b'New parents often worry about attachment to their baby - will I be able to build it? My baby cries a lot - does that mean that we aren\'t attached? If I put my baby in daycare, will they get attached to the daycare staff rather than to me?\\n\\nBased on the ideas about attachment that have been circulated over the years, these are entirely valid concerns. But it turns out that not only should we not worry about these things, but the the research that these ideas were based in was highly flawed.\\n\\nIt\'s often forgotten that attachment theory was developed in the period after World War II, when policymakers were trying to get women out of the jobs they had held during the war, and back into their \'natural\' place in the home.\\n\\nIn one of his earliest papers Dr. John Bowlby - the so-called Father of Attachment Theory - described 44 children who had been referred to his clinic for stealing, and compared these with children who had not stolen anything. He reported that the thieves had been separated from their parents during childhood, which led them to have a low sense of self-worth and capacity for empathy. He went on to say that \\u201cto deprive a small child of his mother\\u2019s companionship is as bad as depriving him of vitamins.\\u201d\\n\\nBut much later in his life, Bowlby revealed that he had conflated a whole lot of kinds of separation into that one category \\u2013 everything between sleeping in a different room to being abandoned in an orphanage. And in addition to being separated, many of the thieves had also experienced physical or sexual abuse. The fear that spending time apart from your baby will damage them in some way is just not supported by the evidence.\\n\\nWhat other common beliefs do we hold about attachment relationships that aren\'t supported by evidence? Well, quite a lot, as it turns out! Listen in for more.\\n\\nCheck this episode for more attachment research:\\xa0What it is, what it\\u2019s not, how to do it, and how to stop stressing about it\\n\\n \\n\\n\\n\\n \\n\\nLink to the book mentioned:\\n
Cornerstones of Attachment Research (Affiliate link).
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