Some additional
notes on attachment, deprivation and privation
James and Joyce
Robertson's studies
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 children.
Here is a summary of the observations on one separated child.
John (aged seventeen months) was put into a fairly typical residential nursery for nine days while his mother had a second child in hospital. His father was at work all day, and there were no relatives nearby to look after him. Four of the five other children at the nursery had been there almost all of their lives. They were noisy, demanding, and aggressive. John was a quiet, loving child. He seemed troubled by the noise and fighting going on around him, and tried to approach the nurses for some attention. They had to spend most of their time with the more demanding children, and John was left out. Even when he managed to obtain their attention they soon had to put him down to tend to one of the others. John's protests and anger were ignored. After some days his distress worsened. He started to cry pitifully, for long periods of time.
This distress lasted for several days. The nurses gave John all the attention they could, but it was nowhere near enough. He began to refuse food, and he wouldn't sleep. With each day that passed John's condition worsened. His cries of distress became huge sobs of despair.
As the separation neared its end, John's behaviour changed again. He stopped trying to be near to the nurses. Instead he would play with whatever toys he could, particularly a large cuddly toy. He began to ignore his father on his nightly visits. John slowly became emotionally detached. When his mother finally came he didn't seem to want to know her. He wouldn't go to her, wouldn't look at her, and resisted her attempts to comfort him.
John had started by being loving, and seeking companionship. Over the nine-day separation he had changed to being distressed, despairing, and finally to appearing emotionally detached.
The Robertsons suggest that children who are separated from their mothers for several days will pass through the same sequence of behaviour as John. They call it the syndrome of distress. The child becomes distressed, then despairing, and then, if not attended to, the child will become emotionally detached. However, the Robertsons are not saying that babies or children must always be near their mothers. What children do need is fairly continuous, high-quality care. They should have this from their caregivers. If they have to be separated from their main caregivers, then continued high-quality care provided by someone else can help them through the separation.
Exercise on the Robertson's research
Summary of the
Robertson's research
James and Joyce Robertson made some challenging films of young children in periods of brief separation from their normal routines, and especially away from their parents' care. They wanted to make health-care
professionals realize that it is potentially damaging to separate children from their parents. Despite fierce resistance and criticism their message eventually won through and routines began to change.
Activity
Imagine that you have been consulted by a director of social services who wants you to write a brief summary of the effects of having secure or insecure attachments. What recommendations would you make?
Do Children need
mothers?
In the early days of the kibbutz system, when it was thought that children could be brought up with little family assistance, many of the children suffered emotional problems. The critics claimed that this showed that children need mothers. Automatic assumptions were again being made: that caregiver necessarily meant mother, and that children's early experiences with their mother were fundamentally important to their later emotional, social, and personal development. Both these views have since been re-examined. For example, we know that in the modern kibbutz children can make relationships with several others and do not suffer ill effects from not being reared exclusively by their mother.
Michael Rutter's
correlational studies
Michael Rutter and his colleagues did not believe the claim
that early experiences automatically would have a disturbing effect on later
behaviour. They studied a group of 9- to 12-year-old boys on the
Rutter did find a positive correlation between the amount of stress which children felt, and the likelihood of their becoming involved in antisocial behaviour. He asked a large number of questions about their early family lives and felt able to divide his sample of adolescents into those coming from good families, from fair families, and from poor families. Good families were those which provided warm, loving, and secure relationships, free from high levels of stress. Rutter found no increase in anti-social behaviour in the children from these homes, or in children from homes described as fair. However, he did find a positive correlation between coming from a poor, stressful home and being involved in antisocial behaviour. In other words, children whose parents argue and fight constantly were more likely to behave in anti-social ways.
Ann and Alan Clarke have consistently challenged the idea that the early years are so important and have such great influences on future mental health. They quote several studies of baby animals and humans who have been separated from their parents yet who are not emotionally scarred for life. We will discuss some of them here.
