Every night, as she curled up under the stars, Koala Lou thought about the times her mother had looked at her and said, ‘Koala Lou, I do love you!’ and she longed for her to say it again.
Mem Fox, Koala Lou, 1991.21
Across most cultures, 65 per cent of mother–child pairs are classed as secure and the parent as being ‘free’ or ‘autonomous’. Most parents reading this book are going to fit into that category: reading parenting books is surely a marker of sensitivity. So why am I bothering to write about the other attachment types?
Being able to look at things from the child’s perspective is the biggest gift of attachment, and it was to fill that need that attachment theory developed in the first place. With a knowledge of just how a secure or insecure pattern of attachment develops, we can evaluate parenting decisions.
Children do move from a secure attachment to an insecure attachment and from insecure to secure. In fact, attachment relationships sit upon a continuum and none of us, even those lucky enough to have been sensitively parented ourselves, can rest upon our laurels and think, ‘Well, I’ll be getting that right’. I believe that attachment is something we need to always be thinking about. For example, when we ‘pull back’ a little from our children because of work commitments or a new baby or a difficult life event, we need to understand why they might initially cope well and then suddenly become far needier than ever before. Or additionally, when a child suddenly won’t take a step we want them to take, such as spending a night in someone else’s house or toilet training, an understanding of attachment as well as temperament is going to help us understand what is going on in his mind.
The attachment literature is also helpful in understanding romantic relationships and it can offer a new understanding of your partner and yourself. One of the fascinating revelations I discovered in the parenting literature is that a long-term partnership with an autonomous person can lead to a change in attachment pattern.22 So if you or your partner had not worked through a difficult childhood, that poor attachment pattern may well ‘lose its grip’ upon the present because of the secure attachment between the two of you — which will allow that working through to safely take place. And this can go the other way as well: a securely attached individual can change their attachment pattern to an insecure one under the influence of a long-term partner.
A secure attachment happens when parents are able to be sensitive to their child’s cues, responsive to his needs and treat him lovingly. This pays instant dividends in both child development and also in behaviour. Children who are securely attached have a distinct set of behaviours — and they are the behaviours we generally want children to have. One cross-cultural study showed that, across all cultures surveyed, people preferred the behaviour of securely attached children.23 So what are these children like?
As long as you are there watching and ready to welcome their return, these are children who will happily go off to explore the world. If you are with them they will usually socialise with new people, but in your absence they are definitely more reserved. When they have been upset they seek comfort from you straight away. There is a strong physical component to that comfort, which works because of the strong body-to-body connection between parent and child in secure attachments. They are soothed quickly and easily most of the time. They show a rich and subtle range of emotions, and are sensitive to them in you also.
My friend Emma wrote of her nine-month-old daughter:
Last night she was the sweetest thing ever. She felt bad (has a cold) and was crying. I went in and picked her up. I was patting her back and thinking impatiently that I wanted to go back to sleep. She leaned back so she was looking at me, really intently. Then she leaned forward and kissed me twice, once on each cheek. Then snuggled down in my arms for a little feed. Not a real feed, just really wanted to lie there. I had no idea a person who is not yet a year old had the emotional range to do that.
At school these children are characterised by:
being generally more persistent than classmates, coupled with a habit of trying even harder when there is a risk of failure
being ‘more independent’ but also able to seek help when needed
their greater social competence (where all else is equal, for instance there is not a barrier to socialisation like a cultural difference, learning difficulties or giftedness)
their strong empathy for others, and
a reduced likelihood of being either a bully or a victim.
There are no guarantees in life, so your child’s secure attachment pattern can be changed by other life events. But a secure and organised attachment is the inside track for becoming a happy, resilient and wise adult.
There are two kinds of insecure attachment, each resulting from a different pattern of parenting. The fact that there is one kind of secure attachment but two kinds of insecure attachment always reminds me of Tolstoy’s famous words: ‘All happy families are happy in the same way, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. And, despite the ‘boxes’ placed around the different types of attachment, most researchers do talk of ‘mixed types’ and ‘difficult to categorise’ when it comes to the insecurely attached mother–child pairs. They arsse all unhappy in their own way.
