Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Bowlby’s theory of attachment, first published in the 1950s, was a very simple but powerful idea. In essence, he told us something that we all knew, which was that the bond between a parent and a child is really important. He was working at the Tavistock Clinic in London with children who hadn’t had the luxury of strong relationships with their parents. Many had been brought up in a children’s home, and many had developed delinquency or other problems by their teens.
Your final book is John Bowlby’s Attachment series. Why did you choose this?
Bowlby’s theory of attachment, first published in the 1950s, was a very simple but powerful idea. In essence he told us something that we all knew, which was that the bond between a parent and a child is really important. But he didn’t just say this anecdotally, he said it on the basis of his clinical experience. He was working at the Tavistock Clinic in London, where he worked with children who hadn’t had the luxury of strong relationships with their parents. Many had been brought up in a children’s home, and many had developed delinquency or other problems by their teens. And just as Steve Pinker looked at language from the perspective of great apes or dolphins, Bowlby looked at attachment behaviour from the perspective of many different species. He unified the study of parent-offspring relations across the animal kingdom.
The reason I’ve selected it here is that it’s a very nice example of an environmental influence that affects all of our outcomes in adulthood. Whereas Pinker talks about genetic or innate factors that predispose humans to produce and understand language, Bowlby reminds us that our early experience and our social environment is equally important. What Bowlby’s studies have shown, now confirmed by scientists who came after him, is that the quality of your attachment to your parents can predict not just short-term outcomes, like how well you do at school and your social popularity, but also long-term outcomes like your risk of divorce and your risk of developing personality disorders in adulthood.
How does the attachment relationship change in the case of autistic children? Is there a special bond there?
Yes. Sometimes people imagine that children with autism don’t form any relationships at all, but actually that’s a myth. They do show selective relationships just like other children, showing a preference for their caregiver, whether that’s a biological parent or a foster parent. They are capable of showing strong attachment. But you’re right in that attachment is bound to change if you have autism. A typically developing child who is securely attached would be expected to be very confident and able to go out and explore the world. In the case of someone with autism, clearly there are other factors that will mediate whether that person will end up socially withdrawn or very confident.
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Professor Simon Baron-Cohen is a world-famous expert of autism, and is the head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He is the author of The Essential Difference and Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts. His film The Transporters also deals with autism.