The Bulldogs Bank
study
In 1946 Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud's daughter) and Sophie
Dann began a case study of six war orphans who, with their mothers, had been
placed in concentration camps by the Nazis during the second World War. Their
parents had been killed not long after their imprisonment and the infants were
looked after as well as possible by some of the other prisoners. Conditions
were very hard, food was scarce, and there were no toys. It would have been
impossible to form any strong bonds with adults, as none would have been around
for long enough. After the war the infants were moved to several camps, until
they eventually arrived at the Bulldogs Bank reception centre in the
The six children had several things in common. They had probably never known their mothers. They had no opportunities to form attachments with caregivers. They had endured awful living conditions and received virtually no stimulation of any kind. They had been moved around a lot, and so were not pleased at being moved again. They couldn't talk very much, and they knew only a few German and Czechoslovakian swear words. They didn't know what to do with normal toys, and they destroyed all of the toys they could find - and most of the furniture too! They did each adopt one special toy, usually a cuddly toy, which they kept near them and always took to bed with them.
They were also fairly hostile and aggressive towards adults. They would only turn to an adult if they actually needed something which they couldn't have in any other way. Two other things they had in common were that they had been together for all their lives and they were totally devoted to each other. They did everything together and refused to be separated for any reason. For example, if one couldn't go out, none would want to go out. If one woke up at night, the others would soon be awake. When one stopped eating, they would all stop eating. They did everything as a group. There wasn't any single child who was always the leader, each would take the lead in different activities. To put it simply, they appeared to be totally attached to each other.
Although they each had different needs it was impossible to treat any one of them as an individual, as they were always together as a group. No one child was dominant all the time: they cooperated over nearly everything. Eventually they learned to speak and play like normal children. Gradually they formed emotional relationships with some of the adult members of staff. They slowly recovered from their early deprivation, but remained attached to each other.
What this study shows is that children can survive without mothers, although we do not know if any of these children suffered emotional problems in their later lives.
Exercise on six war
orphans at Bulldogs Bank
What kind of mothering do you think the children received throughout their first few years?
Severe deprivation
and isolation
In 1972 Jarmila Koluchova began reporting the case of identical
twin boys in
The mother died soon after the twins were born (in 1960) and their father had to place the children in care. Their father remarried a few months later and the twins returned home when they were eighteen months old. Their stepmother had no interest in bringing up young children (despite having had four of her own) and was selfish and uncaring. The father was of below average intelligence, and his job on the railways took him away from home quite a lot. The family had recently moved to a city suburb where nobody knew them, or knew that the family should have contained six children.
Their stepmother treated the twins terribly. They were kept in a small unheated room with a sheet of polythene for a bed and with very little furniture. They were poorly fed. Sometimes the mother would lock them in the cellar and beat them with a wooden kitchen spoon, covering their heads with a mattress in case anyone heard their screams. The twins suffered these conditions for five-and-a-half years. When they were finally examined, at the age of seven, they were severely physically and mentally retarded. Their bodies were covered in scar tissue from the beatings. They had severe rickets (a disease of the bones caused by lack of vitamin D). They couldn't stand up straight, walk or run, and their coordination was poor. They hadn't been taught to speak, had no knowledge, of eating habits and were very frightened of people, and of the dark. It was impossible to give them a standard intelligence test as they couldn't understand the instructions, and they weren't familiar with things like pictures, which were included in some of the tests. It was estimated that their IQ would have been in the 40s. (The average IQ is 100.) Their stage of development was equivalent to that of a child aged three years.
The twins were put in hospital until they were well enough to go to a special school for mentally disadvantaged children. There they made good progress. When they were more sociable they were fostered by a particularly kind and loving woman who lived with her sister, who had already fostered children. By the age of eleven the twins' speech was normal for their age. They enjoyed reading and playing the piano, and they were both fairly active. By the age of fifteen, the twins' 10 scores were normal, and their emotional state had improved greatly. The atmosphere at home was warm and friendly and, although the boys still remembered their early experiences, they rarely talked about them, even to their foster mother.
It appears that even these terrible early experiences could be overcome with the right kind of care. Koluchova's latest report on the twins (in 1991) showed that they had continued to make progress and they have made a full recovery from their earlier mistreatment. Ann and Alan Clarke claim that if early experiences were so important then these children would be emotionally disturbed for the rest of their lives. At the very least they would suffer severe affectionless psychopathy, they claimed - but they didn't.
Another study by the Robertsons
Earlier we mentioned the Robertson's study of a seventeen-month-old infant called John, in a residential nursery. The Robertsons studied several such children, and. noticed the same sequence of behaviour in each of them. The sequence started with protest or distress, this gave way to despair, and finally turned into detachment. One reason why John had suffered was because no one would offer to be a substitute caregiver for him.
