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Attachment to Others Is a Biological Process
Attachment occurs when infants or young children are hungry, or wet, or afraid
and learn that someone cares for them and will attend to their needs. They are
safe.
In most cases, when an infant’s or child’s needs are met—he is fed, his diaper
is changed, his parent soothes him—he develops secure attachment, little by
little, event after event. When he is regularly soothed after feeling needy or
afraid, he eventually learns how to calm himself down.
The brain circuits that regulate human behavior, and give a child a sense of
who he is, and that he matters—so that he forms a sense of self and a connection
with other people—develop as caregivers respond to that child’s needs. These
early relationships activate the growth of all the various regions of our brain that
we need to use in order to have healthy relationships.
A baby smiles, a mom coos, a baby coos back, the mom smiles. In this one
small moment, the mother attunes to and reflects back what her infant is
expressing. And this experience—being seen and known—becomes encoded in
the infant’s neural circuitry.
But if a child’s basic needs for safety and security aren’t met, she will reach
adulthood without ever having learned what it means to be soothed in healthy
ways—or how to calm herself down—when she meets inevitable life and
relationship stressors. She will have an insecure sense of attachment.
Most psychologists agree that a child has to develop a secure attachment with
at least one primary caregiver in order to learn how to effectively regulate her
own emotions for the rest of her life, and in order to learn how to become
attached in a healthy way in adult relationships.
Most people with attachment issues can’t understand why others are reluctant
to get as close to them as they’d like; they instead feel this synaptic disconnect in
the form of rejection and isolation. Think of Kat. “No relationship ever stuck for
me in my twenties and early thirties, and I always thought it was the other
person’s problem. It’s only now, looking back, that I realize I had this huge
reactivity, and can take responsibility for how I behaved.” Kat can see now that
she’d often be anxious, “a bottomless pit of need” for reassurance, then become
“sarcastic or passive-aggressive if my partner wasn’t giving me enough
emotional stroking.” At the same time, if someone got too close to Kat, she
couldn’t sustain it. “Something small would happen in a relationship and all the
sadness and fear and panic I’d felt when I was young would just come spilling
out. Before I knew it, I’d be critical, blaming, controlling, and in-your-face
argumentative.” Each time a relationship “imploded badly,” it reinforced Kat’s
conclusions that others didn’t—and couldn’t—love her.
And so the underconnected areas of Kat’s brain stayed offline for a very long
time.
As for John, psychologists would see his profound need for closeness, and his
sabotaging of it, as a sign of his early insecure attachment with his dad.
A history of insecure attachment also affects what kind of parents we become.
Recently, researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child
Development followed seventy-three children from birth into young adulthood.
Kids whose parents had not soothed them effectively behaved quite differently
in their grown-up romantic relationships from kids who’d had warmer, more
supportive parents. Young adults who’d been less attached to their parents when
small had more trouble managing their negative, reactive feelings and recovering
from conflict with their adult partners. Children who had had secure attachments
with loving, even-keeled parents were far better at recovering from adult
conflict. They were able to manage their fear or anger before those feelings
overwhelmed them—and then move on.
Not surprisingly, these kids who’d had secure attachments with their mothers
also had healthier love relationships and reported being a lot happier in them
over the long term.
In a similar longitudinal study, researchers followed Oregon families for three
generations. Parents who were warm, consistent, not overreactive, and involved
in their kids’ activities had a positive impact not only on how their adolescent
children turned out but also on how skilled their kids were, once grown, in using
positive parenting skills with their own children. Positive parenting habits, and
being able to manage one’s reactivity in family life, transferred to the next
generation of children and even grandchildren.
In another large study, nearly a thousand men and women between the ages of
twenty-five and seventy-four said their childhood relationships with their
mothers had been better than their relationships with their fathers—and this was
especially true for boys. We don’t know why this is—perhaps there is some truth
to the saying that dads are harder on their sons. But men who had enjoyed a
good relationship with their dads during childhood were less emotionally
reactive to stressful events in their daily lives as adults than were men who’d had
poor relationships with their fathers. Other studies have found that sons who
have fond childhood memories of their dads are more able to stay emotionally
calm and stable in the face of everyday stressors.
In a twenty-five-year study, researchers followed boys from the age of nine
until they were thirty-three years old. By then, many had started their own
families. Those men whose dads had poor parenting methods were, predictably,
less skilled parents themselves. Boys whose dads’ behavior had been categorized
as hostile; angry; threatening; neglectful, as in not knowing where their son was
and not taking an active role in his life and activities; or lacking consistent
follow-through behaved very differently with everyone around them. They were
less able to create healthy, caring bonds and relationships with teachers and
peers, coaches and mentors. They had fewer positive connections with
anyone
,
and were more likely to be seen as antisocial and to connect with other teens
who were negative influences upon them.
Later, when these boys had their own families, they were inconsistent and
ineffective parents and their own children displayed more negative and
challenging behaviors than did other kids.
Poor parenting leads to insecurity and less-healthy love relationships in
adulthood. Constructive parenting over generations passes on good parenting
skills and gives kids a foundation for seeking out other positive influences and
mentors; kids relate better with others and create good relationships that help
them to be happy, well adjusted, and successful. And, later, they and their
healthy partners raise good enough families.
Stories like John’s make sense. But what’s entirely new in our understanding
of how family dysfunction is inherited is the discovery that poor parenting styles
—which foster childhood adversity—also engender biological changes in
children’s brains that make those kids neurobiologically less able to be good
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