Relationships and the Developing Mind
Attachment is the very essential bonding process that takes place between a baby and initially his mother and later other caring family members and friends. The first year of life is the most valuable for attachment to begin and positive physical touch is the most important of the sensory experiences that build it.
This article is excerpted from ‘Relationships and the Developing Mind’ By Dr Daniel Siegel.
Relationships and the Developing Mind
Children need adults in their lives with whom they can be attached. Attachment can involve a few selected individuals, including parents, grandparents, other relatives, nannies, childcare providers, and preschool teachers. These “selective attachments” offer children the chance to develop an internal model of security about the world, and allow their minds to develop a sense of emotional well-being and psychological resilience.
Attachment relationships are important in the unfolding of the emotional and social development of the child during the early years of life. Development is an ongoing process, and so close, emotionally involving relationships continue to influence us throughout the lifespan. The importance of the first years may be that the brain structures that mediate social and emotional functioning begin to develop during this time in a manner that appears to be dependent upon interpersonal experience.
The areas of the brain responsible for emotional and social functioning are first developing in the early years of life, this is the time when attachment experiences can shape an individuals patterns of self regulation. This emotional and social learning, then, may create “predispositions” in a child that have their origins in patterns of attachment.
Adults in Children’s Lives
As parents we are faced with the challenges of modern life in which information bombards us daily on what to do and not to do with our children. One lesson from these findings of neurobiology and from attachment studies is that relationships with a selective few adults, not sensory flooding, are the most important form of experience for the growing mind. Adults who are sensitive to a child’s signals, who can offer consistent and predictable behaviour, and who care about the child’s internal experiences are those that are likely to foster a secure attachment.
A child may have a different form of attachment with each caregiver, depending on the nature of the specific patterns in communication and interaction. Attachment is a relationship measure, not a feature of the child alone. Some authors argue, in fact, that having several selective attachments may in fact be good for the child in order to have a variety of close, personal experiences. This variety may confer a sense of resilience by preparing her for the complex world of other individuals outside the home.
In this manner, a selective few other caring adults - such as grandparents, childcare teachers, nannies, and other involved dedicated individuals - may serve as attachment figures. A child will seek proximity to such a figure, go to him when upset for a sense of reassurance as a “safe haven”, and develop an internal model of that person and their relationship to give a sense of “evocative memory”, in which it is believed an internal multi-sensory image of the attachment figure can be evoked at times of stress.
This sense of the attachment figure’s face, smell, and voice, and the patterns of interpersonal communication that characterise the child’s relationship with the individual, all can be retrieved when needed as an image of that attachment figure. Clearly, relationships that are “problematic” will not serve to soothe the child as well as those that are “secure”.
The above excerpts from “Relationships and the Developing Mind” are quoted with permission from Dr Dan Siegel.
