Cross Cultural Variations in Attachment

• If Bowlby's belief that attachments evolved and have a survival value is true then we'd expect patterns of attachment  types to be similar across different cultures, regardless of child-rearing styles used.
• Secure attachments should dominate in all cultures, with equal amounts of Type A's and Type C's.
• Belsky (1999) proposes an evolutionary reason for the existance of similar attachment types in different cultures, arguing that insecure attachment types are associated with weak adult relationships and early sexual activity, which could be useful in certain situations e.g. after famine or plague when the population has shrunk dramatically, people would need to reproduce by being sexually active at a young age and not getting too emotionally involved.
• However, if different patterns of attachment types are found cross-culturally, it would mean that infants' attachment types are not biological but learned through exposure to different cross-cultural child-rearing styles.
• Child-rearing styles do vary across cultures; in some cultures one person does most caregiving, in others many carers are involved.
• Ainsworth's study is often held as an example of research from which we can elicit facts about human behaviour that can be generalised to the population at large and reveals universal patterns of behaviour BUT we have to be sure that we are no imposing an ethnocentric (western) perspective on all cultures.

• What we can say is that when put in the **, children across most cultures show similar behaviours but we cannot say that this is representative of how all children behave in their natural environments.
• Also cross-cultural differences as to how different attachment types are regarded e.g. Type A's are regarded negatively in Britain, as it's associated with a weak attachment to people, but in Germany it is valued as it's associated with being independent from others.  Grossman & Grossman (1991) found there are many more Type A classifications in Germany, supporting the view that there ARE cross-cultural variations in attachment.
• Kyoung (2005) used the ** to compare 87 Korean families with 113 American families.  Notable differences:  Korean infants did not stay close to their mothers and when Korean mothers returned they were much more likely to play with their infants.  But there were a similar proportion of securely attached children in both cultures, suggesting that different child-rearing practices can lead to secure attachments.

• Takahashi (1990) studied 60 middle class Japanese infants and their mothers using the ** and obtained similar results to Ainsworth - 68% secure and 32% insecure-resistant.  There were NO insecure avoidant attachments - in the infant alone scenario, children became severely distressed.  90% of the studies of this scenario had to be stopped for ethical reasons of excessive anxiety on the part of the child.  Suggested that the lack of avoidant behaviour was because children are actively discouraged from behaving in this manner.  Hilights the methodological and ethical problems of assessing attachment where social and cultural norms are different.  Japan is a collectivist country and Japanese children are rarely separated from their parents, contrast to the individiualist country of the USA where children are more used to being left on their own.
• Tronick et al (1992) studied the African tribe, the Efe, in the DRC.  Live in extended family groups where breast-feeding is shared.  Children sleep with their own mothers.  At 6 months old, it was found they had a primary attachment bond just as in western families.

• Grossman & Grossman (1991) found that more German children were classified as "insecurely attaced" when compared with the USA.  Was thought that this is because German culture desires a greater disconnectio between parent and child and therefore chidlren do not seek out the parent in the same way for reassurance and comfort.  Is the ** method therefore valid for these circumstances?  Children who are insecurely attached are thought to be less well adjusted to adult life but there is no evidence to suggest that German children grow up to be any less well adjusted than children from other countries.
• Assessing teh valie and type of attachments requires objectivity and a consideration of the reasons why children from different cultures may respond differently to the **.
• Porges (2003) says that not enough attention is paid to the individual aspects of the child such as personality, intelligence, learning difficulties, low birth weight etc. which can all affect the type of attachment formed.  Above all, he argues that environmental factors must be taken into account - family dysfunction, poverty, adolescent parenting, poor quality child care, poor neighbourhood, maternal depression, poor health etc.

Aboriginal Children & The Australian Care System:

• Malin (1997) found that Aboriginal infants in Australia are discouraged from exploreing by threats and distractions of food and so tend not to use their mothers as a safe base from which to explore, staying close to her at all times.  This leads to infants being incorrectly labelled as insecurely attached and often put into care.
• Soo See Yeo (2003) has concerns about the use of the ** by the New South Wales Children's Court in determining which children should be placed into care.  Aboriginal children are 9 times more likely to be in care than non-Aboriginal children.  Yeo believes asn imposed etic may be at work as assessments are being made by what the dominant culture sees as good parenting, with disregard for Aboriginal cultural practices.  This results in life-changing decisions being made based on culturally inappropriate evidence.
• Aboriginal childrena are often cared for and breastfed by many women within the community and cared for by women interchangeably, often being brought up women who are not their natural mothers.  They are rarely left with strangers.
• Lewis (2005) argues that these child-rearing practices create a network of multi-layered relatinships that create an effective safety net for children, while attachment theory only focuses on the linear relationship between a mother and her infant.  Therefore the assessment of Aboriginal children in line with the ** may lead to incorrect assessments of insecure attachments, resulting in the removal of these children from their communities. 

• Understanding attachment across cultures is more complicated than trying to measure it by one standard "technique" such as the ** which can only explore one aspect of attachment.