11 ms·

Attachment theory is having a breakout moment

145 points by daegloe 10y ago

cylinder 10y ago
NYT seems to be the national hub for pop-science these days.
theGimp 10y ago
A lot of connections made in that article, with no data to back any of it.
- dang 10y ago
  This is the kind of shallow, uncharitable dismissal that we need less of on Hacker News. Obviously a popular news treatment isn't going to supply "data". When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.
  - blazespin 10y ago
    Maybe a little less paywall nytimes on HN as well. I dunno, but I find a lot of their journalism is just 90% padding. I suspect we see a lot of distrust in media isn't just that they're inaccurate, but they're often filled with non experts trying to sound like experts by padding nonsense speculation into their articles. I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"
    - jayajay 10y ago
      NY Times is like a garbage can full of crinkled up rough drafts of poems, with a crinkled up Scientific American article somewhere near the bottom.
      - sctb 10y ago
        We've asked you to comment civilly and substantively before, so please do this. We have to ban accounts that won't.
        jayajay 10y ago
        The average user downvotes, flags, or attacks content they disagree with. I have only ever upvoted and responded with effort to people who do the same to me. If you feel like you need to ban me from this community, that is your prerogative.
    - dang 10y ago
      The standard here is to judge each article on its own merit, and this is a good piece, certainly above the median. The title is beyond stupid, but reporters don't write those. We changed it to a representative phrase from the text, as usual with baity titles. On the paywall thing please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.
  - closed 10y ago
    Not to mention that the article links to a meta-analysis, which is a pretty good place to start!
  - taeric 10y ago
    I both agree and disagree with you. A popular news treatment doesn't have to have supplied all of the data. However, it is free to link or directly reference the data. And a large part of the problem in many reporting places is that the data wasn't actually there. So, I agree we can't hold everyone to a super high standard of "show me the data!" However, I do think we should be moving further in that direction. Anecdotally, in this field it is especially important. Parents get enough crap as it is. Most of it completely unsubstantiated. So, please, less of that crap. If there is advice that can help. Give it and the circumstances that it could help in. If there is a new line that people are investigating, discuss it. But don't over reach on what is capable. Present hypotheses as falsifiable assertions that people are researching. Not as assertions that are merely waiting to be validated.
  - redundant_ 10y ago
    Shut the fuck up, dang. You're a shit moderator, who wants everyone to think happy thoughts. You moderate the wrong people, and fail to deal with the real world in a rational manner.
  - thisrod 10y ago
    To an outsider, this theory sounds like a really hard one to test. The hypothesis is that experiences in infancy condition adult behaviour, so someone would need to track a large cohort of people for decades. That kind of thing is rarely done. And that is just the start. Once it's been shown that bad parents have permanently bad kids, how do you demonstrate causality? Maybe there is a bad people gene that they all have. Maybe the cause is the physical effects of stress during pregnancy. Or the effects of alcohol consumption: no doubt that correlates with the kind of parental behaviour that's being blamed. Sure, you can look at adoption, twins, etc. At that point, we're talking about a really impressive series of experiments, which deserve a bit more than, "it's been scientifically verified," even in a newspaper story.
  - mwexler 10y ago
    Attachment theory within the early areas: lots of great science. Applying it to what feels like every aspect of human interaction and decision making: not so much. Attachment theory was hot in the 90s as well, with lots of not so great studies trying to show impact of attachment style on anything folks could come up with, and I see some of the same errors being repeated today. That being said, where it applies, it's provides a nice explanation of interaction patterns in relationships.
freditup 10y ago
> By the end of our first year, we have stamped on our baby brains a pretty indelible template of how we think relationships work, based on how our parents or other primary caregivers treat us. It seems that the article is stating that one's attachment system is developed primarily in their first year of life? If attachment theory is true, I would've guessed that the first ten or twelve years of life would all contribute. > [many people] are insecurely attached because their early experiences were suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening)... If the first year is the formative year for one's attachment disposition, the meaning of "overbearing" is much different than say, it would be for a ten year old or early teenager. I'm curious what period of life these studies were looking at.
- Nrsolis 10y ago
  At the risk of becoming a target for abuse, one of the big breakthroughs I had in therapy was connecting with a therapist who was able to use attachment theory to help me understand my feelings and emotions in the context of romantic relationships. As a child, I lost my mother to cancer and my father was alternatively abusive or absent. I carried those scars forward into adulthood. Therapy grounded partly in attachment theory helped me and I'm glad to see it gaining ground as a useful tool to help people.
  - Domenic_S 10y ago
    I'm glad that worked for you. I heard somewhere in my teens a doctor who said essentially that we spend our adult lives trying to recreate our childhood relationships and if we find our adult relationships lacking, that connection is the first place to investigate.
  - mrec 10y ago
    I'm curious - why were you worried that this comment might make you a target for abuse?
    - tutufan 10y ago
      There's certainly plenty of abuse posted in response to comments here.
