John Bowlby's Attachment Theory

1) John Bowlby: recognised the importance of the child's first relationships and developed the theory of attachement.Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment suggests that children come into the world biologically pre-programmed to form attachments with others, because this will help them to survive. Bowlby believed that attachment behaviors are instinctive and will be activated by any conditions that seem to threaten the achievement of proximity, such as separation, insecurity and fear.

Main Points of Bowlby’s Theory
a) A child has an inborn need to attach to one main attachment figure

b) A child should receive the continuous care of this single most important attachment figure for approximately the first two years of life.

If the attachment

Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachments was an inadequate explanation.

Harlow’s most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different "mothers." One was made of soft terrycloth, but provided no food. The other was made of wire, but provided nourishment from an attached baby bottle.

Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother. In other words, the infant monkeys went to the wire mother only for food, but preferred to spend their time with the soft, comforting cloth mother when they were not eating.

"These data make it obvious that contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance," Harlow

Therefore, there are 4 key elements of behavior that help determine the child's attachment type.

The results are finalized according to the responses of these questions: i) How much does the child explore his or her surroundings? ii) What is the child’s reaction when the parent leaves? iii) Does the child express any anxiety with the introduction of the stranger when the child is alone? iv) The behavior of the child when interacting with the parent is assessed. 4) James and Joyce Robertson studied the physiological effects children who were separated from their mothers . For example ,through hospital stays.

James and Joyce Robertson conducted some observational studies of children who were between about seventeen months and three years, between 1948 and 1952, and followed these up later, during the 1960s. The children went into hospital or were placed in residential nurseries, separating them from their caregivers for periods from a few days up to several weeks. The Robertsons were convinced that separating babies from their mothers was harmful. The medical profession disagreed. The Robertson’s obtained a cine camera and made eight films of children during their separation which could be shown to people involved in caring for