Effects Of Single Parenting On Attachment

For my paper I decided to pick the question, how does single parenting affect attachment with newborns? I think that through out the course we have mostly talked about two parents raising a child and that this is the way that is most common. This could also include the child having any form of two parents such as mom and dad, mom and mom etc. but not always about single parents and their babies. I think that in my immediate community there are more possibilities of single parents out there raising their children. There are times where someone is ready to have a child but finds that they are not ready to find a partner or do not want to wait any longer and become too old to have a child. Other times there are circumstances where one of

With very young infants who are sensitive to many kinds of stimuli, both social and non-social, produce a favorable reaction, such as a smile to those that interact with them. Infants enjoy human company, and most babies respond equally to any caregiver. They get upset when the person that has captured their attention, ceases to interact with them. From 3 months infants will start to recognize a familiar face and smile more at familiar faces and can be easily comfortable by a regular caregiver. The baby will then start look for particular people for security, comfort, and protection, he or she shows fear of strangers and unhappiness when separated from a special person. Some babies show stranger fear and separation anxiety much more frequently and intensely than others, nevertheless, they are seen as evidence that the baby has formed an attachment and that this is very prominent by one year of age. By 18 months the majority of infants have formed multiple attachments, the baby becomes increasingly independent and forms several attachments. The typical observation of babies and the attachments that they make, indicates that attachments were most likely to form with those who responded accurately to the baby's signals, and not always the person they spent

Parents that were depreseed tended to be indifferent, more critical, impatient, and hostile towards their child, resulting in lower quality of parent child attachment. Many of the situtations with lost (deceased) parents, the parental depressive symptoms may induce stress in both child and parent. This then feeds into low attachment because the parent is less able to provide support for the child to cope with his or her stress. One idea that he mentioned that I found very interesting was the idea that girls are more likely to have a higher quality of parent-child attachment than boys, but in the case that divorce or death of a parent happens after an attachment is made, the girls were more likely to show aggressive bahivior like hitting and yelling than boys would. Through out his study of single parents, he found that there are a higher number of single mothers than there are single fathers in the world. Based on this information about single mothers, this researcher found lower father-child attachment compared to mother-child attachment. There were a few reasons to this, it was said depression was more prominent in fathers than there was in mothers. One case was that there were many fathers that could not cope after losing his wife during giving birth and felt that this child was