Journal Entry for May 2003

May 8, 2003

Attachment, Affiliation, and Belonging

Interest and love are the human emotions that attract infant and mother in synchronized routines of reciprocity. The mother smiles, the infant responds. The infant cries, the mother responds. These nonverbal active-listening routines between mother and infant are the listening love that triggers the infant's emotional interest in the mother's expressions so that secure attachment and the comforts of love are experienced. These synchronized routines are driven by emotional traits in both mother and infant. The emotions create images that stimulate internal working models for the infant to grow cognitively. These affective-cognitive structures are what frame the infant's perceptions of relationships and the evaluation of her life-world.

The temperament of the mother and the infant interact and shape the attachment if the mother and infant are a good match. If the child's temperament allows for openness and flexibility and the mother is responsive to the nonverbal gestures and sounds of the infant, the attachment will probably be a secure attachment. If the infant's temperament is restrictive and withdrawn and the parent's temperament is open and flexible, the parent may get frustrated and feel rejected by the infant's lack of response to the parent's openness. The parent may feel depressed or angry with the baby for not reinforcing her gestures of love, possibly resulting in an ambivalent (resistant) or avoidant infant attachment pattern. Papalia, Olds and Feldman, in Human Development, describe four types of attachment patterns:

When Ainsworth and her colleagues observed 1-year-olds in the Strange Situation and also at home, they found three main patterns of attachment: secure attachment (the most common category, into which 66 percent of American babies fell) and two forms of anxious, or insecure, attachment: avoidant attachment (20 percent of American babies) and ambivalent, or resistant, attachment (12 percent). Later, other research (Main & Solomon, 1986) identified a fourth pattern, disorganized-disoriented attachment. (1998, p160.)

Attachment disorders occur because bonding between parent and child cannot occur in a chaotic detached family that shows a very low positive reinforcement for the infant's efforts to connect with the parent.

With a secure attached child we see in the early childhood years and the middle childhood years a child who reaches out in friendship or affiliation to make a place to belong in the preschool or elementary school. The feelings of affiliation and belonging are still strong in adolescents and young adults who formed secure attachment as infants and experienced authoritative parenting throughout their formative years. (Papalia, Olds, and Feldman, 1998.)

Attachment, affiliation, and belonging are important needs that form one of the 10 categories of need fulfillment for Liberation Psychology. Belonging to a school or a family or a community is important for a child or adolescent to feel love and interest that inspire the motivation to learn. To learn and grow into healthy formative affective-cognitive structures, a child or adolescent requires secure attachments. Authoritative parenting encourages the child or adolescent to develop an affiliative drive to associate and to have friends so that he or she will have the need satisfaction of belonging to a family, school, and community.

Parenting style is important so that the child or adolescent will feel encouraged. According to Adlerian psychology, the discouraged child or adolescent acts out behavior problems in the family or school to gain the acceptance of the family or school. The misbehavior is meant to establish the child's purpose to belong. Children will do whatever works for them. (Orton, 1996). The authoritative parenting style allows the child or adolescent to be part of the solution in working on family problems.

Diana Baumrind delineated three basic patterns of parenting.

• Authoritarian: The parents' word is law, not to be questioned. Misconduct brings strict punishment. Authoritarian parents seem aloof, showing little affection or nurturance. Maturity demands are high, and parent-child communication is rather low.
• Permissive: The parents make few demands on their children, hiding any impatience they feel. Discipline is lax. Parents are nurturant, accepting, and communicate well with offspring. They make few maturity demands because they view themselves as available to help their children but not responsible for shaping how their offspring turn out.
• Authoritative: The parents in this category are similar in some ways to authoritarian parents, in that they set limits and enforce rules, but they are also willing to listen receptively to the child's requests and questions. Family rule is more democratic than dictatorial. Parents make high maturity demands on offspring, communicate well with them, and are nurturant. (Berger, 1998, p. 287.)

Liberation Psychology uses the authoritative parenting style to attain the 10 categories of need satisfaction that a person needs in order to develop into a fully functioning or self-actualized person. The authoritative lifestyle lends itself to raising self-reliant children and adolescents while using positive means to set limits and enforce rules. The authoritative parenting style has been well-researched and has proven through repeated studies on children and their families to have great results.