Continuity and Discontinuity of Attachment from Infancy to Adolescence - Coursework Example

Continuity and Discontinuity of Attachment from Infancy to Adolescence Introduction There have been factors that affect the continuity and the coherence in attachment from infancy to late adolescence and the factors that affect them. There is however, information that confirms that infants who are more disorganized will eventually be more likely to be disorganized even in late adolescence. There is also significant correlation of continuity and change spanned in a variety of age periods and includes the temperament of the infant, the maternal stress life, the family functioning before the advent of adolescence, child mal-treatment, and features of the home environment. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the empirical findings on the matter of stability of attachment from infancy until adolescents. More specifically the paper will attempt to address the longitudinal development and how stability and attachment are affected across the developmental periods from infancy to adolescence. Attachment theory as initially stated by early psychologists such as Bowlby state that the experience that an individual has at the primary or the initial level of care leads to expectations and beliefs about the personal self and the world. This therefore ultimately affects the relationships amongst individuals and these are what are known as the internal working models. These occur even in light of experience throughout the childhood, through adolescence and right through to the adolescence. This has been confirmed by several studies which have indicated that factors such as divorce, illnesses or the kind of parenthood, drug abuse or death may have negative effects of the change that may be felt in terms of the security of the individual (Hamilton 693). In general, therefore, this paper aims at having a unique discussion of the attachment of stability in the examination of issues of development and attachment stability and change. Stability of Attachment across Infancy There are mixed results concerning the factors that contribute to stability across the period that a child is at the infancy stage and therefore the effects are likely to be varied. However, most of these studies confirm that attachment changes as a function of the events that may disrupt the life of a child and how frequent they occur. Events such as the death of a family member or the divorce or separation of parents may have a negative effect in the care giving of the child and therefore have an impact on the quality of changes in the attachment relationship. In addition, the maltreatment of a child sustains a pattern of disorganization as the child gets so frightened and leaves them unprotected. In the trajectory of security and the child remaining secure across the infancy period, there are factors such as the rising level of competence and maturity of the parent, a low incidence of negative life events, non-punitive methods of bearing the child amongst other factors in the child development. These also include sociability, competent exploration and few problems in terms of behaviour are important in ensuring that the child has a secure pattern of positive attachment. However, there are factors that lead to insecurity of the child during infancy such as alcoholism of the parent, higher levels of maternal punitive, parenting that is domineering and insensitive, depression and higher incidences of negative life events. Most of these are affected by the maternal characteristics that play a key role in the development of the stability and attachment of the child during infancy. Edwards, Eiden and Leonard (556) conducted a study to investigate the temporary connection constancy through early stages and made an effort to identify the factors that predict steadiness and alteration within a high-risk sample of children whose parents had a deep alcoholism problem. The participants were about two hundred and twenty families who were participated in the infant Odd Condition process when they had children between the ages of twelve and eighteen months. The results suggested reasonable stability of attachment and change classifications showing a figure of 60 % for mothers and 53 % for fathers from the age of twelve months to eighteen months. It confirmed that higher level of parent’s alcohol symptoms, depression of the mother, antisocial behaviour by the mother and a higher level of undesirable nurturing distress during play were experienced in families with established self-doubting infant-mother affection equated to those in stable security. This implies that children with stable secure relationships with their mother had significant higher levels of positive affect and father-infant steady self-doubt was linked with lower levels of paternal optimistic appearance and shortage of compassion during play. The survey also showed that children with stable secure relationships with their male parents experienced lower levels of negative affect expression and negative emotionality but with an increased positive affect expression. It has also been found that infants who have difficult temperament give the parents or the caregivers challenges and can make the caregiver frustrated and uncertainty to those charged with giving care. It is also true those mothers who fail to adapt to the needs of the child and provide sensitive care giving are likely to leave the child ambivalent about the ability of the parents to provide care and protection during infancy. This research found that there are distinct predictors that are associated with stability of the infant and its attachment to the mother and the infant attachment in relation to the father. Stability of Attachment from Infancy to Early Childhood and Across the Early Childhood Period At the stage where an individual is undergoing early childhood, the attachment relationship changes into a partnership that majorly focuses on the goals and secure-base behaviour can only be shown through the communication with the person giving the care. At this stage, there is the strengthening of constructive experiences and there is no restriction to behaviour that is sought through non-verbal proximity (Moss et al 780). There is now new procedure for the assessment of the quality of attachment to the persons offering the care and the factors to be taken into consideration include the position of the body, visual attention, the content and the manner of speech that is directed towards the parents or the caregivers. At