Ainsworth, Bowlby, Children and Attachment

If money does not indeed buy happiness, and if we can seemingly have wonderful lives complete with food, designer bags, and trips, and still be miserable, what are we missing? We can count money, and we can count how much education we have or how many trips we get to go on, ways our culture manages to account for success, but how can we count how happy and securely attached we are?

It’s difficult, but two amazing early 20th century research pioneers did it, Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, and I’m reading all about their research in Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love, by Robert Karen. It’s a fascinating look at attachment and mothering, topics I’ve been interested in for nearly 30 years now, since I first became a mother and wondered about my own attachment.

If life’s pursuit is not about success then perhaps it's about loving. Perhaps. This too is a topic I’ve long been interested in, but the topic seems relegated to pop lyricists and I’ve yet to find a grad program that grants you a degree in love. OK, well Ken Wilbur seems to have a go at it, but still I'm not convinced he's the one to show me what I need to know. I have seriously wondered; what’s love got to do with a child’s success; their ability to make their way and feel safe in the world?

A mother who is secure and is able to be secure in her parenting will mother a child in a way that is attuned to that child’s needs. To be attuned to her child’s needs, the mother needs to understand and respect her child’s natural tendency to seek out fulfillment of their own needs, “The baby is not a passive recipient creature who becomes attached to his mother because she satifies his needs. [Ainsworth says:] ‘These are very active babies. They went after what they wanted’” (p. 135).

This is important, because this might be where many mothers first feel resentment of their babies, because women have not been socialized to go after their own needs. This whole concept of a child being born with a sense of their own right to demand of their caregiver what they need, set’s the mother’s world on edge. This is just a hunch on my part, yet, I’ve seen women’s rivalry of each other many times, and I’ve understood it to be part of their own powerlessness in a culture where women still have less power than men, and in some families, less power than boy children.

Love after all, is somehow about getting our relationship needs met. It’s about how safe we feel in our homes, and then taking that safety out into the world. Looking for our place, or actually creating enough space for ourselves out in the world, while creating a safe home is what makes the whole life journey the dynamic experience that it is. It seems like I’m just beginning to make sense of this all, but it is making sense, thanks to Ainsworth and Bowlby, my attachment guru heroes. So it seems, that if we want to have safe places for children, we need to have safe places for mothers; and this means we have some work to do, as home, sadly, is one of the most dangerous places for women.