_yvjs 10y ago
Alternate perspective: "Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinking_the_Transmission_Gap_What_Behavioral_Genetics_and_Evolutionary_Psychology_Mean_for_Attachment_Theory_A_Comment_on_Verhage_et_al_2016 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin... "Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439 I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.
- venamresm__ 10y ago
  Why not add to this list the following: "Three Laws of Behavior Genetic and What They Mean", http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf "Why Do People Believe that Birth Order Has Important Effects on Personality?", http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm
RodericDay 10y ago
A buddy of mine has a 2.5 year old daughter. They're not going full-tilt gender-neutral, but as engineers, they're also conscious of not just giving her dolls and whatnot. Anyway, her mom from the get-go has had her wear both dresses, pants, snowsuits, a big variety of clothing. The other day she refused to wear pants. "If I don't wear a dress, nobody will tell me I'm pretty!". A 2.5 year old. It's crazy how much kids pick up in such a tiny period of time.
- bigmanwalter 10y ago
  I've heard an extremely similar story from a friend. First I thought "Wow, what are the chances?", but it turns out that the Internet's a small place. Hi Harold.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  Another finding is that young kids feel more secure when they wear clothes that confirm their gender. This is why princess dresses and girls clothes in that awful shade of purple/pink are so popular.
- jandrese 10y ago
  When my twins (boy and girl) were two the boy started dressing up in the princess dresses that his sister got. We thought it was adorable but didn't push him one way or the other. The only negative is that he was pretty rough on them. Now that they are three, this has morphed into him wearing his Batman costume from Halloween whenever he gets a chance--even though he's going through a growth spurt and the costume now has old man utility belt. I guess maybe he just likes to dress up. His sister is the opposite, she will wear the same outfit day after day unless we make her change. Kids are all different.
- concinds 10y ago
  It's fine to let kids dress the way they want, but quite a few parents go too far with it and seem to want to force their children into an androgynous self-expression instead of letting their kids develop their own identity. Feeling feminine may be very important for some girls and less for others, and has much more to do with personality than with "culture". Stymieing that isn't in the child's interest. Not saying this is the case for your friend, but something to keep in mind.
jayajay 10y ago
Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction? Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents? These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.
- xg15 10y ago
  No.
- cowardlydragon 10y ago
  Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)? Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked? Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.
  - jayajay 10y ago
    trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes What would you suggest a society of N = 620 people should do if there are 20 infertile women, and the resource state permits that only 600 of them can make it until the next resource drop? Should they let fate determine who the 20 deaths will go to? Or should they be smart? Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? At some point, engineering society is the difference between having a society and not having one. There may have been many tribes and villages that perished in history because organisms did not understand how to engineer viable populations (e.g. the difference between sending an old woman to gather berries instead of a younger fertile woman). For example, you would not let someone become "trans" because they don't like being a woman, if your population size is too small. They'll have to suck it up and copulate. As will people who are gay and asexual. There is no room for these modern concepts when the population size is critical. But, this is too emotionally difficult to understand. We have been pampered with "rights" in large N society. We won't understand this until we hit a resource critical stage and we are forced to make harder decisions about our population. If you have been to civil court, you will start to wonder about which humans should stop reproducing first. Parents who beat their children, verbally abuse them, and use drugs will likely be the first to go. At some point, a decision will need to be made and our morals will be redefined to do what is necessary. Until then, you can be happy that you will not live to see such a time. You and I are so damn lucky. Someone someday will be making those decisions, and whoever they are, they deserve our respect, not our dismissal, disapproval, and hostility.
yomly 10y ago
How do we guard against this when it is becoming increasingly the case that both parents work full-time? It seems like parenthood is itself more than a full-time job...
- orthoganol 10y ago
  From a childhood development textbook I once read, having a parent around during the day vs. a nanny apparently doesn't make much of a difference. A nanny, relative, or any caregiver giving regular attention typically has the same effects as if she/ he were a parent.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    There's a parenting book out there that will tell you whatever it is you want to hear.
    - orthoganol 10y ago
      "parenting book" != childhood development / developmental psychology textbook that is the 101 textbook at many elite universities. I mention the book elsewhere in this thread.
  - astrobe_ 10y ago
    ... and can do terrible damage as well. Keep an eye on them.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      That's true of anyone.
robbiep 10y ago
For anyone interested in a good overview of attachment theory, there was a Science Vs. episode recently on it: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/ the standout thing in there being the definition of 'well-attached'
- ohthehugemanate 10y ago