this period, most children who are disorganized find themselves developing behaviour that is aimed at controlling the parent in a care-giving or punitive manner (Main and Jude 420). The children at this stage use behaviour that is authoritarian in conjunction with the caregiver and may include commands, which are harsh, verbal threats and occasional physical aggression towards the parent or guardian. They direct the activities of the parents as well as the conversations through the structuring of interactions in a manner that is both emotional and helpful. There are minimal studies within this area of attachment when the child is in early childhood or in the preschool period but a study by Main and Jude merely looked at the stability of attachments in a low-risk sample of children. Their families found that the stability rate was 84% for the infant-mother attachment while for the infant-father attachment it was 61%. Similarly, in a study by Bar-Haim, Sutton, & Fox (381) that studied stability and change of supplement in a low-risk model of 48 children at 14 to 58 months of age assessed through the Strange Situation procedure and a little modification found that there is relative stability between the ages of 14 to 24 months showing a percentage of 64%. It also showed a lack of stability of between either fourteen months or twenty-four months and fifty-eighteen months showing a rate of 38%. In this study, the mothers in the steady and secure group were found to have a superior number of life events that are positive in nature while their children showed openness in terms of their emotions as measured through the Separation Anxiety Test (SAT). In another study conducted by the NICHD Early Child Care Research Network which examined the stability as well as the change in a low-risk sample of 1, 060 families of children between the ages of 15 and 36 months showed that there is uncertain steadiness of attachment from 15 to 36 months as assessed using the Strange Situation procedure. These studies confirm that in early childhood, there is that tendency for the child to make use of coercive strategies that are available to them and that children who change to an insecure pattern were most likely to enter into about 10 hours per week of childcare. The above-mentioned studies though inconsistent present a stability rate that range from a high of 84 % as found by Main and Cassidy to barely above the chance that is k= .06 as found by the NICHD (847). The inconsistencies may be due to the differences in the range of ages, the size of the sample or issues on measurements. The factors that contributed to the stable insecurity included the experiencing of negative live events, lesser education of the mother, higher income as compared to the needs, lesser maternal sensitivity or marital dissatisfaction amongst other factors. The results also underscore the importance of the quality of care-giving in influencing the stability of attachment during the early childhood or preschool period as well as the roll played by the environment. At the early childhood period or the preschool period, the experiencing of negative life events is a key factor that affects the child and his continuity. The quality of the marital relationship will also play a role in predicting change towards the factor of insecurity, which shows that the relationship between the parents also affects the relationship between the parent and the child especially in a dysfunctional marriage. Stability of Attachment across Adolescence In adolescence, the attachment relationship with those that give care is quite different form that in early childhood as at these periods, the adolescent usually conceives his attachment figure as having their own needs and may consider them. This shows that the adolescent becomes increasingly less dependent on the parents in a number of ways though the parents remain important in one way or the other. The attachment needs and behaviours at adolescence are therefore not relinquished but gradually transferred to peers or those in similar age-sets or groups though the adolescence figure still relies on the attachment figure for protection and care (Allen 1792). Ammaniti et al (328) have previously investigated stability of attachment representation amongst thirty-one low-risks children of between the ages of ten and fourteen among Italian adolescents through the administration of the Attachment Interview for Childhood and Adolescence (AICA) method earlier on developed by Ammaniti amongst other researchers. This interview was a revised version of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) for participants within the late childhood period and early adolescence which taps into the attachment representations by adults or their internal working models through an assessment of general and specific recollections from childhood. It was hen coded based on the quality of the content and discourse and classified adults as Autonomous, Dismissing, Preoccupied or Unresolved. The autonomous individuals usually describe the attachment relationships in a manner that is balanced and the discourse is non-defensive as well as coherent while those that are dismissing lower the chances of the negative aspects of their attachment relationships and have a defensive discourse in nature. The preoccupied individuals are usually preoccupied with their parents and possess angry representations of the past while the unresolved ones exhibit trauma due to either loss or abuse that has not been resolved. From the above study, it was found that the rate of stability is 71 % across a period of four years, tat of dismissing was 78 %, secure 74 %, while the preoccupied and unresolved both stood at 50%. The findings in the unresolved and preoccupied categories are far much off the expected average because there was few numbers of participants in the study at these categories. The participants also tended to show more dismissing strategies across the four years and feel more rejected by their parents and therefore a higher chance of detttachment from the parent at this period of development. Similarly, Zimmermann and Becker-Stoll (107) also investigated the stability of attachment in a low-risk sample among forty-one adolescents by assessing them through the AAI when they were at the ages of 16 and 18 and found that the quality of attachment remained at a relatively stable 77 % over the course of two years. Allen, Boykin McElhaney, Kuperminc, and Jodi (1805) also examined change and stability in attachment security amongst a sample of about a hundred