I find it useful to look at the ‘patterns of behaviour’ in parents and the ‘patterns of behaviour’ children develop as a result.
Some parents simply do not respond to the needy attachment behaviours like crying, tugging on your leg, whimpering and so on. They don’t believe that the relationship between parent and child is particularly important in how that child turns out. So they dismiss their child’s needs for an intimate relationship and only encourage ‘independent behaviours’. While physical care is provided, emotional care is not. This type of parent is, happily, very rare, and called ‘dismissive’ in the parenting literature.
The children produced from this pattern of attachment are described as ‘avoidant’. So how does a child treated this way turn out?
Regardless of the mother’s behaviour, a child’s need to stay close to Mum never disappears. So children have to find a way that is acceptable to Mum of staying close. They quickly learn to be ‘independent and brave’, to go off and explore, not because they feel safe, but because it makes Mum feel safe enough to take an interest in them. What develops is a kind of false independence where the child becomes ‘brave’, but it is not the confident self-motivated exploration of the secure child but exploration done to please the caregiver.
This is an important distinction, as exploration for its own sake is full of the joy of discovery, whereas exploration to please Mum means that the child is not focused on exploring but on Mum. The secure baby who can ‘take his mother for granted’ is able to focus on learning and developing skills, but the ‘avoidant’ baby has development as the second priority.16
So what happens when such a child needs comfort? He will swiftly learn that expressing emotional needs will diminish his connection to his parents. He will learn to go and ‘lick his wounds’ in private. Within a short number of years he will learn to hide his negative emotions even from himself, so well that only various biochemical, heart and immune function tests will be able to detect their presence.
Finally, research is indicating that these children will become hypervigilant in scanning the environment for emotional clues, and then ‘switch them off’ before they can even reach their conscious awareness.24 This is chilling research, because being unable to recognise the emotions of others is a big step towards some of the nastier psychopathologies — from the milder personality disorders all the way through to sociopathic personality disorder. The child who hurts an animal and seems unable to recognise the pain the animal feels (both emotional and physical) is on track to grow into an adult who is comfortable hurting other people in the same way.
When these children go on to parent themselves, unless they have been lucky enough to have developed a secure attachment with someone else, they too will not respond to emotional clues in their children, and so this pattern is transmitted to the next generation.
Dismissive, parenting and avoidant attachment
This is a fictional story that a person beginning to come to terms with a childhood in which they had been dismissively parented might tell.
‘My mother didn’t ever — either she didn’t notice or she didn’t choose to — respond to how I felt. And she went away from me, I mean, she actually moved away from me if I cried or reached out to her. I always had food, I always had a bed, I went to school, the house was kept clean — but I never had love. I never saw love on her face. It was always still, frozen, barren of emotion.
‘My sister was the favourite. I learned, though, how to be like Mother wished. If I was very happy she didn’t mind me being around. If I didn’t ask for love or cuddles or comfort, I could be near her. So I would just do sums, sitting near her feet. I would colour in, and if I didn’t look at her, I didn’t irritate her. So that was how I could still be close. But she always encouraged me to go off and do my own thing. I always got approval for that. A tiny bit of warmth. If I hurt myself, though, I would want so much to ask for a cuddle I would have to walk away. I’d go off by myself to get over it. Because her pushing me away when I needed to be held was worse than the injury. And if I cried, she was just hostile for days. It wasn’t worth it.
‘I remember breaking a finger at the beginning of the holidays once. I hid it, of course, and she didn’t notice, but the teacher worked it out at school on the first day. And I asked her not to do anything about it, but she thought it was abuse, and so she did. Of course there was a lot of trouble over it, and my mother was very angry with me, because people then said she was a neglectful parent.’
