More handpicked essays just for you.
Compare and contrast the attachment theories of Bowlby and Ainsworth
Compare and contrast the attachment theories of Bowlby and Ainsworth
Attachment theory model Ainsworth et al 1978 Bowlby 1980
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Harlow’s wire mother was a mother, built out of wire and included a heating element. Harlow’s cloth mother included a heating element but was covered with a soft terry cloth. This mother’s parenting style is not comforting her child. Allowing your child to be comforted eventually makes them comfortable in new situations and they want to explore their enviornment more if they were given comfort. Comforting is a sense of security and this mother is not providing that for her child. How does attachment affect exploration? Be sure to include findings from both Harlow and Ainsworth in your response. Harlow found that attatchment directly affects exploration because when our mothers are present as children we are comfortable to look around and
One of the most famous experiments on attachment was Harlow’s monkey experiments. After watching a video of the monkey experiments the conclusion is that ...
During the twentieth century, Harry Harlow performed one of the most controversial experiments that led to a scientific breakthrough concerning the parent-child relationship. It paved the way for understanding terms such as secure, insecure, ambivalent, and disorganized relationships (Bernstein, 2014, 364). During the course of this study, Harlow separated baby monkeys from their birth mothers and isolated them in frightening environments. According to the video “H.H. Overview”, this proved the monkey’s preference for a comforting mother versus a nutritional one. However, this raises the question: can his experiments be deemed ethical, or did his scientific inquiry overstep boundaries?
The warmth that parents bring to their children’s lives starts at infancy. Mothers and fathers of young children shower their kids with baby-talk and physical touch. These behaviours show the child that others are sensitive of their needs and those parents can be relied on for emotional responsiveness. However, this didn’t occur until twelve years later in Dani’s life, whereas Olivia, three years old , is her mother’s, Rosemary’s favourite and is described as ‘so lovable’ – a word Sylvia-Amelia-Julia had never heard her use to describe any of them – and is wished to “stay at this age for ever” because of this. Dani’s mother, Hayley, didn’t get the chance to hold her child before she was “placed in a clear Perspex cot and wheeled out of the birthing room” to the intensive care unit as she was premature – birthed at only five months “so small. So desperately, impossible small – barely larger than the midwife’s hands”. Although despite Hayley’s absolute exhaustion afterwards, she still felt “an overwhelming need to reach out and touch the child”, but her strength left her when she pushed herself up, so “she could do nothing but look” as her child was taken a...
Born in 1896, in Neuchatel, Switzerland, Jean Piaget was an exceptionally gifted researcher. By the age of 10, he had written and distributed his first experimental paper about the Albino Sparrow. At the age of 21, he distributed 20 logical papers on his experience while studying mollusks which helped formulate his ideas about adaption (Piaget’s Background, n.d.). Much of his introductory hypothesis was focused upon his perceptions of his own kids. Piaget's work is an unmistakable sample of descriptive research. (Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development. 2013).
In the early 1950s, Harry Harlow’s famous study of rhesus monkeys to determine attachment relationships demonstrated that infant rhesus monkeys raised in isolation, preferred the comfort of a cloth-covered surrogate mother to that of a wire-mesh surrogate with an attached feeding bottle. Harlow wished to dispute the traditional view that affection and mother–infant attachment was based on food, and his experiments had clearly demonstrated that the foundations of attachment were not associated solely with the need for nourishment. A more important facet of human nature was that the profoundly meaningful act of physical intimacy plays a greater role in the health of an infant than nourishment alone. (Vicedo 2009)
...ses represent the physical absence of her mother. Implicitly, however, these objects symbolize the lost memories of her mother. The possessive nature of the “mother’s watch” shows that its loss was not welcome. In Morrison’s story when Twyla and Roberta connect many years after staying at the orphanage, Roberta suggests that Maggie, the “kitchen woman with legs like parentheses,” was black (Morrison, 245). Twyla then claims that Maggie was her “dancing mother,” meaning that she was “dead” and “dumb” in addition to being “nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night” (259). The grief Twyla experiences suggests that she felt as though no one cared, that no one had cared for her mother either.
In the next experiment, the infants were placed in the middle of the cliff and had the mothers on the other side of it and were calling out their child's name in order to encourage them to cross over from either the deep side or the shallow side. They experimented with different ages of infants, but the results showed that the older the child the more likely he or she was going to cross over to the mother by going through the deep side.
Bowlby argued that if the attachment between the infant and the mother is disturbed in anyway during first two years of the child’s life, then there will be lasting consequences for that individual (McLeod, 2007). This relates to Harlow’s findings because Harlow found that after six months, the infant monkeys with the cloth mothers had a hard time forgetting that attachment with their caregiver (Harlow, 1959). Therefore, it is clear that in the 1950’s and during the time that Harlow wrote his article, thoughts about the importance of attachment changed to focus on how infants and parents should form a close bond with one
As children grow and develop, their actions become more self-directed and less subject to outside regulation by others (Poulsen, et al., 2006, p....
Harlow’s experiment shows the connection of mother and child using monkeys. From this experiment you can see that withdrawal or removal can cause depression in the rhesus monkeys. Harlow further relates that to children and their mothers. Seeing that there was too much maternal contact he notes that over attachment can cause severe depression.
Psychologist, Mary Ainsworth expanded upon Bowlby's original work. She conducted a study labelled the ‘Strange Situation’. In the study, based upon the children’s reactions, Ainsworth described three major styles of attachment: secure attachment, ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment. Work by Stroufe and Waters in 1977, further supported Ainsworth's attachment styles and have indicated that attachment styles also have an impact on behaviours later in life (Birns, 1999, p. 13). Researchers have found strengths in attachment patterns established early in life can lead to a number of outcomes. For example, children who are securely attached as infants tend to develop stronger self-esteem and better self-reliance as they grow older. These children also tend to be more independent, perform better in school, have successful social relationships, and experience less depression and anxiety (Birns, 1999, p. 13).
The ability for children to discover is innate. From birth children discover all sorts of different things about the world around them. It has even been said that "babies are as good at discovery as the smartest adult" (Gopnik, 2005). Discovering is the natural way that children learn. By interacting with the world around them, they ar...
Displays of activities in the setting and good frequent communication of the sort of activities that a child is doing in a setting will help a parent to understand suitable activities and specific areas of development as a child will not be able to pass on information about all their activities in a day
Furthermore, by introducing shared open spaces with other classes, we can bring out the full potential of the children physically, mentally and emotionally. They will have more sensory play when exposed to a wider range of materials outdoors more often. The importance of sensory play is supported by Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development in the sensorimotor stage which states child’s intelligence is developed by the basic motor and sensory explorations of the world around them.
Zion, M. & Sadeh, I. (2007, Autumn). Curiosity and open inquiry learning. Journal of Biology Education, 41(4), 162-168. Retrieved from ERIC