  Worth noting the difference between attachment theory and attachment parenting. Attachment theory is a psychological model. It proposes that during early childhood, we learn how to respond "within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones, or perceiving a threat." We learn this by modeling the behavior of our parents. Attachment parenting is a parenting philosophy (not a consistent theory) invented and spread to a popular audience in the 90's by evangelical christian pediatrician William Sears. It proposes that mothers should maximize physical contact with her infant by wearing the baby during the day, co-sleeping at night, breastfeeding, and responding immediately (or pre-emptively) to all crying. The philosophy recommends women stay in the home to focus on child rearing in this way for the first three years. After that, motherhood should be their "supreme career." After the philosophy was formulated, Sears made an ex post connection to attachment theory, but is otherwise unrelated. One of them is a respectable scientific theory; the other is a very lucrative fad of anti-woman, patriarchal bullshit with no basis in science.
  - robbiep 10y ago
    Well put
gammarator 10y ago
Parental genetics are far more important than parenting style in determining what kind of person you turn out to be. And the "nurture" that matters is your peers, not your parents. Skeptical? I highly recommend this book-length treatment of the research literature: https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-Updated/dp/1439101655/ https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-U... Unless they are doing twin & adoption studies (hard!), attachment researchers are conflating parenting practices (these warm and loving parents had a warm & loving kid!) with genetics.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  The nature vs nurture argument is not going to be settled by one book. I can see if you raised some shitty kids how the "it's mostly nature" theory would be attractive. I believe it's a combination of both nature and nurture.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    However, nature feeds into nurture and not the other way around. Is you tried raising a disabled child or one with extreme variant of personality you would know that such conditions tend to enact sets of behaviour in the environment and parents. Generally not conducive to proper upbringing one way or another.
mcoliver 10y ago
Attachment parenting has some merits but is a bit over the top in my opinion. Do I want my kid to start screaming the minute I walk away or hand them to someone else? Absolutely not. I want them to be self confident and happy knowing that I would not leave them in a dangerous situation, give them to a bad person, and that I will come back for them. That is a truly "secure" child.
- spraak 10y ago
  You're misunderstanding how attachment parenting works. In fact it's just as you'd like, that through this way of relating with your child/ren they become secure in their own sense of self. It is when the parents too early leave the child alone that they don't form a stable sense of self.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    Actually, this is exactly how I've seen it work with some parents who subscribe to attachment parenting.
- jvvw 10y ago
  It's worth pointing out that there isn't any evidence (that I know of at least - I would be very interested to see any) of a link between 'attachment parenting' and secure attachment as defined by attachment theory, despite the similar names and the fact that attachment parenting is sometimes presented as a way to achieve secure attachment.
- ohthehugemanate 10y ago
  To be clear: attachment theory is a normal scientific theory which describes one aspect of early childhood relationship development. Attachment _parenting_ is a fad parenting philosophy with no basis in science. It's founder, William Sears, explains that after coming up with the philosophy out of whole cloth, he made the connection to attachment theory. You can raise a securely attached (in the scientific sense) child without following Sears' evangelical christian "attachment parenting" rulebook. Lots of people do.
orthoganol 10y ago
You may find it interesting to read about attachment type correlations with certain countries/ cultures, from a developmental psychology textbook I have: Perhaps surprisingly, the relative incidence of different attachment styles, as measured using Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, varies dramatically across cultures (Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). Consider, for example, the substantial cultural differences shown in Table 6.2. The majority of German infants studied were measured as insecurely attached (mostly avoidant, or Type A). Japanese infants showed no avoidant attachments whatsoever, and they were almost three times as likely as their American counterparts to show anxious (Type C) attachments. Finally, one group of Israeli children showed almost 10 times as many anxious attachments as Swedish children. Because the procedure used in the Strange Situation is relatively straightforward, it does not seem that these variations can be explained by simple methodological discrepancies in how the assessments were conducted (Harwood et al., 1995; Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). From "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior", p. 236
roryisok 10y ago
I honestly read that as "Attachment theory is having breakfast at the moment".
hclivess 10y ago
can we please ban this retarded domain? it's disgusting. otherwise, Ill have to opt for hackaday solely.
mrdrozdov 10y ago
This seems like a specific case of Curriculum Learning from the machine learning literature.
seanmceligot 10y ago
The simplest explanation I've heard of attachment theory is kids should be attached to parents securely enough that they are comfortable transferring that attachment to friends and relationships later. Too far in one direction and the child never leaves the parents side or the parent never lets the child grow up. Too far in the other direction and the child never learns healthy bonding and trust.
woodandsteel 10y ago
Anybody know if cognitive-behavioral therapists have methods for dealing with attachment problems?

