What Is Parenthood?: Contemporary Debates about the Family

10. Parenting Matters: An Attachment Perspective

CHAPTER TEN 214 Parenting Matters An Attachment Perspective Howard Steele and Miriam Steele This chapter examines how parenting has been defined and studied by attachment theory and research. Further, it describes reliable and valid attachment research tools that may assist public policy makers and judges with decision-making processes regarding parent custody, child protection , and the prevention of child abuse. In the frame of reference provided by John Bowlby’s landmark trilogy, Attachment, Separation, and Loss,1 parents are attachment figures on whom children depend as (1) a secure base from which the child explores (away) when feeling curious; and (2) a safe haven to which the child returns when frightened or otherwise distressed. There is an implicit interplay between the motivation to attach (in search of familiarity/safety) and the motivation to explore (in search of novelty/ danger). Getting the balance right in one’s personal and family life is an ongoing challenge for every parent (and child). This chapter reviews the psychological characteristics of the parent who meets the demands to serve as both a secure base and a safe haven, and the lifelong relevance of these concepts for healthy child, adolescent, and adult development. Bowlby’s writings on parenthood are reviewed together with an account of the (high) extent to which his views from the 1950s and 1960s have been validated by fifty years of systematic research that includes results from studies of what are typical (nuclear) and less typical family groups (e.g., foster, adoptive parents), with reference to mainly human but also nonhuman animals. Genetic and Social Influences on Parenting Bowlby reckoned that social parenting influences on children may be at least as important as genetic influences.2 For a contemporary account of contributions to parenting that arise from inherited biological characteristics at the level of temperament or gene polymorphisms, readers should see the previous chapter by Hébert, Moss, Cere, and Song.3 The lively area 215 Parenting Matters of ongoing research concerning gene expression and parenting in animals and humans is relevant, but at the end of the day, a parent or family court judge is left to decide what type and quality of caregiving is best suited to the needs of a given child. Confidence in how to respond to this question is within our grasp, based on available research incorporating attachment research methods that rely on the observation of behavior and close attention to language concerning attachment, loss, and trauma—research measures with documented validity in multigenerational longitudinal studies, pursued in many different countries.4 Overcoming Adverse Childhood Experiences to Become a Good Enough Parent Importantly, the chapter will highlight research showing how parents demonstrate an ability to rise above adverse experiences in their past and realize their ambitions to be competent caring parents. The relevance to this process of reflective functioning will be highlighted. Reflective functioning is a basic human capacity, present in childhood in only a nascent form but evolving with language and cognitive development, to enable an understanding of thoughts and feelings in self and others. While this process begins with the acquisition of a basic theory of mind in the preschool years, it grows into a fuller appreciation of the desires, beliefs (sometimes false, based on limited information), and intentions that are the causes and consequences of behavior. Over time, reflective functioning comes to include a developmental perspective, that is, the ability to distinguish between children’s desires and beliefs and the multiple perspective-taking and higher-order reflections available to the adult mind. None of this happens in a vacuum. Vital to the process of overcoming adversity are ongoing supportive relationships, involving communication, clarification, and much listening by each party to the interaction. Only against this background may it be the case that trauma experienced in one generation is not revisited upon the next. Attachment research over the last fifty years has produced a toolbox of reliable measures that permit identification of individual differences in parents’ states of mind that influence child outcomes, including how parenting is experienced by children, and how such experiences by children are carried forward into new relationships in the school-age years, adolescence, and far beyond into the next generation. There is a massive volume of research based on attachment theory, which carries messages of import for public policy and legal decision-making processes that 216 Howard Steele and Miriam Steele involve children and parents. Drawing on research on...