John Bowlby’s insights about the importance of attachment was a revelation to a western world dominated by left-brain orientations of non-relational individualism and treating mothers as milk machines instead of nurturers.
Attachment is a psychological concept that caught on among researchers and interventionists, and spread to the public. It usually refers to the type of bond a child develops with the mother or primary caregiver during the first year or two of life. (See prior post on attachment.) Attachment-to-mother can be measured rather easily, hence its popularity among developmental researchers. Numerous studies have demonstrated its importance for child adjustment and socialization, at least in industrialized nations.
Why is the latter an important caveat? Industrialized nations have largely disrupted our species’ evolved nest in multiple ways, leaving a minimal set of supports for young children. Attachment is one indicator of things going well enough in a child’s life. The dominant culture stripped away our species-normal community of nurturers to a nuclear mother-father-children or more recently, single-parent-and-child, putting a large burden on the mother or the primary caregiver and narrowing bonding (and growth) options for babies.
Attachment as it is measured and conceived is correspondingly narrow. Focusing on attachment has shrunk the relational world of the baby to the relationship with mother. Such a restricted perspective has limited understanding of what is really happening, and what needs to happen, in early life.
First, attachment is only a slice of what needs to develop well in the early years. For example, in his “Cultural Acquisition Device,” anthropologist Melvin Konner lists over twenty processes that facilitate socialization or fitting into one’s culture that are developed or activated in species-normal early life. Attachment is only one of the processes. Psychological theorists would add a few more things, like developing flexible attunement to different partners and learning from carers how to repair dyssynchrony with communication partners. Native Peoples would expect attachment to be much broader, and include relationships with a community of other humans and non-humans.
Second, attachment is one aspect of the broader notion of connectedness. Connectedness is the sense of connection with the living world: at conception, in gestation, at birth, post-birth, throughout childhood and adulthood. The focus on attachment to mother/primary caregiver is one tiny piece of connectedness in a wide world of relationships.
We can see the broader orientation to connectedness in Native American traditions with respectful attitudes and behavior towards the animals and plants whose lives are asked for in order to sustain humans. Permission is requested from the plants and animals to take their lives–see Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass. (Our recent book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview, dialogues about some of these traditions.)
The San Bushmen of southern Africa carry humanity’s ancestral genes and have been in existence as hunter-gatherers for over 150,000 years. In a webinar discussing a recent book, UCLA clinical psychologists Dan Siegel mentioned his experience with the San Bushmen. He wondered how they could be so happy with so little (having been pushed into the Kalahari desert by colonizers). An elder told him they feel like they belong to one another and to their place on Earth.
Connectedness is what modern society undermines at every turn, especially in the USA.
What a degraded communal evolved nest does in babies is foster a sense of disconnection, creating brains that are fearful and anxious, undermining healthy development. There are countless studies of prenatal, birth, post-birth undercare/toxic stress having long term effects in humans and other mammals. The anxiety, depression, and me-mine-centeredness we see in our society are not species-typical but shaped by child raising practices that disconnect. The effects compound over generations and are passed on through epigenetic inheritance.
Bruce Scofield and Lynn Margulis (2012) noted: “The psychological discontent of civilized people emerges directly from isolation, a chronic physical dissociation of humans from the rest of the biosphere, including fellow humans” (p. 221, emphasis added). This starts with newborns being separated from the warm bodies of mother and others. Babies should experience zero separation (Bergman, 2014).
To understand our species-normal baselines, you have to take a deep history view of our species. We are social mammals who emerged tens of millions of years ago. Recall that our genus emerged around six million years ago, our homo line about two million years ago, and homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago. Only in the last couple of millennia, accelerating in recent centuries, have we become increasingly Earth-dissociated, degrading the communal evolved nest, becoming narrowly (mostly insecurely) attached to one person (mother), and increasingly attached to having more and more things (security objects).
Of course in our ancestral context, hunter-gatherer civilization, children are nest nurtured, keeping their wholeness in mind. Community practices emphasize feeling and maintaining connectedness to All—now, and through time (ancestors, future generations), including to the life-enhancing unmanifest (spiritual realm).
Imagine how our world would be different if we had made connectedness a basic human right rather than (only) freedom (from responsible connectedness!)—a reaction formation if ever I saw one: “I don’t need anybody” say the undercared for.
Imagine how our world would be different if we had made connected, respectful stewardship a basic right for Nature (and a basic responsibility for every human).
It is time to return to our nested pathway and restore connectedness from the beginning, a connectedness that guides our treatment of others, including all of Nature.
FREE RESOURCES:
Build your attachment to Nature with 28 days of Eco-Attachment Dance.
Check out Nature Immersion and Connection suggestions (component 8 of the evolved nest).
Check out Healing Practices (component 9 of the evolved nest).
Test your attachment style with romantic partners here.
REFERENCES
Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.
Bergman, Nils (2014). The neuroscience of birth – and the case for Zero Separation. Curationis, 37, 10.4102/curationis.v37i2.1440
Berman, M. (2000). Wandering God: A study in nomadic spirituality. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books (Original work published 1969).
Bowlby, J. (1979). The making and breaking of affectional bonds. Tavistock.
Hewlett, B.S., & Lamb, M.E. (2005). Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine.
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, MN.
Konner, M. (2010). The evolution of childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.
Narvaez, D. (2019). In search of baselines: Why psychology needs cognitive archaeology. In T. Henley, M. Rossano & E. Kardas (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive archaeology: A psychological framework (pp. 104-119). London: Routledge.
Scofield, B., & Margulis, L. (2012). Psychological discontent: Self and science in our symbiotic planet. In P.H. Kahn Jr & P.H. Hasbach (Eds.) Ecopsychology: Science, totems and the technological species. MIT Press.
Suzman, J. (2017). Affluence without abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen. New York: Bloomsbury.
Topa, Wahinkpe & Narvaez, D. (2022). Restoring the kinship worldview: Indigenous voices introduce 28 precepts for rebalancing life on planet earth. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Tronick, E. (2007). The neurobehavioral and social-emotional development of infants and children. New York: Norton.