come later.
Some of the mothers from her study were “very pleasant, welcoming and cooperative” but didn’t really have a lot of rich detail to share about their child, or were more interested in chatting about “things other than the baby,” while other women, who were “equally hospitable…proved to be excellent informants.” When asked about their babies, “they responded readily, volunteering relevant information and giving much spontaneous detail about the baby’s behavior.” Of the former group, she writes, “The phenomenon of finding incomplete data, despite numerous visits, highlighted the fact that these mothers differed in their excellence as informants” (italics mine).
Mary investigated further by looking back through the data and asking which mothers had the most insight into their children. And what did it mean, if anything?
What she found was that “mother’s excellence as informant” was significantly correlated with babies being securely attached. This was a surprising finding that continues to unfold in contemporary attachment research. It points in an incredibly important direction—toward the experience of being a parent. Of the other possible factors she thought might be related to attachment security—warmth of mother, multiple caretakers, amount of care given by the mother, total amount of care, scheduled vs. self-demand feeding, mother’s milk supply, mother’s attitude toward breastfeeding—the only two that showed any connection at all were “mother’s attitude toward breastfeeding” and “total amount of care.” The latter, she believed, emerged as an important variable because the mother’s availability, her “total amount of care,” is simply a “necessary condition” for interaction. In other words, it’s not so much the care itself that is associated with security, but the fact that the mother has to be there in order to be in a relationship with her child. “If the mother is elsewhere,” Mary writes, “she obviously cannot respond to and interact with the baby, although her mere presence is no guarantee of sensitivity or interaction.”
The fact that Mary even thought to ask these women whether or not they enjoyed breastfeeding, that she uncovered that it was the mothers’ feelings—their pleasure, their delight—that mattered more than the nursing itself, is a major departure from the way mothers were viewed in the 1950s, and it still is.
In other words, while all the external, easily observed behaviors, like feeding and playing and cuddling and disciplining, were interesting to Mary, ultimately these actions were more like the bread crumbs leading back to what Mary found really mattered—a mother’s “attitude.” Excellent informants were mothers who were able, for some reason, to pay more attention to their children and, through their own awareness, to tell a compelling, detailed, vivid, and true enough story about them. And so it was that, by tracking the behaviors between mothers and their babies, she began to see that a woman’s internal experience called for investigation.
Radical. A woman’s feelings about her child are worthy of the scientific gaze.
Mary couldn’t wait until she could do another study confirming what she saw in Uganda—that babies really do use their mother as a secure base, and that a parent’s attention is like the sunlight that grows a secure attachment.
What Mary saw and what has been borne out in study after study since is that the way we feel about our relationships gets conveyed in the stories we tell—about our children and about ourselves—and the lives we live based upon these stories. And so it is through these narratives, made manifest in our lives, that our children tend to feel what we feel, and internalize it. This is how attachment is passed down through generations.
And this is the way we can transform those stories, those feelings, and our excellence as informants: simply—miraculously—by shedding our light upon them.
part iii
miracle
This internalized something that we call attachment has aspects of feelings, memories, wishes, expectancies, and intentions, all of which constitute an inner program acquired through experience and somehow built into a flexible yet retentive inner mechanism (which we identify with central nervous system functions) which serves as a kind of filter for the reception and interpretation of interpersonal experience and as a kind of template shaping the nature of outwardly observable response.
—Mary Ainsworth, Infancy in Uganda
chapter six
Never in a million years