Special section: does infancy matter?Contextualism and the issue of continuity
Section snippets
Developmental models in socio-emotional development
We return to our developmental models in a more formal way using attachment as our exemplar of the problems in asking the question about the nature of change. Three models of attachment over time are offered as they relate to the role of the environment or to contextualism. These models are the child attribute model, the contextual model, and the transactional model.
Contextualism and the nature of environments
In some sense, all the positions, except for the most radical trait view, argue for at least some role of the environment, however defined. In order to explore the question of stability and change in attachment, it is necessary to measure the nature of the environment. One problem is to define the quality of the environment. One can look at the mother-child relationship over time in keeping with the idea that mothers, as primary caregivers, are the most important respects of environments.
Does attachment at one year predict anything?
The child attribution or trait model suggests that early attachment at one year should be related to autobiographical recollection at 13 years and to adult attachment models at 18 years. There is no relationship between attachment behaviors and attachment classification at one year and these two later attachment models (see Lewis et al., 2000). Of the insecure 1-year-olds, over 60% had secure attachment models at 13 and 18 years while of the secure 1-year-olds, only about 57% had secure
Personal narratives and identity
There is not much support for the idea that people’s working models may bear much resemblance to what actually occurred in their childhood. In fact, those models are likely to be more related to people’s current status. We can see that what occurred in early childhood bears little relation to what it is that people believe about their relationships with their parents. In other words, early attachment relationships bear little resemblance to what people will believe later in life or how they may
Contextualism and the measure of environments
Perhaps the best way to contrast contextualism with the more traditional developmental models is to apply both to a problem in development. Consider this example. A child is being raised by a mother who is depressed. The child’s condition at one year is influenced by her mother’s psychopathology. As in most studies, we can ask, ”What will that child be like when she is of school age?“ Assuming that the child showed poor school adjustment, we could argue that the child’s earlier adjustment
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