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The Shifting Paradigm of Attachment Theory: From Parent to Early Childhood Educator
In recent decades, the potent echoes of John Bowlby’s attachment theory have permeated not only our understanding of infant-mother dynamics but have also intricately woven themselves into the fabric of early childhood education. With a clear transference of the traditional attachment narratives, the scrutinizing lens…
Chapter One: Changing Stories
Changing Stories assembles a variety of evidence for a group-based picture of human beginnings. Cross-cultural comparisons remind us that most babies around the world, and through history, have grown up within groups of kith and kin, not home-alone with a mother. Primate research aligns human...
Appendix: Intersubjectivity and Attachment: Theory and Science
The Appendix provides evidence-rich evaluations of two well-known theories of infant sociability which blinker appreciation of groupness in infants. It first evaluates evidence for claims that babies are born with a capacity for one-to-one mind-reading or ‘innate intersubjectivity’: through pre-speech ‘conversational’ behaviour; a capacity to...
Impossible Standards: Making Educators into Substitute Mums
From the 1970s on, advocates of attachment theory have urged that attendance by very young children at centres for early childhood education will harm their development. They aim to encourage, shame or scare parents – meaning mothers – into caring for their young children at...
Chapter Five: Prisms and Multiplicities
Prisms and Multiplicities shows how ignoring group contexts in many traditions of psychotherapy can distort descriptions of what happens in therapy, with serious unintended consequences. For example, identifying mothers alone as the effective ‘environment’ for their babies, makes mothers the fulcrum of mental health and...
Blame the Mother, Never Mind about the Evidence
One after the other, three babies in the Folbigg family died before any had reached their first birthday. That was between 1989 and 1993. Then in 1997, their sister Laura also died. She was 18 months old. No-one knew how the four children had died....
Chapter Two: Babies in Threes
Babies in Threes details findings produced by new methods for recording and describing interactions in all-infant trios. These demonstrate that six- to eight-month-olds have capacities for group membership. The chapter uses a detailed analysis of one trio to show that babies can create their own...
Chapter Three: This Is Not Happening
This Is Not Happening shifts from describing infants in all-baby trios to the study of baby-only quartets. In so doing it takes up the challenge of moving beyond familiar cultural scripts which focus on individuals, couples, or ‘jealous’ threesomes. Extended vignettes show baby foursomes feature...
The Baby Vanishes: How the Infant in Infant-Mother Attachment Disappeared
‘What babies need’ was the focus for the observations which gave rise to the science of attachment. Babies need a secure one-to-one bond with their mums. Should they not form such a bond, they face a darkened future. John Bowlby was the man who made...