Attachment Definition

Both Robert Karen’s Becoming Attached and Robert LeVine and Karin Norman’s The Infant 's Acquisition of Culture: Early Attachment Re-Examined in Anthropological Perspective delve into the complicated relation between toddlers and their caregivers, and just how uncertain it is whether or not a certain form attachment is truly the best for children. Toddlerhood is centered on the sudden recognition of autonomy as well as exploring their world with the help of their caregiver. Thus this goes into the idea of attachment, and the various forms that come along with it. Robert Karen explores these attachment relationships using the results of experiments such as the Strange Situation done by Mary Ainsworth and Harry Harlow’s research with monkeys. In LeVine and Norman’s article, they break down the assumptions that Karen makes off of American studies and instead investigate the analyses made by Klaus and Karin Grossmann, who study a group of German children using the same model with the Strange Situation. What arises from both of these texts is that there is not necessarily one attachment that is

It seems that either direction, whether being securely or insecurely attached, seems to be strict in its rules, that either you attend to the child crying every time, or not at all. If a parent decides to attend to a child when they are crying because they are in serious danger, but not if they have simply dropped a toy, would this make them in a whole new category of attachment? Is being on either side of the spectrum worse for children growing up rather than having a balance of affection? Attachment is an extremely important part of a toddler’s development and thus it would be interesting to see other types of parenting, and then see how this parenting has affected the children in the long