The mention of her mother’s frozen expression is important. It’s called the ‘still face’ in parenting literature and it has been shown to be as distressing to babies as a very frightening angry expression on Mum’s face. That still expression is the embodiment of neglect, as the frightening expression is the embodiment of abuse. This is a fearful child, so this relationship would be classified as disorganised as well as insecure.
You can see that ‘still face’ in most adventure movies: the frozen expression that the hero shows in response to threat.[25] When you see it on the face of a mother looking at her child, you know that the mother is perceiving a threat. What kind of threat? Perhaps a threat to her child — she may see a child showing neediness as advertising their vulnerability and therefore unsafe in a predatory world. Or perhaps a threat to her own equilibrium, which may depend on her keeping emotionally distant from the rest of the world? Or is the mother simply depressed? Whatever the cause, the effect on the child is much the same. Instead of a smile leading to oxytocin release and brain growth, the ‘still face’ leads to the release of catecholamines and the loss of brain circuitry.26
The distressing thing is that when people say to vulnerable new mothers things such as, ‘You will spoil that child if you keep picking her up’, they are promoting a dismissive pattern of attachment. And that’s tragic because these children then don’t have such a rich experience of life, because life’s richness comes from emotions and our relationships with other people. Dismissive parenting leads straight to isolation.
In other ways these children can look like strong performers. They do eventually acquire strong skills, as a result of their parent’s keen interest in that aspect of development. They are often successful in work roles as a result. They are keenly motivated.
What these children tend to lack is one of the prerequisites for good impulse control, however. For someone to be able to stop themself doing or saying something that will damage a relationship with another person, they need first of all to be able to empathise with another person. They need to be able to imagine just how those words or that action or non-words or non-action will appear from the other person’s perspective. And, because this child has very rarely experienced that empathy from his parent, he will mostly lack it himself.
This is a huge deficit. Success in life is, above all else, about our relationships.
So how do these children behave?
As babies, they seem only distantly connected to their parents. The frequent smiling and patting of Mum that you expect to see isn’t there. In fact, the very strong body-to-body connection between mother and child is missing altogether. Physical contact is brief and the child is often seen to be avoiding it. They are usually a little distance away from their parents exploring, but their exploration and play is not characterised by the richly varied themes and absorption you see in the securely attached child.
Mum and I believe, and this is not something studied in the literature, that you see more repetition in the play of these children. It can look a bit like an autism spectrum disorder, but it owes more to the fact that these children aren’t really playing but pretending to play while keeping a close watch on Mum. It sets the children up for the need for an unvarying pattern to play and a small repertoire of activities that can be enjoyed.
At school these children might be successful students but not the most successful, as they do not ask for help when they require it. Unsurprisingly, their social skills are markedly poor. Teachers notice, too, their difficulties in telling stories that make emotional sense and which can take into account multiple viewpoints. And for this same reason — appreciating that different people have different views of the same event — these children struggle with conflict resolution with their peers. So they fit very quickly into a pure bully or victim profile, or a bully/victim, with the roles alternating.
Although very few parents fall into the category of ‘dismissive’, a dismissive element is common in Australian parenting styles. Statements like ‘It only counts if it is bleeding’ or ‘Build a bridge and get over it’ or ‘Tell it to someone who cares’ or ‘That’s not worth crying over’ or ‘Come on, it’s not that sad’ are all dismissive. By saying such things our child hears that we believe his feelings are not strong enough to justify his behaviour.
In fact, we are asking them to ‘feel less’, which is not possible, so what they do is listen to their feelings less. Teaching children to disconnect from their emotions is not a good idea as it puts them on the pathway for mental illness later on. If you are feeling little prickles of annoyance with me at this stage — or have even thrown the book across the room (for me, this is a real sign that something has hit a nerve and I need to pay attention) — then you and I have something in common. My insistence that my sons shouldn’t feel despair was dismissive.
On the other end of the attachment scale are the parents who, far from ‘forgetting’ their childhoods, cannot be in the present moment with their own children as their own childhood attachments are still their main focus. In the parenting literature these parents are called ‘preoccupied’.