145 points by daegloe 10y ago

cylinder 10y ago

NYT seems to be the national hub for pop-science these days.

theGimp 10y ago

A lot of connections made in that article, with no data to back any of it.

dang 10y ago
This is the kind of shallow, uncharitable dismissal that we need less of on Hacker News. Obviously a popular news treatment isn't going to supply "data". When it comes to the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth, you could hardly be more wrong, since apart from everything else they were champions of empirical observation.
- blazespin 10y ago
  Maybe a little less paywall nytimes on HN as well. I dunno, but I find a lot of their journalism is just 90% padding. I suspect we see a lot of distrust in media isn't just that they're inaccurate, but they're often filled with non experts trying to sound like experts by padding nonsense speculation into their articles. I mean, is this the same Kate Murphy that wrote "10 richest U.S. presidents before Trump takes top spot" I'm not saying she's bright. She's probably smarter there most and I'd love for her to comment in on HN. But I don't think she should be writing articles titled "Yes it's your parents fault"
  - jayajay 10y ago
    NY Times is like a garbage can full of crinkled up rough drafts of poems, with a crinkled up Scientific American article somewhere near the bottom.
    - sctb 10y ago
      We've asked you to comment civilly and substantively before, so please do this. We have to ban accounts that won't.
      - jayajay 10y ago
        The average user downvotes, flags, or attacks content they disagree with. I have only ever upvoted and responded with effort to people who do the same to me. If you feel like you need to ban me from this community, that is your prerogative.
  - dang 10y ago
    The standard here is to judge each article on its own merit, and this is a good piece, certainly above the median. The title is beyond stupid, but reporters don't write those. We changed it to a representative phrase from the text, as usual with baity titles. On the paywall thing please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989.
- closed 10y ago
  Not to mention that the article links to a meta-analysis, which is a pretty good place to start!
- taeric 10y ago
  I both agree and disagree with you. A popular news treatment doesn't have to have supplied all of the data. However, it is free to link or directly reference the data. And a large part of the problem in many reporting places is that the data wasn't actually there. So, I agree we can't hold everyone to a super high standard of "show me the data!" However, I do think we should be moving further in that direction. Anecdotally, in this field it is especially important. Parents get enough crap as it is. Most of it completely unsubstantiated. So, please, less of that crap. If there is advice that can help. Give it and the circumstances that it could help in. If there is a new line that people are investigating, discuss it. But don't over reach on what is capable. Present hypotheses as falsifiable assertions that people are researching. Not as assertions that are merely waiting to be validated.
- redundant_ 10y ago
  Shut the fuck up, dang. You're a shit moderator, who wants everyone to think happy thoughts. You moderate the wrong people, and fail to deal with the real world in a rational manner.
- thisrod 10y ago
  To an outsider, this theory sounds like a really hard one to test. The hypothesis is that experiences in infancy condition adult behaviour, so someone would need to track a large cohort of people for decades. That kind of thing is rarely done. And that is just the start. Once it's been shown that bad parents have permanently bad kids, how do you demonstrate causality? Maybe there is a bad people gene that they all have. Maybe the cause is the physical effects of stress during pregnancy. Or the effects of alcohol consumption: no doubt that correlates with the kind of parental behaviour that's being blamed. Sure, you can look at adoption, twins, etc. At that point, we're talking about a really impressive series of experiments, which deserve a bit more than, "it's been scientifically verified," even in a newspaper story.
- mwexler 10y ago
  Attachment theory within the early areas: lots of great science. Applying it to what feels like every aspect of human interaction and decision making: not so much. Attachment theory was hot in the 90s as well, with lots of not so great studies trying to show impact of attachment style on anything folks could come up with, and I see some of the same errors being repeated today. That being said, where it applies, it's provides a nice explanation of interaction patterns in relationships.

