Fostering secure attachment in the baby room – part 1

Have you ever behaved in an adult relationship in a way that you didn’t, deep down, want to behave? Have you ever started an argument when you didn’t really want to? Have you ever clung onto someone even when you knew you actually needed to let them go? Have you ever shut down and distanced yourself, even when you knew it would be more helpful to reach out and connect? Underpinning all of our adult behaviours in the context of relationships are our early attachment experiences and while it’s not impossible to change the attachment style we adopt as a baby, it is extremely difficult.

This means that when we are building relationships with the babies in the baby room, we are helping them to understand how relationships work in a way that will impact them for their entire lives. They will carry a set of principles about how relationships work (an internal working model) that comes from how they are treated and responded to right now as babies. Feeding into early attachment experiences is probably the most lasting and significant impact that baby room educators have on babies’ lives.  

In the first part of this blogpost series, I want to delve into the four attachment styles: secure, avoidant, ambivalent and disorganised. For each, we’ll take a look at:

• What each attachment style looks like in a baby’s behaviour
• The internal working model that underpins this attachment style
• What an attachment style looks like in an adult’s behaviour – so that you can see just how much early attachment experiences shape the rest of your life
• Early interaction patterns that shape each attachment style: what do the adults do around the baby that fosters a particular type of attachment?

In the second part of the series, we’ll use this foundation of understanding to come up with five day-to-day ways in which we can support secure attachment in the baby room.  

Just a final note before we get going: Make this real to you. As you’re reading about each attachment style, think about yourself and your own experiences as well as the babies around you at the moment. The point is not too label yourself and others, but instead to notice how behaviours crop around you and how they make sense when seen through the lens of attachment. Ok, let’s go…

Secure attachment

In a baby…

• The baby is upset to be left by primary caregiver – separation is distressing (assuming that they’re at an appropriate developmental stage for separation anxiety)
• It takes time for them to trust others but will build relationships with others
• Part of that relationship-building is the active seeking of comfort and reassurance
• The new caregiver becomes a secure base from which the baby explores
• When it’s home-time, the baby is pleased to be reunited with their primary caregiver

In an adult…

• This person will be relatively trusting but not naïve
• They judge people by their behaviours and makes decisions about whether they are a good person to form a relationship with
• The intimacy they offer is proportionate to the joy and trust in the relationship
• There is a desire to be with the other person but it doesn’t overwhelm life and individuality

What is the internal working model? The voice inside says:

• “I can trust others”
• “The world is a welcoming place, containing love and comfort”
• “I deserve love, respect and care”  

What are the interaction patterns that reinforce this working model in babyhood?

• Emotional distress is met with concern and comfort
• Big feelings are attended to and are made sense of together
• Co-regulation strategies are used to soothe a baby
• Interactions seek to see and hear the baby e.g. ‘Oh I think you might be missing mummy at the moment; this is a hard time to be apart’
• Interactions are mind-minded. That is, there is recognition for each baby’s feelings and thoughts and these are referenced in speech e.g. ‘You’d probably feel better if you had a clean bum; I wonder if you’d mind if I changed your nappy now’ rather than ‘It’s time to change your nappy’ and scooping the baby up immediately

Avoidant attachment

In a baby…

• This is a baby who tends not to use the adult as a secure base during exploration
• They show low separation anxiety
• They show low stranger anxiety and familiarity doesn’t seem to affect how they relate to the person e.g. agency staff are treated the same as a baby room educator who is there all the time
• At home time, they show little reaction to reunion with their primary caregiver

In an adult…

• They may be emotionally distant sometimes or all the time
• They will avoid intimacy and find it quite uncomfortable
• They are likely to bottle up their feelings  

What is the internal working model? The voice inside says:

• “It’s not safe for me to be vulnerable”
• “Other people are likely to leave”
• “Relying on others is too risky”

What are the interaction patterns that reinforce this working model in babyhood?