Thomas was one of four children to whom the Robertsons offered temporary fostering in their own home. He was twenty-eight months old (a year older than John) when his mother went into hospital to have another baby. The Robertsons visited Thomas in his own home before his mother went away and he visited their home to become - familiar with it.
Thomas settled in with the Robertsons well, although he obviously missed his mother. Every day during the separation Thomas received constant, patient, high-quality care from Joyce Robertson, supported by her husband and teenage daughter, Jean. Thomas had brought some favourite things from home, including a photograph of his mother and him together. Thomas was pleased when his father visited each night, but became understandably upset when his father had to leave. Thomas also had a few problems with food and sleep, and as the separation went into the second week he did cry more for his mother. Nevertheless Joyce Robertsons' patience and reassurance always quietened him.
When Thomas's mother finally came
to take him home he was happily and successfully reunited with her. He had
changed a little. He was rather more aggressive and harder to control than he
had been before. Separating him from his usual routines may have had some
unfortunate effects, despite the care he had received. However, there was a new
baby in the family and Thomas wouldn't be quite the centre of attention that he
had been. This may have been enough, anyway, to affect some of his behaviour
following his return.
Summary of the
evidence against Bowlby
Bowlby said that growing up at home - even in a poor home - would be preferable to growing up in even the best institution, as the mother-child attachment bond could develop at home. However, studies show that
some children reared in orphanages cope rather better than those reared at home. The twins studied by Jarmila Koluchova, for instance, were raised in the poorest of conditions and had no parenting until they were well past the age of five, which is the age that Bowlby thought was essential for establishing attachment bonds. They appear to have recovered well. Neither would children who were separated necessarily suffer if top-quality
alternative care - such as that provided by Joyce Robertson - could be provided for them.
Conclusion to the
attachment debate
Bowlby claimed that babies make one central attachment to
one main caregiver: their mother. Although that caregiver would not have to be
the baby's natural mother, in most cases it would be. Bowlby thought that there
would be a hierarchy of attachments, with the mother at the top and all other
attachments being inferior to that one. In Schaffer and Emerson's
Barry Lester and his colleagues found that the babies they studied had all made strong attachments with their mothers by the time they were nine months old, but had also attached to their fathers by twelve months. Fathers are often more playful with their babies, whereas mothers are often more nurturant. As we mentioned earlier, fathers offer rough-andtumble activities. They can also be gentle with their infants, and the infants can form strong emotional ties with them.
Michael Lamb went further. He had noticed how babies choose and use different caregivers for different activities. Babies appeared to prefer their mother's company if they were distressed. They would respond to their mother's soft soothing voice and gentle cuddles. However, they seemed to prefer their fathers for rather more adventurous activities. These three things - tenderness, emotional warmth, and more physical activities - might help babies use their father as a safe base from which to explore the world.
Dan Stern has shown that babies can signal their needs to their parents and help to regulate the type and amount of contact that they received. This suggests that they are quite aware of their own needs and soon learn how to express them. They interact with other humans for enjoyment. Trevarthen and Richards have shown how interactions between babies and caregivers are like conversations, with each partner taking turns.
It seems that much of the evidence today does not support
Bowlby's view that babies make only one central attachment to their mother.
Rather it appears they can make several attachments, each of which is of equal
value. They may make their first attachment with their mother, but soon other
attachments can be made.
It is important to note, however, that not everyone agrees that babies are so capable of communicating their needs. Kenneth Kaye believes that this is simply what rather optimistic observers would like to think.
Despite these reservations Bowlby's view of the early importance of mother-child bonds did appear to explain many of the problems that parents and doctors had noticed. What he said about children and mothers seemed to fit the facts. Several professions concerned with children began to change some of their practices to avoid unnecessary separation of mothers and children. For example, hospital wards started to allow young children to stay with their mother for longer periods, if the mother wasn't too ill. In some cases cots were provided so that children could sleep near their mothers. Mothers would be allowed to stay with her child, if the child became ill. Many social workers were taught to regard the separation of the mother from her child as the worst possible solution to a family's problems. Bowlby had claimed that `a bad home is better than the best institution'. Whatever difficulties stood in the way of the mother and her child staying together, they must be overcome if at all possible.