freditup 10y ago

> By the end of our first year, we have stamped on our baby brains a pretty indelible template of how we think relationships work, based on how our parents or other primary caregivers treat us. It seems that the article is stating that one's attachment system is developed primarily in their first year of life? If attachment theory is true, I would've guessed that the first ten or twelve years of life would all contribute. > [many people] are insecurely attached because their early experiences were suboptimal (their caregivers were distracted, overbearing, dismissive, unreliable, absent or perhaps threatening)... If the first year is the formative year for one's attachment disposition, the meaning of "overbearing" is much different than say, it would be for a ten year old or early teenager. I'm curious what period of life these studies were looking at.

Nrsolis 10y ago
At the risk of becoming a target for abuse, one of the big breakthroughs I had in therapy was connecting with a therapist who was able to use attachment theory to help me understand my feelings and emotions in the context of romantic relationships. As a child, I lost my mother to cancer and my father was alternatively abusive or absent. I carried those scars forward into adulthood. Therapy grounded partly in attachment theory helped me and I'm glad to see it gaining ground as a useful tool to help people.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  I'm glad that worked for you. I heard somewhere in my teens a doctor who said essentially that we spend our adult lives trying to recreate our childhood relationships and if we find our adult relationships lacking, that connection is the first place to investigate.
- mrec 10y ago
  I'm curious - why were you worried that this comment might make you a target for abuse?
  - tutufan 10y ago
    There's certainly plenty of abuse posted in response to comments here.

_yvjs 10y ago

Alternate perspective: "Rethinking the Transmission Gap: What Behavioral Genetics and Evolutionary Psychology Mean for Attachment Theory", https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinking_the_Transmission_Gap_What_Behavioral_Genetics_and_Evolutionary_Psychology_Mean_for_Attachment_Theory_A_Comment_on_Verhage_et_al_2016 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303952365_Rethinkin... "Top 10 Replicated Findings From Behavioral Genetics", http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691615617439 I would really recommend reading the above (in particular finding 9 from the second survey). The media has a strong bias towards environmental theories of human traits.

venamresm__ 10y ago
Why not add to this list the following: "Three Laws of Behavior Genetic and What They Mean", http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/three_laws.pdf "Why Do People Believe that Birth Order Has Important Effects on Personality?", http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm http://judithrichharris.info/tna/birth-order/believe.htm

RodericDay 10y ago

A buddy of mine has a 2.5 year old daughter. They're not going full-tilt gender-neutral, but as engineers, they're also conscious of not just giving her dolls and whatnot. Anyway, her mom from the get-go has had her wear both dresses, pants, snowsuits, a big variety of clothing. The other day she refused to wear pants. "If I don't wear a dress, nobody will tell me I'm pretty!". A 2.5 year old. It's crazy how much kids pick up in such a tiny period of time.

