Attachment

"Bowlby’s Theory of Attachment, first published in the 1950s, was a very simple but powerful idea. In essence he told us something that we all knew, which was that the emotional bond between a parent and a child is really important. But he didn’t just say this anecdotally, he said it on the basis of his clinical experience. He was working at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where he worked with children who hadn’t had the luxury of strong relationships with their parents. Many had been brought up in a children’s home, and many had developed delinquency or other problems by their teens. And just as Steve Pinker looked at language from the perspective of great apes or dolphins, Bowlby looked at attachment behaviour from the perspective of many different species. He unified the study of parent-offspring relations across the animal kingdom. The reason I’ve selected it here is that it’s a very nice example of an environmental influence that affects all of our outcomes in adulthood. Whereas Pinker talks about genetic or innate factors that predispose humans to produce and understand language, Bowlby reminds us that our early experience and our social environment is equally important. What Bowlby’s studies have shown, now confirmed by scientists who came after him, is that the quality of your attachment to your parents can predict not just short-term outcomes, like how well you do at school and your social popularity, but also long-term outcomes like your risk of divorce and your risk of developing personality disorders in adulthood. Sometimes people imagine that children with autism don’t form any relationships at all, but that’s a myth. They do show selective relationships just like other children, showing a preference for their caregiver, whether that’s a biological parent or a foster parent. They are capable of showing strong emotional attachment. But you’re right in that attachment is likely to be different for an autistic child. A typically developing child who is securely attached would be expected to be very confident and able to go out and explore the world. In the case of an autistic child, clearly there are many other factors that could mediate whether that person will end up socially withdrawn or very confident. This interview was first published in 2010 and updated in 2024."