Substitute Parents by Gillian Bentley Ruth Mace

Author:Gillian Bentley, Ruth Mace [Gillian Bentley, Ruth Mace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857456410
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2012-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Attachment Theory and Infant Determinism

For some time from the 1960s to the 1980s the Euro-American literature on parenting was heavily influenced by attachment theory; that is, the notion that a young child (usually he) required a dyadic relationship with a primary caretaker (usually his mother) devoted to meeting his needs in order for him to thrive not only physically, but emotionally. Without such a relationship the child’s future would be blighted. The dependency of young children is a biological fact, one rightly emphasized by Bowlby (1951). If children perceive that they are being neglected or harmed they show signs of stress, whether measured behaviourally, metabolically or hormonally.

Nevertheless, the explanations of how parents and other carers handle children’s dependency, and how children in turn respond to the handling, are likely to be culturally determined – as Gottlieb’s chapter (this volume) clearly demonstrates. Attachment theory has become progressively modified, not least because of anthropological and psychological evidence which suggested that the intensity of this attachment varied considerably according to the particular group of children and adults, and the time and place where they were being studied (Kagan et al. 1978).1

Allied to ideas of attachment is what Kagan (1998) calls ‘the myth of infant determinism’, the belief that parents profoundly influence their young children and shape how they develop. At the level of survival, maternal input is indispensable. But the range of gradations of behaviour is enormous and complex, and there are many arguments to be had about critical periods for development, and the lasting or powerful influence of parents and caregivers. Robert LeVine (2003), the Harvard anthropologist (who described himself as a ‘gadfly’ on the back of developmental psychology), pointed to the pervasive ‘folklore’ reinforced by psychoanalytic theorists, about the importance of early years in shaping adult life.

The beliefs about infant determinism, while pervasive in the North, are not widely shared. LeVine and New (2008) have edited an anthropological reader on child development in which they explore cultural variation in parental goals across cultures. In many groups or communities in the South, parents do not see themselves as having influence or power over their children’s future. They do not provide the kind of warm, responsive, intense caregiver focus on individual infants that theorists in the North regard as indispensable to young children’s development (see Belsky, this volume).

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