bigmanwalter 10y ago
I've heard an extremely similar story from a friend. First I thought "Wow, what are the chances?", but it turns out that the Internet's a small place. Hi Harold.
gerbilly 10y ago
Another finding is that young kids feel more secure when they wear clothes that confirm their gender. This is why princess dresses and girls clothes in that awful shade of purple/pink are so popular.
jandrese 10y ago
When my twins (boy and girl) were two the boy started dressing up in the princess dresses that his sister got. We thought it was adorable but didn't push him one way or the other. The only negative is that he was pretty rough on them. Now that they are three, this has morphed into him wearing his Batman costume from Halloween whenever he gets a chance--even though he's going through a growth spurt and the costume now has old man utility belt. I guess maybe he just likes to dress up. His sister is the opposite, she will wear the same outfit day after day unless we make her change. Kids are all different.
concinds 10y ago
It's fine to let kids dress the way they want, but quite a few parents go too far with it and seem to want to force their children into an androgynous self-expression instead of letting their kids develop their own identity. Feeling feminine may be very important for some girls and less for others, and has much more to do with personality than with "culture". Stymieing that isn't in the child's interest. Not saying this is the case for your friend, but something to keep in mind.

jayajay 10y ago

Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction? Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents? These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

xg15 10y ago
No.
cowardlydragon 10y ago
Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)? Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked? Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.
- jayajay 10y ago
  trigger warning, ideas may be involved that do not agree with conventional liberal attitudes What would you suggest a society of N = 620 people should do if there are 20 infertile women, and the resource state permits that only 600 of them can make it until the next resource drop? Should they let fate determine who the 20 deaths will go to? Or should they be smart? Or is being smart here too emotionally hard for you? At some point, engineering society is the difference between having a society and not having one. There may have been many tribes and villages that perished in history because organisms did not understand how to engineer viable populations (e.g. the difference between sending an old woman to gather berries instead of a younger fertile woman). For example, you would not let someone become "trans" because they don't like being a woman, if your population size is too small. They'll have to suck it up and copulate. As will people who are gay and asexual. There is no room for these modern concepts when the population size is critical. But, this is too emotionally difficult to understand. We have been pampered with "rights" in large N society. We won't understand this until we hit a resource critical stage and we are forced to make harder decisions about our population. If you have been to civil court, you will start to wonder about which humans should stop reproducing first. Parents who beat their children, verbally abuse them, and use drugs will likely be the first to go. At some point, a decision will need to be made and our morals will be redefined to do what is necessary. Until then, you can be happy that you will not live to see such a time. You and I are so damn lucky. Someone someday will be making those decisions, and whoever they are, they deserve our respect, not our dismissal, disapproval, and hostility.

yomly 10y ago

How do we guard against this when it is becoming increasingly the case that both parents work full-time? It seems like parenthood is itself more than a full-time job...

orthoganol 10y ago
From a childhood development textbook I once read, having a parent around during the day vs. a nanny apparently doesn't make much of a difference. A nanny, relative, or any caregiver giving regular attention typically has the same effects as if she/ he were a parent.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  There's a parenting book out there that will tell you whatever it is you want to hear.
  - orthoganol 10y ago
    "parenting book" != childhood development / developmental psychology textbook that is the 101 textbook at many elite universities. I mention the book elsewhere in this thread.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  ... and can do terrible damage as well. Keep an eye on them.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    That's true of anyone.

robbiep 10y ago

For anyone interested in a good overview of attachment theory, there was a Science Vs. episode recently on it: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-attachment-parenting/ the standout thing in there being the definition of 'well-attached'

ohthehugemanate 10y ago
Worth noting the difference between attachment theory and attachment parenting. Attachment theory is a psychological model. It proposes that during early childhood, we learn how to respond "within relationships when hurt, separated from loved ones, or perceiving a threat." We learn this by modeling the behavior of our parents. Attachment parenting is a parenting philosophy (not a consistent theory) invented and spread to a popular audience in the 90's by evangelical christian pediatrician William Sears. It proposes that mothers should maximize physical contact with her infant by wearing the baby during the day, co-sleeping at night, breastfeeding, and responding immediately (or pre-emptively) to all crying. The philosophy recommends women stay in the home to focus on child rearing in this way for the first three years. After that, motherhood should be their "supreme career." After the philosophy was formulated, Sears made an ex post connection to attachment theory, but is otherwise unrelated. One of them is a respectable scientific theory; the other is a very lucrative fad of anti-woman, patriarchal bullshit with no basis in science.
- robbiep 10y ago
  Well put

