The essential part of it is that parents can be many things; teachers, physical caregivers, playmates . But unless the parent is predictably there when the child is sick, distressed, upset, then that child even though the parent\u2019s doing all the other things, they develop an insecurity about what the world is going to be. So a secure attachment is what we want for kids. And a secure attachment is when the baby is distressed, as I\u2019ve said, sick, under whatever circumstance, they emit and the caregiver responds. So if that happens, securely, often enough, then we know from research that those infants grow up to be more competent and capable children, adolescents and adults in the absence of any bad things happening in their life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas there are other children who the parents are not predictable; so sometimes they\u2019ll come and soothe the child, sometimes they won\u2019t. So they are quite insecure. It\u2019s like, oh, if I send out this cue and am I going to get responded to? So those children can be very anxious. There are other parents and infant dyads or combinations where the parent just doesn\u2019t respond, just doesn\u2019t respond. And that baby develops procedures to deal with that as well. And they also, their attachment is insecure, maybe avoidant and we know that they don\u2019t do as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scariest ones though are where the infant is distressed and the parent causes fear. So the person that you want to be there when you\u2019re fearful is actually the cause of your fear. That creates a disorganized attachment and in that situation the babies don\u2019t have any procedural memory to know what to do. They\u2019re just so discombobulated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So why is it important? Why is it so important to respond to your baby\u2019s needs predictably in that way? Well one, because it\u2019s helping build the brain and the ability to soothe. It\u2019s helping build the amygdala, hippocampus and other connections and in the long term, it\u2019s making a big difference in terms of health later in life because it affects the immune system, how the immune system gets built. But it affects your pleasure and happiness and competence in your ability to cope later in life. So attachment is a really pivotal core function to understand. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The essential part of it is that parents can be many things; teachers, physical caregivers, playmates . But unless the parent is predictably there when the child is sick, distressed, upset, then that child even though the parent\u2019s doing all the other things, they develop an insecurity about what the world is going to be. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1617","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1617"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1618,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1617\/revisions\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}