YOUTH NOW
What Your Attachment Style Means in Adulthood
You don’t need to be a victim of your upbringing
It started with a group of infants in a small, white playroom. The experiment taking place, later known as “The Strange Situation,” was designed to observe the behavior of children with their caregivers.
For 21 minutes, researcher Mary Ainsworth and her colleagues watched the infants respond to various scenarios. In one, the parent and child are alone, and the child plays freely while the parent stands by. In another, a stranger enters and the parent conspicuously leaves. Other scenarios include the stranger interacting with the child alone, the parent re-entering and comforting the child while the stranger leaves, and the parent exiting and leaving the child completely alone.
By observing the child’s responses to the caregivers, Ainsworth discovered a few common patterns. In particular, certain children responded to the presence of a stranger and the absence of a parent with confusion or intense distress, while others handled it with ease. These patterns, known as attachment styles, are imprinted on us at an early age, and end up impacting our behavior for a lifetime. What Ainsworth and other psychologists discovered is that our attachments, or how others respond to our needs, can leave a…