moderately at-risk adolescents and the attachment assessed using the AAI Q-set developed by (Kobak et al 231) at the ages of 16 and 18 years of age. The results in this survey indicated substantial stability in attachment security (r = .61) and it was found that intermesh of discontinuity, adolescents who perceive their mothers as more supportive when disagreements arose made serious gains in terms of security. Adolescents who at the age of sixteen were in the over-personalized in disagreeing with their parents had lower levels of security when they turned eighteen. The change in attachment security was due to many factors amongst them the over-personalization of the family interactions, poverty and depression, which caused a 15 % variance. Therefore, the above studies of examining the stability of attachment in adolescence which used the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) or a modified one endeavoured to look at the continuity or discontinuity that adolescents usually undergo. It can be concluded that the stability of attachment in both the low-risk and high-risk samples of adolescents is stable. However, an important limitation in the study by Ammaniti et al was that the researchers did not put into consideration such factors that would ably explain the process of stability and change in the putting up of an attachment system across adolescence. All in all, they show that adolescents who perceived their parents as supportive during disagreements made significant gains in terms of security and that an internal factor such as depression and those who contribute to identity development play a significant role in predicting stability and change of attachment amongst adolescents. This is because adolescents usually struggle with identity formation and depression during this period of development especially between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. The interaction patterns of families help in the prediction of stability and attachment change amongst adolescents thus showing that adolescents usually want to be supported while parents while at the same time maintain independence. External factors such as poverty may also play a significant role in the prediction of discontinuity at the period when one is experiencing adolescence. Conclusion This research paper has reviewed the variables that influence stability and change attachment across the development of a person from infancy to the period that the person becomes an adolescent. It identifies the various factors that play a key role in influencing continuity and discontinuity across the stated periods and additionally, the variables that are important in the prediction of security and stability are examined. At infancy, the factors or variables include maternal depression, antisocial behaviour, employment of the mother and the childbearing mothers have been found to affect stability and security while external factors such as negative life events also affect the stability. At the early childhood, the factors play little role in predicting change in attachment and stability but there are factors such as maternal insensitivity and change in attachment classification that still play a role in predicting change in attachment and security. At the adolescence stage, the most important factors are usually related to communication and identity especially when it comes to interactions of the family as well as depression. However, there are still several questions that have not been answered by these researches on stability of attachment relationships such as the little knowledge on the stability of father-child attachment as opposed to mother-child attachment. Research should also in future look at other factors that could be influential in the prediction of stability and change in attachment relationships and how they affect the quality of the relationship. There is therefore the need to employ other methods of assessing attachment relationships and this would give the persons or stakeholders in this field a wider source of knowledge in handling matters to do with the longitudinal development of a person across all ages. These studies are important as they may help parents, guardians or the care-givers to adopt the correct strategies to properly instil the right model of child development and shield them from both the internal and external factors that affect the development of a child right from infancy through to adolescence. Works Cited Allen, Joseph P, Kathleen B. McElhaney, Gabriel P. Kuperminc, and Kathleen M. Jodl. "Stability and Change in Attachment Security Across Adolescence." Child Development. 75.6 (2004): 1792-1805. Print. Ammaniti, Massimo, Ijzendoorn M. Van, Anna M. Speranza, and Renata Tambelli. "Internal Working Models of Attachment During Late Childhood and Early Adolescence: an Exploration of Stability and Change." Attachment & Human Development. 2.3 (2000): 328-346. Print. Bar-Haim, Yair, D B. Sutton, Nathan A. Fox, and Robert S. Marvin. "Stability and Change of Attachment at 14, 24, and 58 Months of Age: Behavior, Representation, and Life Events." Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 41.3 (2000): 381-388. Print. Edwards, Ellen P, Rina D. Eiden, and Kenneth E. Leonard. "Impact of Fathers Alcoholism and Associated Risk Factors on Parent-Infant Attachment Stability from 12 to 18 Months." Infant Mental Health Journal. 25.6 (2004): 556-579. Print. Hamilton, Claire E. "Continuity and Discontinuity of Attachment from Infancy Through Adolescence." Child Development. 71.3 (2000): 690-694. Print. Kobak, R R, Holland E. Cole, Rayanne Ferenz-Gillies, William S. Fleming, and Wendy Gamble. "Attachment and Emotion Regulation During Mother-Teen Problem Solving: a Control Theory Analysis." Child Development. 64.1 (1993): 231-245. Print. Main, Mary, and Jude Cassidy. "Categories of Response to Reunion with the Parent at Age 6: Predictable from Infant Attachment Classifications and Stable Over a 1-Month Period." Developmental Psychology. 24.3 (1988): 415-26. Print. Moss, E, C Cyr, JF Bureau, GM Tarabulsy, and K Dubois-Comtois. "Stability of Attachment During the Preschool Period." Developmental Psychology. 41.5 (2005): 773-83. Print. NICHD, Early C. C. R. N. "Child-care and Family Predictors of Preschool Attachment and Stability from Infancy." Developmental Psychology. 37.6 (2001): 847-62. Print. Zimmermann, Paul, and F Becker-Stoll. "Stability of Attachment Representations During Adolescence: the Influence of Ego-Identity Status." Journal of Adolescence. 25.1 (2002): 107-24. Print. Read More