Primary attachment figures...

"The theory of attachment was originally developed by John Bowlby (1907 - 1990), a British psychoanalyst who was attempting to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who had been separated from their parents. Bowlby observed that separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths (e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to prevent separation from their parents or to reestablish proximity to a missing parent.

Bowlby argued that, over the course of evolutionary history, infants who were able to maintain proximity to an attachment figure via attachment behaviors would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age. According to Bowlby, a motivational system, what he called theattachment behavioral system, was gradually "designed" by natural selection to regulate proximity to an attachment figure.

According to Bowlby, the attachment system essentially "asks" the following fundamental question: Is the attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive? If the child perceives the answer to this question to be "yes," he or she feels loved, secure, and confident, and, behaviorally, is likely to explore his or her environment, play with others, and be sociable. If, however, the child perceives the answer to this question to be "no," the child experiences anxiety and, behaviorally, is likely to exhibit attachment behaviors ranging from simple visual searching on the low extreme to active following and vocal signaling on the other" (see Figure below).

Figure 1. Basic control processes

 http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm

http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm

"Bowlby (citing Marris, 1958) claimed that grief and mourning processes in children and adults appear whenever attachment behaviors are activated but the attachment figure continues to he unavailable. He also suggested that an inability to form deep relationships with others may result when the succession of substitutes is too frequent."

http://www.psychology.sunysb.edu/attachment/online/inge_origins.pdf

How to avoid harming a baby’s and a child’s attachment

The key to maintaining secure attachments throughout childhood is to avoid any experience, however well intentioned, that overwhelms the attachment bond. Maintaining children’s security of attachment requires that their attachment figure provides them with a sense of safety and protection at all times. Children who are frightened, whether by parents who are abusive, neglectful or violent, or by being separated from their attachment figures for an inappropriate amount of time (even when they’re in perfectly “safe” situations) can become insecurely attached.

Extreme experiences of separation that are known to harm young children are: spending weeks or months in residential care or, as used to happen in the UK in the 1950’s, spending two weeks in hospital with only brief visits from an attachment figure. An experience which seems safe to adults but not to babies, is spending each day without access to an attachment figure in certain forms of non-parental daycare. The circumstances in which babies cannot access a secondary attachment figure are found most frequently in group child-care settings such as day-nurseries.

Bowlby believes that many babies and toddlers develop a risk factor in daycare without an attachment figure, and babies from disadvantaged families where insecure attachment is common are particularly vulnerable. Babies with an insecure attachment at home, who then spend time in daycare without an attachment figure, will have their negative model of relationships reinforced.

These babies need daycare from a long-term secondary attachment figure who is consistent throughout the years of daycare, is sensitive to their individual needs, and is always available to them. In this way a more positive model of relationships can develop.
Although we know that this is what babies need, it seems to be extremely difficult to provide this in group daycare settings." Bowlby
http://www.allianceforchildhood.eu/files/QOC%20Sig%204.pdf

http://www.drmomma.org/2009/11/science-of-attachment-biological-roots.html

According to Axness "We tend to throw around the word “attachment” a lot when talking about kids and parenting, so let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing: attachment is a measure of the security of relationship between a child and those one or two or three adults with whom that child is in consistent contact.

We now recognize assures Axness that healthy (secure) attachment is a fundamental form of nourishment for a child’s growing brain. In particular, attachment fosters rich circuitry in the area of the brain that mediates social and emotional functioning. A parent’s ability to be present for a child is fundamental to fostering this brain circuitry needed to regulate attention.

When we distill the attachment and brain development research, it is remarkably consistent with the teachings of ancient spiritual traditions as well as modern humanist psychology: for a child to develop secure attachment (the basis for all future development), the child first and foremost needs regular doses of the undistracted, full presence of a primary attachment figure.  What the past decade of brain science has discovered is that a parent’s ability for this kind of presence goes hand in hand with the an important set of other right-hemisphere, social brain skills: empathy, autobiographical memory and an array of other social-emotional capabilities." (Axness)

Relationships with a selective few adults, not sensory flooding, are the most important form of experience for the growing mind. Adults who are sensitive to a child’s signals, who can offer consistent and predictable behaviors, and who care about the child’s internal experiences are those that are likely to foster a secure attachment.    — Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., UCLA Dept. of Psychiatry

How Attachment Styles Get “Passed Down” (Axness)

Leading-edge research from the newly aligned fields of brain science and attachment theory has revealed an astonishing principle:  the factor that  most reliably predicts a child’s secure, healthy attachment is the ability of that child’s parent (or consistent caregiver) to make sense of his/her own early history.**  This autobiographical ability tends to go hand in hand with the ability to be present in the way that nourishes a child’s growing sense of self. This is a kind of counter-intuitive, puzzling connection: What does me being able to tell my childhood story have to do with how good a parent I am??!  Turns out that this has to do with some newly-discovered principles of brain development and function:

The natural mode of brain functioning for the young child is governed primarily by the right hemisphere (as in the phrase, “right brain.”) This is the mode in which key lifelong brain capacities are wired, which lay a foundation for healthy social-emotional functioning and a strong sense of self.

But when a child’s need for attachment is thwarted (what I call “malattachment”) through chronic emotional or physical stress or abuse – or even the more subtle emotional “non-presence” of a parent – the child’s adaptive survival response is to prematurely engage the left hemisphere of the brain, which has to do with facts, logic and thinking.

Under conditions of malattachment, it is very painful for a child to continue to “live” in the relationship-seeking right hemisphere, which has to do with imagination, creativity, andfeeling.

When a child is prematurely “living in the left brain,” the development of key right brain area skills (including what we have come to call “emotional intelligence” or “E.Q.”) is dangerously undermined. One such skill is autobiographical memory. Thus, a child who has spent much of childhood engaging life through the rational, fact-based left brain is more likely to grow up to be an adult who is less likely to be able to tell the story of his or her childhood in a way that hangs together and makes sense. They will more likely have only disjointed fragments of memories — random pieces of a puzzle, but without a big picture that fits together reasonably well.

And vice versa:  the ability to easily make sense of and relate one’s early story is good evidence for one’s own healthy attachment history. But can’t we simply determine to “do better” for our own child?  Why doesour story make such a difference?

It is of key importance to understand that it isn’t so much what happened to you as a child that influences how you are as a parent, but how you come to make sense of what happened to you. Axness

http://marcyaxness.com/parenting-for-peace/presence-attachment-adhd-treatment/

The need of secondary attachment figures in daycare:
http://www.inspiredbybabies.org.uk/Page4NewsandInformationresources/Richard%20Bowlby%20secondary%20attachment.pdf