• Emotional distress is consistently treated as frustrating or an inconvenience
• ‘Independence’ and ‘resilience’ are overly praised because they are convenient to us e.g. a baby who doesn’t cry when they fall over is congratulated for being so brave, rather than stopping to find out whether they were actually hurt or upset by the event
• Leaving without saying a proper goodbye, slipping out to avoid the immediate distress of a goodbye

Ambivalent attachment

In a baby…

• This shows up as extreme clinginess – so even when the caregiver is there, they want to stay very close to the caregiver at all times. It’s not just separation anxiety (which is a feature of secure attachment); instead, they seem to be anxious even when the adult is around
• There are extremely high levels of distress around separation
• There are extremely high levels of distress around strangers
• They may feel angry and upset with the primary caregiver when they return and reject their comfort

In an adult…

• This looks like being overly needy
• Feeling anxious about abandonment  
• Disproportionately distraught about relationships ending (e.g. even a 3 month relationship will be grieved to an extreme level)

What is the internal working model? The voice inside says:

• “Please don’t leave me”
• “I have to make you love me”
• “I don’t know what’s going on in your mind and that’s terrifying”

What are the interaction patterns that reinforce this working model in babyhood?

• Inconsistency in whether love and attention are forthcoming or withheld
• Unpredictable responses 
• Emotional blackmail, such as silent treatment when baby hasn’t behaved in the way you wanted them to e.g. when they didn’t nap at the ‘right’ time
• Dissociation of the adult, often not fully present in the interaction  

Disorganised attachment

In a baby…

• Unpredictable emotional distress
• Behaviour looks disorganised – you can’t work it out
• Dissociation – dorsal shutdown: this is when the body shuts down because it considers the danger levels to be too high even for flight or fight responses. It may look like a baby just lying there, or potentially even holding their breath (unintentionally) and blacking out.

In an adult…

• Dissociation – dorsal shutdown. Adults with a disorganised attachment style can experience blackouts where they do not remember what has happened. This occurs when the stress response is so intense for so much of the time that the hippocampus (one of the memory centres in the brain) stops working properly.
• Extreme feelings come and go and can feel risky to others
• Infatuation followed by rejection (they’re in love one minute and completely uninterested in the next)
• Impulsive behaviours
• Inability to understand others

What is the internal working model? The voice inside says:

• “The world is not safe”
• “I don’t know who I am”
• “I don’t know who you are”

What are the interaction patterns that reinforce this working model in babyhood?

• Trauma – terrifying experiences; including the parents’ own terror
• Experiences are too often unsafe to establish what safety looks and feels like
• Neglect and other forms of abuse
• Nervous system is in a stress response much of the time

Final words

Real life isn’t as neat as the lists above would suggest! These categories and lists are a helpful starting point for understanding different ways that we can interact with babies and what experiences babies may be having at home, which they are bringing into nursery with them. At the same time, it’s unhelpful to use these attachment styles as a form of labelling or judgment. It’s not up to us to label certain babies as securely attached or insecurely attached. But it can be helpful to notice and reflect on behaviours that you see in the babies and even more importantly, notice and consider your own behaviours.

For example, when I developed my understanding of the avoidant ambivalent attachment style, I saw just how often I congratulated ‘independent’ behaviours in babies and young children. I often find myself saying ‘wow, look at her just getting on with it!’ and ‘you’re so brave doing that all by yourself!’. When my daughter started in the baby room as a one year old, she walked straight in to the nursery and I celebrated this as an achievement: ‘Wow, she doesn’t need me! She goes straight in all by herself!’

When we reflect through the lens of attachment though, we start to helpfully question what we say and do and understand where this comes from. I realised that often I was appreciating these behaviours because they were helpful to me – it was helpful to me if I was needed less! I also realised that it corresponded to my own attachment behaviours, where I have always strived to be as independent as possible and to need others as little as possible.

You might have some of your own moments of realisation – how do your own behaviours with babies in the baby room relate back to your own early attachment experiences. What internal working model informs how you set up the relationships in the baby room?

In the next part in the blogpost series, we’ll turn this foundational and reflective understanding into five ideas for practically fostering secure attachment in the baby room.