He did not make eye contact when his name was called. He put toys in his mouth and climbed on things and did not interact socially with anyone. His mother expressed that she felt frustration and negative emotions when she tried to play with him and he wouldn’t respond to her. The nurse and psychologists assessed the child developmental skills can concluded that the child’s developmental age was 19.5 and 15; for locomotion was and motor ability; 15 and 15 for self-help and motor ability; and 10 and 10 for linguistics and comprehension. The child’s joint attention behaviors were measured to be at an 8 month old level at intake (21 months) while the mother’s negative emotions were measured to be at level 12 at intake.
Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of divorce. Unable to understand and process such complex matters of life, children resort to alternative ways of expressing their heartache and confusion. The fact is that the divorce of parents remains with children, to some degree, all of their lives. Any adult child of divorce can relay past feelings that accompanied the demise of their caretaker’s marriage. Regardless of the passage of time, few children of divorce are unable to provide some recollection of pain.
Approximately 22% of infants were ‘insecure-avoidant’. This is when they ignored their mother and didn’t mind if she left the room as they were comfortable with the stranger comforting them. 66% were ‘securely attached’ which meant that they were happy with their mother being there, upset when she left and excited when she returned. Securely attached children also tried to avoid strangers. The final 12% were ‘insecure-resistant’.
Psychologists have attributed this to the fact that the privation prevented her from forming an attachment or learning any language skills during the critical period of her life, up to two and a half years of age. A further case study was that of the Czech twins who were locked up by their stepmother. This case differed slightly as they were discovered at the age of seven; and as they had been kept together psychologists believe they may have been able to form some sort of attachment with one another. When they were discovered the twins were unable to talk, however after spending several years with the people who adopted them, the twins went on to become and IT technician and a trainer, and live normal and happy lives. This suggested that the privation for the twins was not long lasting, as they were intellectually equal to most others and had no problems forming relationships.
Early studies found that 70% were unable to show feelings towards anyone. The children were assessed regularly and some of the children had even left due to adoption or they had been reunited with their families. Hodges and Tizard found that the children who had been reunited with their families were less likely to form attachments with their mothers; however the adopted children were as closely attached to their parents as ‘normal’ children. On the other hand, both groups did have problems with peers as they struggled to make secure friendships. This shows that privation had an effect on the children and had affected their ability to form attachments.
While many single mothers worry too much or regret decisions during their children childhood they are satisfied with the result and the out come of there children by the actions their children make after they grown out of their childhood In “I stand here ironing” a mother depicts her first child to have a bad early childhood by making the wrong decision not by choice but simply what got handed to them in a urban world. “She was a miracle to me but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father who “could no longer endure sharing want with us.”” Narrator did not want leave her child with the downstairs neighbor, but to provide the little she could to her child she made scarifies due to been a one parent family. She did all she could even with the father figure leaving to irrelevant discussion on his part. When she sees the development of her child thru the years she gets warmth never felt. “Now suddenly she was Somebody, and as imprisoned in her difference as she had in anonymity.” In the narrators point of view her child was an outcast, a nobody, but when she got the call from her daughter it seem the sun finally started to shine in her daughter path, she was free.
Describe and evaluate Ainsworth's work on attachment (12 marks) In 1978 Ainsworth et al studied the reactions of young children to brief separations from their mother in order to determine the nature of attachment behaviours and types of attachments Ainsworth’s procedure is known as the strange situation. In the study she conducted she use controlled observation infants were exposed to a sequence of 3 minute-episodes. The total observation period lasted for approximately 25 minutes. First the infant and mother were introduced to the observation room by the researcher, then the researcher left the room. After a while a stranger entered and had a brief conversation with the mother.
The study found that 68% were Type B (securely attached), 32% were Type C (resistant-insecure), however none were classified as Type A (avoidant-insecure). In fact, the ‘infant alone’ part of the Strange Situation was stopped for 90% of participants because the infant was too distressed to be left without their mother. If this wasn’t the case, many more would have been classified as insecurely attached. Takahashi’s study supports that there is cross- cultural variations in the way infants respond to being left alone, due to infants experiencing much little to no separation in everyday life – the study was lacking in ecological validity. Japanese infants are with their parents almost twenty-four-seven, and for this reason, the Strange Situation was very stressful.
It relates the tale of a suburban Mom, Mrs Wadsworth (Ruth Roman) and her three fatherless adult children, the youngest of whom, Baby (David Manzy) is in his twenties but still behaves like an ungainly diaper-swaddled newborn. Mrs Wadsworth’s unconventional household makes her the focus of social workers’ attention: when one of them, Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer), expresses a particular interest in the family’s situation, nobody could guess that she might have an ulterior motive. The true seat of horror here resides not in this anti-bourgeois unit but in the external agencies attempting to
This is a belief formed by sociologist Philippe Aires in 1962. The feudal family was looked at as a production unit, with every member working so the family could survive; obviously babies could not work, so they were looked at as ‘inadequate adults’. Parents were also very distant with their offspring, not attaching themselves to them emotionally. This is due to the high infant mortality rates; an example of this is that children were usually not given names until they reached their 5th birthdays. Children were looked at as economic assets rather than a symbol of peoples love for one another.