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 home. This push has spectacularly failed. Around the world, year on year, more and more babies and toddlers are experiencing centre-based care and education – now more than 1 in 4 in Australia. By 3, over half Australian children regularly spend time in early-childhood education centres (ECEC).
So a new battle has begun: to require educators to behave as what attachment theorists judge to be ‘natural mothers’ – by being constantly ‘available,’ ‘sensitive,’ ‘responsive,’ and ‘accepting’ to each baby under their care. So far, this battle has gone well for attachment theorists – as we see when we look at documents like the National Quality Framework (NQF) Guide released by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority in September 2020. The NQF incorporates both the National Quality Standards and The Early Years Learning Framework.
Consider, for instance, the NQF’s requirement that services should ‘facilitate children’s learning and development through play by providing educators with whom children can form attachments.’ Or the NQF’s prescriptions for making sure ‘children develop strong attachments and a sense of belonging’ in ECEC. Or the rule that educators should engage in ‘one-to-one interactions with children during daily routines’ in order to develop ‘routines and play experiences to interact with children to build attachments.’
Why worry about national guidelines like the NQF which transfer the burden of facilitating infant-adult attachments to educators? For three reasons.
First, attachment theory does not have a credible scientific pedigree even when talking about babies at home – as we show in our book Babies in Groups.
Secondly, even if attachment theory were valid in homes, it would be practically impossible to transfer the attachment ideal of maternal care to early education centres. Why? Because even in well-staffed ECEC, each educator is responsible for a minimum of four infants at any one time. Plus, staff are not constantly available to the babies and toddlers in their care because they have other duties, and often do not work five days a week. You only have to watch an educator trying to feed four babies-in-highchairs at the same time, each with their own bowl and spoon, to see how impossible it is to put the one-to-one ideal of attachment theory into practice in ECEC. Hence, if educators are judged by their competence as substitute ‘mother-figures,’ they are bound to fail – and likely become discouraged.
Lastly, the effectiveness of requirements that educators ‘build attachments’ with infants has not been properly tested. Why? Because only when researchers have shown care which makes a priority of forming infant-educator attachments outperforms a scientifically-supported non-attachment model of infant care – such as the group-based care we describe in Babies in Groups – would attachment advocates have reasonable grounds to advocate their model of mothering in centres of early education. Nowhere has this been attempted, despite thousands of attachment-based studies of ECEC being published over the last 55 years. In fact, as the early findings reported in Chapter 4 of Babies in Groups suggest, group-based care looks likely to outperform attachment-based care.