Where the dismissive parent teaches the child to avoid expressing and, in fact, consciously feeling negative emotions, the preoccupied parent does the reverse. By only inconsistently responding because she’s spending all that time in her own past, this parent teaches her children to amplify all emotions in their efforts to get her to respond.
And often these parents need very strong signals to break through their preoccupation. Because of this, children exaggerate their neediness into whining and crying, even over quite small events, in order to keep their mother on the spot and paying attention. As a result these children do not learn to manage their mood, but they exaggerate emotions in order to keep Mum up to the mark, and on top of that they are most unlikely to leave her side to go and explore. The confidence to explore comes when a child knows that his parent is always watching over him, ready to help if it is required and to share the moment with him. The preoccupied parent is hardly to be relied upon and the child knows this, and remains glued to her side.16 All in all, these are the very whiny, very angry, very clingy kids. They are called ‘ambivalent’ or ‘resistant’ in the parenting literature.
When these mothers do respond they don’t always respond appropriately. They might grab a child without warning, or comfort a child who is not distressed, or laugh when a child is upset, or give them a toy to play with when the child wants comfort. Even while apparently interacting with their child, they are still so closely engaged with their own emotions that they fail to register how their child is feeling — and therefore don’t respond to how their child is feeling. They might be occupying the same space, but there is a lack of emotional connection between them. That lack of empathy from a parent will prevent the child developing the ability to manage his own mood.5
This emotional mismatch usually leads to a child becoming increasingly distressed in an effort to ‘break through’ their mother’s absorption. Even when the mother finally ‘wakes up’ to her child’s emotions things don’t improve. When these children actually receive the comfort they have been asking for, they don’t calm down. Close proximity to Mum does not help them feel soothed after all, and sometimes it even further unbalances their flailing emotions. The body-to-body connection that is so much part of a secure attachment is missing from the relationship.27
The preoccupied parent
This is a fictional story that a parent still caught up in the events of her childhood while attempting to parent might tell:
‘You know, she’d be so upset some days and she’d just fall apart. And so it fell to me to do lots of things: I cleaned the house, I brought up my siblings. She’d sort of come in now and then with them, and she’d often get it wrong, you know, come on too strong with us, miss what we were really on about.
‘She didn’t like me for doing her jobs — she could be a real bitch, actually. But someone had to do those things. And I was the eldest girl, so I kept on doing them, even though my brother was the favourite, because it was something I could do to make a difference. But he was the golden boy and he still is. He can’t put a foot wrong.
‘I’d have done the house from top to bottom and he’d have just stared at the TV all afternoon or gone out and kicked a football around some oval. He’d be the one to get the real thanks — I mean, she’d thank me, but the benefits always seemed to somehow land at his door. Now Golden Boy doesn’t have full-time work because he’s really slowly making an important documentary on early TV shows, but that’s okay because he can stay with Mum rent-free and eat the food I cook and bring over for her. I get really angry with the pair of them, I can tell you.
‘I shout at her and I say, “Mum, if you’d just spend a bit of your time with my kids that would be great. Golden Boy is actually an adult now, and you are missing out on my kids right now and they are so beautiful.” My two younger sisters have just disappeared from our lives — perhaps they had the right idea?
‘I’ve tried to limit what I do for my mother but I always come back in the end to the fact that she is my mother and she does actually need me.
‘There are days when I want to fall apart too, just like her, but I don’t. My kids aren’t going to get turned into little caregivers like I was and get screwed up. I get angry lots of the time, and I just can’t think straight when I’m angry either; it makes working out what to do with the kids so hard when they’re difficult. But I hope they don’t just disappear from my life like my sisters have from Mum’s; even though it’s so hard to cope, I don’t know what I’d do without them. They’re my life.
