Consequences of early attachment relations for children's social development
Consequences of early attachment relations for children’s social development.
Sigmund Freud (1909) suggested that a child’s psychological development takes place in psychosexual stages (a series of five fixed stages). In the oral stage, which occurs in the first year of a child’s life, the focus of organ-pleasure is the mouth. He proposed that if children experience trauma in this stage, they become fixated in the oral stage and it continues into adulthood, for example, smoking and thumb-sucking. The second stage, from 1-3 years of age, is the anal stage. In this stage, the child is fully aware of the ego and that his wish might conflict with someone else’s. Freud believed it to be characterized in elimination through potty-training, for example (Freud, 1909). The phallic stage, 3-6 years, in which the focus of organ-pleasure has shifted to the genitals, includes Freud’s highly controversial Oedipus conflict which analyses the castration anxiety in a five-year-old boy (Freud, 1909). The latency stage occurs between 7-11 years, where sexual urges are at a minimum. The genital stage occurs at 11 years. However, progress to this stage is only possible if serious fixation has not developed at an earlier stage. Freud suggests that the phallic stage and the Oedipal stage are the most critical in affecting a child’s moral and gender development. His thoughts regarding psychological defenses, such as the idea that they are acquired as a consequence of childhood trauma, are widely supported (Jacobs, 1992).
The social learning theory suggests that an individual must acquire a new behaviour by imitating a model (Bandura, 1977). Bandura (1977) came up with four requirements for observational learning to occur; attention (paying attention to the model), retention (retaining memory), reproduction (capability to perform observed action) and motivation (motivated to learn the behaviour in return for an award). The social learning theory attempts to explain the acquisition of behaviour, for example aggression. The genetic influences on personality must also be considered when looking at a child’s development. Genetics influence individuals’ differences and have become very important to the issue of child development (Plomin et al., 1997). Another aspect, which psychologists have previously not considered, is temperament. The perspective of psychologists used to be that babies were a “blank-canvas” on which experiences would mould individual personalities. Nowadays it is believed that temperament is present upon birth (Thomas, and Chess, 1977). Thomas and Chess (1977) attempted to discover a way to classify children in relation to their temperament. They questioned parents on several issues over the behavior of their babies and used the results for classifications.
