious Type D, while Crittenden would place him somewhere far along the Type C end of the behavioural spectrum.

      This might seem like a fairly small point of contention, but it has placed a divide not just between the two theories, but between their major proponents. Crittenden’s Dynamic Maturation Model has been castigated as an unfounded corruption of Ainsworth’s original theory, while Main’s disorganized attachment has been described as a lazy catch-all for behaviours that, ultimately, adhere to either Type A or Type C strategies. And that, really, is the crux of the matter. According to the Dynamic Maturational Model, all attachment behaviour is “organized,” in that children invariably interact with their caregivers in a manner they deem most conducive to their survival. These strategies, though damaging in the long run, are not mere aberrations. They exist for a reason. Even in infancy, children know to look out for number one.

      Now any parent whose young child has managed to lay their hands on a pair of scissors, or toddled gleefully toward a busy road, or reached idly for the handle of a pot of boiling water will regard this claim with understandable incredulity. Children, especially young ones, are walking maelstroms of calamity. However, this behaviour stems not from a deliberately foolhardy or self-destructive impulse, but from incomplete neural development. Their little brains simply haven’t matured enough to properly assess risk. Yet even infants know enough to know they’re helpless, and that their survival depends wholly on their ability to charm the enormous, benevolent, and deeply strange creatures that have thus far deigned to feed and clothe and shelter them. Human babies can’t rely on their wits or speed or protective poisons or appendages; they lack any conventional means of self-defence. Their only chance of surviving those tumultuous early years is to forge a bond with their caregivers strong enough to keep them out of harm’s way.

      Children will adopt whatever behaviour will best serve them in those first few years where they have only the tiniest modicum of control over their lives, even if it causes innumerable problems for them down the road. This idea is the underpinning principle of the Dynamic Maturational Model. In Patricia Crittenden’s view, all attachment behaviour is adaptive — while an infant may be classified as insecure in the DMM, that child has adapted perfectly to its environment. Mary Main, on the other hand, believes that children do sometimes get it wrong, and in situations of extreme and unrelenting stress, they may behave in a reckless, irrational, and detrimental way.

      Which side do we take in this particular feud? As our stance on nature versus nurture should indicate, we aren’t much for “sides.” Our opinion is that, as is often the case when two theories are presented and neither can be easily discredited through observation or analysis, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Which does not mean both Crittenden and Main are half wrong — both of their views may be correct. They would simply, in that case, be incomplete. Like two artists standing on either side of an object, each puts metaphorical brush to canvas and reproduces with skilled strokes the object’s dimensions, colour, texture, and features as they see them. Both artists paint a stunning picture, reproducing the object perfectly while completely ignoring any aspect of its opposite side. Their paintings may look entirely different, but the object displayed on either canvas is one and the same.

      So, in short, we take neither side. We see no practical reason why we should have to. Despite their disagreements, Crittenden’s and Main’s theories are not all that different from one another. Both emphasize the influence of early child behaviour on adult development; by extension, both focus almost exclusively on nurture. Their reasons for doing so are not unfounded — both theories are backed by extensive research showing strong correlations between parenting style and child attachment behaviour. Among the general population, roughly 15 percent of children display some characteristics of disorganized attachment (or what Crittenden would refer to as extreme Type A or C attachment); among maltreated children, that number is 80 percent. Clearly parents have an enormous influence over how their children learn to deal with other human beings — after all, they are the ones on whom children first hone their social skills. However, a small but growing body of research suggests that, though they may sometimes have to shout to be heard, genes still manage to get their say.

      The Return of the 7-Repeat

      Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg turned their attention once again to the DRD4 7-repeat allele, although this time they were interested in different child outcomes. Knowing 7-repeat’s influence on externalizing behaviour, the two researchers believed the troublesome allele may hold similar sway over disorganized attachment. But 7-repeat can only increase a child’s susceptibility to behavioural disorders; it can’t actually cause them. An environmental factor must also be at play, and it needn’t be anything as extreme or deplorable as physical or mental abuse. Bakermans-Kranenburg and Van IJzendoorn thought a shift in parents’ mood brought on by recent emotional trauma would suffice.

      What sort of emotional trauma? Feelings can be hard to measure, as subjective and messy as they are, which is why Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg set far more specific guidelines for inclusion in their study. They recruited 85 mothers who had recently lost a friend or relative, someone who they either a) lived with or b) visited at least once a week, prior to the loved one’s passing. Van IJzendoorn and Bakermans-Kranenburg videotaped the mothers as they went about their day, much as the two researchers had done in their externalizing behaviour study. They also conducted extensive interviews with mothers, asking them about the nature of their recent loss, their memories from childhood, and the state of their current relationships with friends and loved ones.

      The videotapes were scrutinized, their contents parsed for three distinct classes of actions, deemed “frightening behaviours”: threatening behaviour, frightened behaviour, and dissociative behaviour. These three categories compose a scale designed by attachment theory proponent Mary Main, and together they quantify the degree to which a mother’s behaviour can potentially disturb her child, creating the conditions that cause disorganized attachment. In order to use the scale, researchers observe tapes of the participants and pick out every incident, however minor, that can be classified as threatening, frightened, or dissociative in nature.

      Despite their ominous names, frightening behaviours are not necessarily abusive. Threatening behaviour includes scolding, shouting, and spanking. Frightened behaviour is exactly what it sounds like: a mother responding in an emotional or dramatic way to a threat their child doesn’t comprehend, such as a snarling dog, a high ledge, or a busy road. Dissociative behaviour is perhaps the most abstract, and includes any behaviour that separates a mother from her children mentally but not physically, be it a daydream, a trance, or simply a few minutes spent ignoring СКАЧАТЬ