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Frightened children pick unavailable partners
Safety and fear in one parent
Attachment theory treats the attachment figure as a secure base. For a frightened child, that figure is also a source of fear, which is very confusing. Parents in this position are usually scary, scared, or both, and that does not make them bad: a parent can be traumatized. Infant research shows traumatized parents passing along the message that the world is scary without a word, moment by moment, and the child picks up that fear as their own.
Closeness and distance
Infants who fear a parent are observed running toward and away, toward and away. Later in life it becomes a lose-lose: distance is upsetting and closeness is threatening, and these adults are often aroused by danger and overwhelmed by tenderness. Many choose partners who are unavailable and won't flood them with closeness.
A reliable witness
New relationships are the main route to change, including the relationship with a therapist, when they provide a secure base and a reliable witness. Many children's witnesses are not reliable. In some families one parent is the active aggressor and the other a passive participant, or one lashes out while the other shuts down or dissociates. The parents function as a system, which leaves the child without a reliable witness.
How do researchers spot a frightened child in infancy?
Mary Main and Judith Solomon described disorganized attachment in 1986, after studying videotapes of the Strange Situation procedure. Some infants approached a returning parent with their heads turned away, froze mid-motion, or moved toward the parent and then backed off. Main and Erik Hesse argued that parents of such infants often behaved in frightened or frightening ways themselves. The pattern is far more common in samples of maltreated children than in the general population.
How does a parent's face change a baby's mood?
Developmental psychologist Edward Tronick introduced the still-face experiment in the 1970s. A mother plays normally with her infant, then turns to a blank expression and stays that way for a couple of minutes. Within seconds the baby tries to win her back with smiles and gestures, and then turns away and grows distressed. Dozens of replications across cultures have shown the same sequence.
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