evidence the study produced, which Egeland and Sroufe and two coauthors summarized most completely in their 2005 book
Attachment classification, the Minnesota researchers found, was not absolute destiny—sometimes attachment relationships changed in the course of childhood, and some children with anxious attachments went on to thrive. But for most children, attachment status at one year of age, as measured by the Strange Situation and other tests, was highly predictive of a wide range of outcomes later in life. Children with secure attachment early on were more socially competent throughout their lives: better able to engage with preschool peers, better able to form close friendships in middle childhood, better able to negotiate the complex dynamics of adolescent social networks.
In preschool, two-thirds of children in the Minnesota study who had been securely attached in infancy were categorized by their teachers as “effective” in terms of their behavior, meaning they were attentive and engaged and rarely acted out in class. Among children who had been observed to be anxiously attached a few years earlier, only one in eight was placed in the effective category; the large majority of those children were classified by their teachers as having one or more behavior problems. (The teachers didn’t know how the kids had done on the Strange Situation.) Children whose parents had been judged disengaged or emotionally unavailable in early assessments of their parenting style did the worst in preschool, and teachers recommended special education or grade retention for two-thirds of them. When teachers ranked students on indicators of dependency, 90 percent of the children with an anxious-attachment history fell in the more dependent half of the class, compared with just 12 percent of children with secure histories. When teachers and other children were surveyed, the anxiously attached children were more often labeled mean, antisocial, and immature.
When the children in the study were ten, researchers invited a randomly selected group of forty-eight students to four-week-long sessions at a summer camp, where they were closely observed and discreetly studied. Counselors (again, unaware of the students’ attachment classifications at one year) rated campers who had had secure attachment in infancy as more self-confident, more curious, and better able to deal with setbacks. The ones with anxious-attachment histories spent less time with peers, more time with the counselors, and more time alone.
Finally, the researchers followed the children through high school, where they found that early parental care predicted which students would graduate even more reliably than IQ or achievement-test scores. Using measures of early parenting only and ignoring the students’ own characteristics and abilities, the researchers found they could have predicted with 77 percent accuracy, when the children were not yet four years old, which ones would later drop out of high school.
It is easy to see parallels between what Michael Meaney’s researchers found in their rat pups in Montreal and what Alan Sroufe and Byron Egeland found in the children they studied in Minnesota. In both cases, certain mothers performed certain specific idiosyncratic parenting behaviors in the earliest days of their children’s lives. And those behaviors—licking and grooming in the rats, responding sensitively to infants’ cues in the humans—seem to have had a powerful and long-lasting effect on the children’s outcomes in a variety of similar ways: the human and rat babies who received the extra dose of early care were, later on, more curious, more self-reliant, calmer, and better able to deal with obstacles. The early nurturing attention from their mothers had fostered in them a resilience that acted as a protective buffer against stress. When the regular challenges of life emerged, even years later—an open-field test, a disagreement among strong-willed kindergartners—they were able, rats and humans alike, to assert themselves, draw on reserves of self-confidence, and make their way forward.
12. Parenting Interventions
There is a direct link between Mary Ainsworth’s research on attachment and Nadine Burke Harris’s clinic in Bayview?Hunters Point, and that link is a San Francisco psychologist named Alicia Lieberman. In the mid-1970s, Lieberman studied with Ainsworth at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It was the era when Ainsworth was conducting her first big study of parenting and attachment, and under Ainsworth’s direction, Lieberman, then a graduate student, spent long hours watching and coding videotape of new mothers interacting with their babies, looking for the small, specific examples of sensitive and responsive maternal behavior that promoted secure attachment for the infants. Today, Lieberman runs the Child Trauma Research Program at the University of California at San Francisco, where she has become, in recent years, a close collaborator with Nadine Burke Harris.
Lieberman told me that while she admires the study that Sroufe and Egeland did in Minnesota, she feels there are two important ideas missing from their analysis. The first is an explicit recognition of how plainly difficult it is for many parents in neighborhoods like Bayview?Hunters Point to form secure attachments with their children. “Often, the circumstances of a mother’s life overwhelm her natural coping capacity,” Lieberman told me when I visited one of the clinics where she works in San Francisco. “When you are bombarded by poverty, uncertainty, and fear, it takes a superhuman quality to provide the conditions for a secure attachment.” In addition, a mother’s own attachment history can make her parenting challenge even greater: research from the Minnesota study and elsewhere shows that if a new mother experienced insecure attachment with her parents as a child (no matter what her class background), then it will be exponentially more difficult for her to provide a secure, nurturing environment for her own children.
The other thing that is underemphasized in the Minnesota study, Lieberman said, is the fact that parents can
Lieberman’s treatment is relatively intensive, administered in weekly sessions that can continue for as long as a year. But the principle behind it—improving children’s outcomes by promoting stronger relationships between children and their parents—is increasingly in use across the country in a wide variety of interventions. And the results, when these interventions are evaluated, are often powerful.
In one study, Dante Cicchetti, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota , tracked a group of 137 families with documented histories of previous child maltreatment; these were families, in other words, where children were at very high risk. Each family had a one-year-old child who was the focus of the intervention. At the beginning of the study, all the infants were evaluated in the Strange Situation procedure, and the results were predictably awful: just one of the 137 infants demonstrated secure attachment, and 90 percent of them were classified as having disorganized attachment, the most problematic type of anxious attachment. Then the families were divided randomly into a treatment group and a control group. The treatment group was given a year of Lieberman’s child- parent psychotherapy, and the control group received the standard community services provided to families reported for maltreatment. When the children were two years old, 61 percent of the ones in the treatment group had formed a secure attachment with their mothers, while in the control group, only 2 percent of the children were securely attached. Attachment-promoting parenting, Cicchetti had shown, can be nurtured in even the most troubled parents, and the benefit to both them and their children can be profound.
Other studies have shown an effect on not only children’s attachment classification but also the health of their stress-response systems, and researchers have demonstrated this effect with interventions that are less intensive than Lieberman’s treatment. An intervention called Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care for Preschoolers, run by a psychologist in Eugene, Oregon, named Philip Fisher, gives foster parents six months of training and consultation in techniques to manage confrontation and difficult situations in the home. Children in foster care often have trouble regulating their stress-response systems (just as Monisha Sullivan did), but in one experiment, after six months of treatment, the kids in Fisher’s program not only showed increased evidence of
