Child Care
By the twenty-first century, most infants in the
United States experienced some form of child care in
their first year of life. This represented an enormous
shift in how children in the United States were raised,
a shift that led to concerns about whether infant child
care disrupts mother-child attachment. Some have
argued that infants experience daily separations as
maternal rejection, which should lead to avoidance,
while others have suggested that separations prevent
mothers from having sufficient opportunities to de-
velop sensitive caregiving styles. The results of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Devel-
opment Study of Early Child Care, a study of more
than 1,000 infants and their mothers, clearly demon-
strated that neither security nor avoidance in the
Strange Situation was associated with type of care,
amount of care, or quality of care. Instead, security
was associated with characteristics of mothering, such
as sensitivity. Infants who experienced dual risks, for
example poor quality child care and insensitive moth-
ering, were at increased risk for developing insecure
attachments. Thus, the effects of child care on attach-
ment depend primarily on the nature of ongoing in-
teractions between mothers and children.
Other Measures of Attachment
The Strange Situation continues to be the bench-
mark method for assessing attachment security in in-
fancy. Alternatives, however, have been developed.
The Attachment Q-sort, developed by Everett Waters,
is a method designed to assess attachment security
naturalistically in the home environment. Observers
sort a set of ninety cards with behavioral descrip-
tions—for example, ‘‘Actively solicits comforting
from adult when distressed’’—from most characteris-
tic to least characteristic of the child. The child’s pro-
file is compared to that of a prototypical securely
attached child, based on attachment researchers’ hy-
pothetical sorts or rankings of the cards.
Methods have also been developed for assessing
attachment security in adolescence and adulthood.
Preeminent among these is the Adult Attachment In-
terview (developed by Carol George, Nancy Kaplan,
and Mary Main), a semistructured interview in which
adults are asked to reflect and report on their early
experiences with attachment figures, typically their
mothers and fathers. The coding system focuses on
the consistency and coherency of responses. Adults
are classified as ‘‘secure/autonomous’’ if they express
value for their early attachment relationships and are
able to report on these experiences in a clear and or-
ganized fashion. Adults are classified as ‘‘dismissing’’
if they devalue the importance of early attachment re-
lationships by expressing disregard for negative ex-
periences, by having few memories of childhood, or
by having idealized memories of their childhoods.
Adults are classified as ‘‘preoccupied’’ if they display
confusion or anger regarding early attachment rela-
tionships and talk excessively about their early expe-
riences concerning them. Finally, adults are classified
as ‘‘unresolved/disorganized’’ if they demonstrate
lapses in reasoning during discussions of loss or
abuse.Stability of Attachment and Later
Relationship Functioning
There is some evidence that attachment status is
a stable phenomenon, as evidenced by concordance
between security in the Strange Situation during in-
fancy and in the Adult Attachment Interview during
adolescence or early adulthood. Specifically, secure
infants become autonomous adults, while avoidant
infants become dismissing and ambivalent infants
become preoccupied. Instability in attachment classi-
fications over time seems to be linked to salient life
events. Events that may redirect secure infants toward
patterns of insecurity in adolescence and adulthood
include maltreatment, the loss of a parent, parental
divorce, or a serious illness for the parent or child.
Strange Situation classifications in infancy are
also predictive of later relationship functioning. In-
fants classified as secure show more positive emotions
toward their parents at two years of age and have bet-
ter communication with their parents during middle
childhood than infants classified as insecure. Patterns
of attachment in infancy are also predictive of the
quality of relationships with people other than par-
ents. For example, children who are securely attached
to their caregivers have better relationships with
teachers, peers, and close friends.Clinical Implications
The field of attachment began with Bowlby’s clin-
ical work with disordered patients. Since then, re-
searchers have remained interested in links between
early attachment history and the development of psy-
chopathology. Work with institutionalized children
demonstrates that the failure to form attachment re-
lationships can lead to serious mental health prob-
lems. Most research, however, concerns associations
between the quality of care children receive from at-
tachment figures and later behavior. For example, in-
fants with ambivalent attachment relationships are
more likely to develop later anxiety disorders, while
those with disorganized attachment relationships are
more likely to develop later dissociative disorders,
where individuals lose touch with reality. There is lit-ATTACHMENT 35