Editorial: Attachment, development and quality of life

Abstract

This issue includes the 2008 Emanuel Miller Lecture on attachment presented by Prof. Sir Michael Rutter and the practitioner review on quality of life in child mental health by Coghill et al., as well as other papers pertaining to closely related issues of interest, including papers on screening for childhood mental health problems, prosocial development, empathy and psychopathic traits, sibling relationships, parent groups for young children with behaviour difficulties, school-based intervention to reduce aggression, face processing among adolescence with conduct disorder and early markers and maternal sensitivity as associated with attachment in young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). No doubt that Emanuel Miller would have been pleased to read this collection of papers which relate nicely to the transactional model of development (Sameroff & Chandler, 1975). Rutter, Kreppner and Sonuga-Barke raise some important questions regarding the state of the art research and its application in the field of attachment. They outline five key landmarks in the development of attachment theory including the differentiation of attachment from love made by Bowlby, the creation of the Strange Situation Procedure by Ainsworth to assess various forms of attachment (secure, insecure – ambivalent, insecure avoidant) between young children and their caregivers, a representational level of attachment in addition to the behavioural level, the addition of the disorganized category to the three aforementioned categories, and the introduction of the diagnostic category of Reactive Attachment Disorder. The authors state that “in itself, insecurity is not an indication of disorder or even maladjustment” (p. 530). Therefore, attachment as conceptualized and assessed in children with typical as well as atypical development does not “incorporate the whole of social relationships and behaviour” (p. 530) but rather is one aspect of social relationships. Today we know that children with ASD with all their social difficulties and impairments, not only discriminate among adults, but also form secure attachments with their mothers (Rutgers, Bakermans-Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, & van Berckelaer-Onnes, 2004). Whereas the 50% rate of secure attachment in samples of children with ASD is lower than the 65–70% in normative samples, it is still surprisingly high, suggesting that insecure attachment and ASD may be somewhat independent of one another, and this may be true for other disorders as well. Even in the case of Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), which may intuitively suggest an insecure attachment pattern, it is well documented that adopted children can reveal both secure attachments toward their adoptive parents and signs of RAD at the same time (Chisholm, 1998; O’Connor et al., 2001). Thus attachment may be best viewed as one component of social and emotional development and not as encompassing the whole of social relationships and behaviour, nor as explaining or as a prerequisite of psychopathology. It is perhaps more appropriate to view secure attachment as a protective factor and insecure attachment as a risk factor. The interaction and transaction of disposition and context are important contributors to the continuity and discontinuity in attachment classifications and to the independence of attachment classifications on the one hand, and typical development and diagnostic entities on the other hand. Moreover, attachment security and insecurity may be best conceptualized as contributing positively or negatively, respectively, to the quality of life in children with typical development as well as in children with various diagnoses because secure attachments help all children to more fully actualize their developmental potential, whereas insecure attachments may inhibit such actualization.