The first 3-5 years are seen to be by Bowlby, the critical period. This attachment must develop by this critical period, otherwise it never will and the child’s internal working model will then for future references have less trust and may not be able to care for others in the same way. Bowlby said that if the attachment is not formed or is broken, this may seriously damage the child’s social and emotional development.
However, this explanation is not supported by Shaffer and Emerson, as they found that a stage in the child’s development is multiple attachments, and if these may be formed, monotropy would not exist. Also, attachments are important in development, but lack of attachment or a broken attachment may not have the severe consequences that Bowlby claimed.
Another explanation into attachment is the psychodynamic theory. Freud claimed that during infancy the id is in control of the baby’s actions and the biological needs such as feeding or sleeping are priority at this stage in development. The model suggests that the baby cries when it is hungry, and because the mother feeds it this will give the baby pleasure as the need is removed. Therefore, the baby will make a link between food and the mother (or PCG) as when the mother is around the baby’s biological needs for food, warmth etc are fulfilled. Freud would say this is why all babies attach to their mother.
However, Shaffer and Emerson found that some babies did not have strong attachments with the mother, even though she fed them. They claimed that good interaction and quality care of the baby was more important and the baby will attach to whoever was most sensitive and loving (hence the theory of multiple attachments). This is also shown in Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey experiment where monkeys were privated and brought up in isolation. They were they proposed two surrogate ‘mothers’, a wire mother and a cloth mother. The wire mother had a feeding bottle attached but the cloth mother did not. It was found that most monkeys spent their time clinging to the cloth mother and only went to the wire mother to feed indicating that the monkeys needed contact comfort as much as food which contradicts the psychodynamic theory. This experiment has been criticised however as monkey behaviour cannot always be generalised to apply to humans and also, the method was unethical as the monkeys were privated of attachment.