gammarator 10y ago

Parental genetics are far more important than parenting style in determining what kind of person you turn out to be. And the "nurture" that matters is your peers, not your parents. Skeptical? I highly recommend this book-length treatment of the research literature: https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-Updated/dp/1439101655/ https://www.amazon.com/Nurture-Assumption-Children-Revised-U... Unless they are doing twin & adoption studies (hard!), attachment researchers are conflating parenting practices (these warm and loving parents had a warm & loving kid!) with genetics.

jcoffland 10y ago
The nature vs nurture argument is not going to be settled by one book. I can see if you raised some shitty kids how the "it's mostly nature" theory would be attractive. I believe it's a combination of both nature and nurture.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  However, nature feeds into nurture and not the other way around. Is you tried raising a disabled child or one with extreme variant of personality you would know that such conditions tend to enact sets of behaviour in the environment and parents. Generally not conducive to proper upbringing one way or another.

mcoliver 10y ago

Attachment parenting has some merits but is a bit over the top in my opinion. Do I want my kid to start screaming the minute I walk away or hand them to someone else? Absolutely not. I want them to be self confident and happy knowing that I would not leave them in a dangerous situation, give them to a bad person, and that I will come back for them. That is a truly "secure" child.

spraak 10y ago
You're misunderstanding how attachment parenting works. In fact it's just as you'd like, that through this way of relating with your child/ren they become secure in their own sense of self. It is when the parents too early leave the child alone that they don't form a stable sense of self.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  Actually, this is exactly how I've seen it work with some parents who subscribe to attachment parenting.
jvvw 10y ago
It's worth pointing out that there isn't any evidence (that I know of at least - I would be very interested to see any) of a link between 'attachment parenting' and secure attachment as defined by attachment theory, despite the similar names and the fact that attachment parenting is sometimes presented as a way to achieve secure attachment.
ohthehugemanate 10y ago
To be clear: attachment theory is a normal scientific theory which describes one aspect of early childhood relationship development. Attachment _parenting_ is a fad parenting philosophy with no basis in science. It's founder, William Sears, explains that after coming up with the philosophy out of whole cloth, he made the connection to attachment theory. You can raise a securely attached (in the scientific sense) child without following Sears' evangelical christian "attachment parenting" rulebook. Lots of people do.

orthoganol 10y ago

You may find it interesting to read about attachment type correlations with certain countries/ cultures, from a developmental psychology textbook I have: Perhaps surprisingly, the relative incidence of different attachment styles, as measured using Ainsworth’s Strange Situation, varies dramatically across cultures (Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). Consider, for example, the substantial cultural differences shown in Table 6.2. The majority of German infants studied were measured as insecurely attached (mostly avoidant, or Type A). Japanese infants showed no avoidant attachments whatsoever, and they were almost three times as likely as their American counterparts to show anxious (Type C) attachments. Finally, one group of Israeli children showed almost 10 times as many anxious attachments as Swedish children. Because the procedure used in the Strange Situation is relatively straightforward, it does not seem that these variations can be explained by simple methodological discrepancies in how the assessments were conducted (Harwood et al., 1995; Thompson, 1998; Van IJzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988). From "Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior", p. 236

roryisok 10y ago

I honestly read that as "Attachment theory is having breakfast at the moment".

hclivess 10y ago

can we please ban this retarded domain? it's disgusting. otherwise, Ill have to opt for hackaday solely.

mrdrozdov 10y ago

This seems like a specific case of Curriculum Learning from the machine learning literature.

seanmceligot 10y ago

The simplest explanation I've heard of attachment theory is kids should be attached to parents securely enough that they are comfortable transferring that attachment to friends and relationships later. Too far in one direction and the child never leaves the parents side or the parent never lets the child grow up. Too far in the other direction and the child never learns healthy bonding and trust.

woodandsteel 10y ago

Anybody know if cognitive-behavioral therapists have methods for dealing with attachment problems?