Attachment Theory

Is it normal for your baby to cry when leaving them at a new daycare facility?
Attachment in infants is common and normal, but as the child begins to grow, things should slowly begin to change. Attachment is an emotional tie to specific people that mainly begins with the infant’s parents, and/or primary caregiver (Ainsworth, 1973). In today’s time, there are many different people who become the primary caregiver, including, fathers, grandparents, siblings, daycare/childcare providers, however, during the mid-1900’s, researchers focused on the attachment between a mother and her child.
A psychologist by the name of Harry Harlow organized a very famous series of experiments. He raised infant rhesus monkeys with two different types

This is where Harlow introduced what he called, “contact comfort” defined as – the comfortable feeling that infants gain by clinging to a soft attachment figure (Harlow, 1959 as cited in Cook and Cook, 2014). During this time, the psychoanalytical and behavioral theories were well known, but Harlow’s discoveries were just the opposite. Psychoanalytical theories, focused on the structure of personality and how things like behavior and development are influenced by the conscious and the unconscious.
During the late eighteen hundreds to the mid nineteen hundreds, Sigmund Freud created his own psychoanalytical theory, stating that the mind contains three basic sections, the id, the ego, and the superego, and that these three properties were constantly in conflict with one another. The id is where our instincts come in that can sometimes lead to aggression, which is why we as humans then need to depend on our ego, which can help us justify, and our superego which can remind us of our ethical concepts. Freud’s belief was that every infant is born with the id and through stages of development, develop the ego and superego to later become