Basic Instincts
Modern parenting is bewildering, and the struggles are plentiful. Parents turn to childrearing books filled with behavioral principals of reinforcement and punishment to generate compliance from their offspring. When these operant conditioning techniques fail, parents are confused and frustrated.
Why are many children—especially teenagers—defiant and disrespectful?
While there are individual differences contributing to some of the domestic turmoil, looking to our most basic parental instincts may help us understand how modern parenting has gone awry.
A Brief History of Attachment
In the early 20th century, psychologists—propelled mostly by Freudian theory—conceptualized the infant-caregiver relationship as Cupboard Love. It was assumed that infants preferred their mothers because they had their physiological needs for food met by them.
In the 1950s, John Bowlby, while observing distressed infants, realized there was more to the infant-caregiver relationship than the nourishment provided. Bowlby determined the attachment relationship is an evolutionary mechanism. He proposed that the parent-infant relationship has been the most essential process for human survival.
Bowlby went on to define attachment as a neurobiological mechanism that resulted in the infant bonding to the primary…