‘Mum’s not always so uptight, though. Sometimes we have great times together and we laugh and I can see the kids just basking in it, and they relax, you can see that, and I wish it could always be that way. They’re my favourite times in the whole world. But they don’t last. I can’t keep it up and neither can she. I don’t know why. The kids start whining and carrying on over absolutely nothing — except for Lloyd, he’s my good boy, he helps me keep the others on track — and I lose my shirt and I whack them. I feel so guilty then, and I make it up to them by doing something special with them — but that is so tiring to keep up and I’m trying to look after Mum as well …’
You might have noticed the role reversal — the fact that the daughter cared for her siblings and ran the house. This is a marker for disorganisation as well as ambivalent attachment. Like everything else in parenting, this tends to travel down the generations, taking on a slightly different shape with each new generation.
Children take on adult roles not because they want to, but in order to make themselves feel safe. It is not in a child’s long-term interests to take on adult roles in childhood, no matter how remarkably ‘mature’ and special they seem to observers. I’m not suggesting children should not help in roles around the house, but that they should not take on the ‘emotional’ role of an adult. Taking on an adult role puts a child at risk of growing up to have borderline personality disorder.28
At the heart of this story lies every child’s need for a secure attachment. Our storyteller is still looking for that from her mother. Her adult life has been a quest to receive that acknowledgment and approval — it was withheld in childhood and she’s never got over doing without it. The tragedy is that a quest should always end with someone finding the grail — but in this case, the grail is a change to someone else’s behaviour. Like love itself, a change to another person’s behaviour is not something you get as a reward. The gates for change are within, and they open from the inside: only the person themself has the key.
Our storyteller’s quest is fruitless, but she can’t see that yet. Every now and then she has a moment of ‘true connection’ with her mother and, rewarded by this, she keeps on.
At a recent conference I attended I was told that, while a mother being preoccupied with her past was the main reason for her children developing an ‘ambivalent’ attachment, there are also other reasons.29 Plain old ‘inconsistent’ parenting was the first of these and I’d spotted that for myself. One of the hard things is that we are all busier these days. The kind of inconsistent on-and-off parenting that was once associated with parents with the ‘preoccupied’ psychological status is occurring in parents without this kind of personal history. We need to be very careful that this isn’t a trap we fall into.
I’ve come to realise that it doesn’t matter what we are preoccupied with, whether it’s writing a book or something that happened to us, if we only inconsistently respond to our children we are going to see the same effects. I find it is difficult to stop in the middle of a train of thought to listen to Rafael tell me that his Bionicle now has a little brother or to Sam telling me that the water pressure at the bottom of the ocean is equivalent to so many jumbo jets sitting on top of my head, but, as I’ve become increasingly familiar with the attachment research and the consequences of preoccupied parenting, I do now stop and listen.
What else creates ambivalence in children?
Actually forbidding them to go out and explore has the same impact as inconsistency. Instead of a child sticking close to Mum in order to keep her up to the mark, we keep a child close ourselves. So if we feel that the world is a very dangerous place we will do this, and we will also do this if we ‘need our children to need us’. In both cases, we are heightening our children’s ‘attachment system’ — the part of them that needs a parent close to feel safe — so they don’t feel able to go out and explore the world.
The children are the ‘obviously in trouble’ children by the time they reach school. Their intense emotionality puts them at immediate risk of being bullied. Having not been empathised with properly by their parents means that they cannot empathise well with others. They are the children who frequently behave inappropriately or ‘out of tune’, having missed the emotional cues of the other children.
The self-regulation skills that lead to resilience are also missing. In particular, good impulse control is not rewarded in this type of parenting. The children have learned to immediately turn their emotions ‘up to eleven’ in order to get what they want. And, with their focus on keeping Mum available through whingeing and clinging, these children are behind on their skill development. This puts them at immediate disadvantage when it comes to learning in the formal setting of school. Finally, the seesawing emotions, the difficulties reading other people and the leftover issues from childhood put these children on track to parent just as they have been parented.
But transmission of insecure attachment patterns is not set in stone because we can change. The human ability to metamorphose is phenomenal.