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2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Children become attached to whoever takes the main care of them. The further life of a child strongly depends on the nature of this attachment. A sense of security develops when an adult is able to emotionally tune in to a child. The attunement begins at the most subtle levels of interaction between adult and child.

E. Tronic and other researchers have shown that when young children and adults are synchronized on an emotional level, they are synchronized physically as well. When the child is in sync with the person who takes care of him, his emotions and body are calm. When synchronization is broken, the physical parameters change as well. Managing his own arousal is an important skill, and until the child learns to do this, the parents have to do it for him. Children who are cared for by adults who are capable of emotional attunement to it feel protected in future adulthood, are more resilient, have a positive self-concept and have more trust in life. Having learned to synchronize with other people, they are able to notice the slightest changes in facial expressions and tone of voice, adjusting their behavior to the context. Neglect or abuse disrupts this process and directs it in the opposite direction. Children who have experienced abuse are most often susceptible to changes in voice and facial expressions, but tend to react to them as a threat, rather than using this information to adjust.

S. Pollak showed photographs with different facial expressions to a group of abused children and a group of children without such experience. Children of the first group, looking at photographs in which the spectrum of emotions changed, from anger to sadness, were more susceptible to the slightest manifestations of anger. When faced with abuse, these children become hyper-alert, easily out of control, or withdrawn.

The development of attachment in children occurs at the level of biological instinct. Depending on how adults treat them - with love, detached or cruel, they form adaptation strategies based on attempts to get at least some part of attention.

M. Ainsworth studied the infant's reactions to temporary separation from his mother. Children who had developed a healthy attachment became nervous when their mother left them and felt joy when she returned, and after a short time they recovered, calmed down and became playful again. This type of attachment has been called reliable.

Children with anxious attachment type become very upset and are not able to recover when their mother returns, the presence of the mother does not bring them any visible pleasure, but they continue to focus on her.

Avoidant children looked like they didn’t care, they didn’t cry when their mother left them, and didn’t pay attention to her when she returned. But this did not mean that they were not suffering, their chronically rapid heart rate indicates that they are permanently aroused.

Attachment researchers believe that these three strategies work because they provide the maximum amount of care a particular adult is capable of. Children who have a clear pattern of caring, even if they are detached, are able to adapt to maintain a relationship. But this does not eliminate the problem, the attachment pattern formed in early childhood is reproduced in adult attachment relationships and, in general, affects adaptation to adulthood.

Later, another group of children was identified who could not develop sustainable adaptation.

M. Main described the type of attachment, which received the name - disorganized (chaotic) type of attachment. These children did not understand how to interact with a caring adult. It turned out that these adults represented a source of terror and stress for the child. Finding themselves in such a situation, children have no one to turn to for help, they are faced with a dilemma that cannot be resolved - the mother is necessary for survival and causes fear in them. Such children find themselves in a situation where they can neither draw close (secure attachment), nor shift attention (anxious attachment type), or escape (avoidant attachment type). Observations of these children show that when they see their parents entering the premises, they very quickly turn away from them. The child is unable to decide whether to try to get closer to the parent or to avoid, he may begin to swing on all fours, as if falling into a trance state, freeze in place with his arms raised up, or stand up to greet his parent, and then fall to the floor.

Children are programmed to be deeply loyal to their caregivers, even if they are mistreated by them. The horror that a child experiences from an adult's actions / inactions only heightens the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also a source of horror.

G. Harlow, a well-known researcher of affective attachment systems, in one of his experiments gave out a wire surrogate to rhesus monkeys as a mother, in which an air spray was inserted into the middle of the body. When the cub clung to such a mother, he received a stream of air in the chest. And like children who endure bullying from an adult, babies of rhesus monkeys only clung tighter to their maternal surrogate. In this regard, an interesting experiment conducted in a completely different field of knowledge.

R. Sullivan taught pups to associate a neutral odor with electric shock. If the formation of such a reflex began when the pups were ten days old or more (teenage rats), then when the smell appeared, a completely logical thing happened: the amygdala was activated, glucocorticoids were released, the pups avoided the smell. It is striking that during the development of the odor-shock association, nothing of the kind happened in very young rat pups, on the contrary, the rat pups were drawn to the smell. The fact is that the rodent fetus secretes glucocorticoids, but a few hours after birth, the adrenal glands abruptly lose this function: they practically do not work. This effect of stress hyporeactivity gradually subsides over the next few weeks. Glucocorticoids have such a diverse and contradictory effect on brain development that for optimal brain development, it is better to turn them off just in case using stress hyporeactivity. Thus, the brain develops normally, and the mother will cope with the troubles. Accordingly, if the mother is deprived of the rat pups, then in a few hours the adrenal glands will restore the ability to secrete a large amount of glucocorticoids. During the period of stress hyporeactivity, the rat pups seem to use the rule - if my mother is nearby (and I do not need glucocorticoids), I should be drawn to strong stimuli. Mom won't let bad things happen. Returning to the experiment, as soon as glucocorticoids were injected into the amygdala of very young rat pups, during the development of a conditioned reflex, it was activated and the pups developed odor avoidance. Conversely, if adolescent rat pups are blocked by glucocorticoids during training, they will develop an addiction to this smell. And if the mother is present in the experiment, then the rat pups do not release glucocorticoids and, again, an addiction to this smell develops. In other words, in very young rat pups, even unpleasant stimuli are reinforced in the presence of the mother, even if the mother is a source of stress. These youngsters' attachment to their guardian has evolved so that the bond between them does not depend on the quality of the care shown.

It is known that it is not just childhood that people hold on to those who abuse them. A woman who hides the beatings and covers her alcoholic husband, a man who works in the sweat of his brow, who is reproached with money for cigarettes and can be kicked out of his own house at any time, a subordinate who does not sleep all night long completing his work for the leader so that not removed from office, hostages making bail for their captors.

Lyons-Root videotaped the direct interactions of the mothers of their children at the age of six months, a year, and a year and a half. The disorderly attachment manifested itself in two different ways, one group of mothers seemed to be too busy with their own problems to respond to the needs of their young children. They often behaved intrusively and hostilely, sometimes they did not pay attention to their children, sometimes they behaved with him as if the children had to satisfy their needs. Another group of mothers experienced fear and feelings of helplessness. They did not notice their children, returning after separation from them, and did not take them in their arms when they were bad.

Eighteen years later, when the children were about 20 years old, a study was conducted to find out how they adapted to adulthood. Children, whose emotional connection with their mothers was severely disrupted, grew up with an unstable sense of their own self, a tendency to self-destruction, excessive aggression and suicide.

Unfavorable childhood conditions increase the risk in the future:

- depression

- anxiety conditions

- various forms of addiction

- decrease in intellectual capabilities

- violation of self-control

- asocial behavior.

- the formation of relationships that copy the unfavorable conditions of child development (the formation of abusive relationships).

V. Carrion in his studies demonstrated a decrease in the growth rate of the hippocampus for several months after an act of cruelty. Thus, unfavorable conditions negatively affect memory and learning, they also inhibit the development of the frontal cortex. And in the amygdala, the opposite is true - unfavorable conditions affect the increase in the amygdala and its sensitivity. Because of this, the risk of anxiety and disorders increases, emotional and behavioral regulation is impaired. The difficult conditions of childhood accelerate the maturation of the amygdala, the ability to control the frontal cortex decreases and does not perform the functions of blocking the amygdala, on the contrary, the amygdala blocks the cortex.

A difficult childhood also damages the dopamine system, thus, an organism susceptible to alcohol or drug addiction develops, and the risk of a depressive disorder increases.