Bowlby put forward the principle of monotropy, believing that the infant displays a strong innate tendency to form an attachment with one significant person, not necessarily, but usually the mother. (Gross, R. 2005). This was criticised by Rutter (1981), who claimed that the mother is not special in the way that the infant shows its attachment, as children will show a whole range of attachment behaviours towards a variety of people. Bowlby (1969), cited in Martin et al 2007 p. 546) claimed that the most important attachment behaviours are sucking, cuddling, looking, smiling and crying. According to Freud the newborn infant lives in a solipsistic world of ‘primary narcissism’ and experiences a build-up of tension with the need to suck the breast as an expression of his infantile sexuality.
It is said that individuals who have these traits may have parents with the same traits. But not all individuals who turn to crime are from broken home homes, some are from homes with supportive parents. Parenting affects a child’s temperament and is inter-related in important ways to include harsh physical discipline, parental supervision, and antisocial attitudes. Parenting plays an important role in the development of antisocial behavior. At an early age boys tend to be more aggressive than girls, due to the ability to socialize being easier for girls than for boys thereby, creating gender difference in antisocial behavior.
Throughout the set up, the infants were judged on an intensity scale of 1-7 (1 being the lowest and 7 the highest) which described their behaviour. This was Ainsworth’s quantitative data, though some of the method was qualitative. When the mother left the room and returned, with the effect of the stranger, the infants’ behaviour showed that the infants could fall into 3 types of behaviour. Type B is ‘secure attachment’; this is when the infants found it stressful and unsettling when their mother left the room. They did not care about the stranger attempting to give the comfort.
Therefore there is reason to believe that genes may not affect gender development that much as there are a lot of people nowadays who are transgender. However, hormones can also have an effect on gender development. Case studies such as the Batista family show that hormones can have a huge effect on gender development as Imperato-Mcginley et al, found that four children in Dominica were born with female genitalia and were raised as girls, but they produced large amounts of testosterone at puberty and
The biosocial explanation of gender was advanced by Money and Ehrhardt, who proposed that there are a number of critical events that affect the early development of a child. These events begin before birth in the form of maternal hormones and genes. However, from birth onwards, social factors also begin to play an important part. Once a child is labelled as a boy or a girl, they are treated very differently and these social factors interact with the biological ones to determine the child’s gender identity. In the majority of cases, the child’s biological sex matches their gender and there are no problems.
The biggest flaw of Ainsworth's strange situation is the fact that it may not measure the attachment type of the infant but rather the quality of the relationship between the infant and caregiver. A study conducted by Main and Weston concluded that infants behave differently depending on which parent they are with. This could mean that the strange situation doesn't fully measure what it is supposed to which ultimately decreases the validity of the strange situation as a measurement of attachment type. However it could be argued that the only relationship that matters is that of your primary caregiver which is the parent that partakes
If this idea is put into effect, it will take “designer babies” to a whole new level. While some people believe that being deaf or being a dwarf is a disability, those who actually experience that life think of it as a good thing. They want their children to be exactly like them. They ask if it is wrong to let that occur (2). That is one of the main questions that many debate.
When shown together there evidence provided a way of proving how levels of security in these relationships have substantial impact upon infants development. It is important to mention that the “strange situation” technique has received criticisms surrounding ethics with regards to intentionally inflicting distress upon infants by purposely separating them from their attachment figure however it has been argued that this situation is something that does occur naturally in an infants life. The ecological validity of the research and its ability to be generalised within different cultures has also been questioned as the study used only a sample of westernised participants. For Bowlby the IWM only had capacity to change in the period of infancy after this it is fixed for the rest of a persons life therefore a link should be able to be demonstrated between infant attachment classifications and adult attachment classifications. Continuing from the work of Bowlby and Ainsworth the adult attachment interview was developed by Main, here an adults ability to integrate childhood memories of relationships with attachment figures into working models of relationships was assessed identifying in accordance to Main three
One thing they expected to find in the experiment would be that the mothers and children that were clinically anxious would have higher scores and correlations than the ones who weren’t but the results were insignificant. However, the expressed behaviors were higher. According to the study and their findings, the results of the experiment could implicate some kind of treatment for childhood anxiety by managing parental anxiety and being
These sorts of stereotypes can prove harmful; they can stifle individual expression and creativity, as well as hinder personal and professional growth. The weight of scientific evidence demonstrates that children learn gender stereotypes from adults. As with gender roles, socializing agents—parents, teachers, peers, religious leaders, and the media—pass along gender stereotypes from one generation to the next. One approach to reexamining conventional gender roles and stereotypes isandrogyny, which is the blending of feminine and masculine attributes in the same individual. The androgyne, or androgynous person, does not neatly fit into a female or male gender role; she or he can comfortably express the qualities of both genders.