for safety and “feel felt,” it’s another good sign. This is why the Strange Situation works so well—it highlights the relationship while controlling for almost everything else. Ainsworth really was a genius.
Eventually I learned how to read the cues, and I began to notice the quickest glance and connect it with the rest of the baby’s behavior. I now knew the difference between a full-on, wrap-around-the-legs greeting and a limp request for contact, and the significance of each. I started to wonder about the baby who reached up to be held, was picked up, then kicked to be let down. And I began to worry about all those “good” babies who just sat there, moving shapes around the floor, unaffected by their lifeline’s comings and goings. I was learning that babies who don’t use their mothers to soothe themselves have trouble later on—as children and as adults.
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ONCE MARY SAW the American babies in her study using their mother as a secure base, like the Ganda babies had at home, that could have been the end of the Strange Situation. She could have just said, Okay, yes, this secure-base thing is real. But the different ways babies responded in the Strange Situation was so, as one scholar put it, “especially striking” that another layer of the onion revealed itself.
After watching the babies move through the Strange Situation, Mary and her colleagues categorized their individual differences, according to an “ABC” system, which is still used around the world to classify patterns of infant attachment: A is insecure/avoidant; B is secure; C is insecure/resistant or insecure/ambivalent. These patterns are now completely embedded in our understandings of attachment, and are the basis upon which the idea of “attachment styles” was built.
Today, though different studies have slightly varying results, it is generally understood that global averages for security in infancy is at around 65 percent, not far off from what Mary found in Uganda and Baltimore in her small samples. At home and in the Strange Situation, “Group-B infants showed significantly less frequent distress when mother left the room than either A or C infants,” whereas “Group-C babies showed the most separation distress both at home and in the strange situation.” B babies responded the most positively when held at home and generally tended to seek contact and interaction with the mother in the Strange Situation. A (avoidant) babies showed the least disturbance in separation episodes and tended to avoid physical closeness with the mother. C (resistant) babies were upset upon separation and also angry upon reunion.
Tens of thousands of studies over the past sixty years have shown how our ABC classification in the Strange Situation is moderately stable across our life span—if it changes, it’s most often due to negative experiences—and is connected to pretty much every single aspect of our lives, including the ways we approach adult relationships, with all their ups and downs. Out of the shorthand wisdom of the Strange Situation, what Mary and her team discovered in those early labs at Johns Hopkins was three universal attachment patterns, one of which—A, B, or C—has been etched into our very being since our first year of life and will inform our feelings about who we are in relation to others and how we behave toward them—with confidence, anger, or lack of trust. The Strange Situation shows us what a one-year-old has learned about her world.
As Mary wrote in a letter to a colleague in 1983, “There seems no doubt now that there is continuity, coherence, predictability or whatever you want to call it between early patterns of infant-parent attachment and a number of aspects of later development.”
Attachment, in other words, is, as Mary said, “a robust phenomenon.”
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BECAUSE THE B (secure) babies were the most predictable and prevalent, they were the easiest to notice. Many cried upon separation, then were soothed by their mothers, just like the secure babies in Uganda. Those who did not cry but enthusiastically greeted their mothers and/or energetically initiated interaction with them upon their reunion were also found to be secure. And because Mary had these babies’ home data and consistently compared them against the Strange Situation data, she could see that the secure babies, even those who cried mightily in