of fathers in child development, and attachment specifically, is Michael Lamb, a British man who traveled to Baltimore to work with Mary Ainsworth as a master’s-level student at Johns Hopkins in 1973–74.
In one epistolary exchange between Lamb and Ainsworth from 1974, the by-then-ex-student has requested feedback on his research on fathers in the Strange Situation, which he believed showed that babies exhibited no preference for mothers or fathers. In the letter he received in response, Mary responds not so much to his results as to his process, giving the young scholar a bit of a lashing for being impetuous and careless. She takes him to task for lacking nuance in his reading of both Bowlby and her, being dead wrong about things she has written, as well in the way he interprets his own data. However, being a secure/autonomous who always values attachment, Ainsworth ends her seven-page typed, single-spaced takedown by saying, “Forgive the avuncular (or perhaps it is maternal) tone of all of this…With my very best wishes to you and Jamie [presumably Lamb’s partner at the time].”
Ainsworth’s beefs with Lamb’s paper are of course deeply personal. And yet, her critique is significant in that it offers a clear explanation of her understanding of the role of fathers, a position that—almost fifty years and tens of thousands of studies later—still holds true, not just for the role of fathers in attachment, but about critiques of attachment theory on the whole. This letter could be sent to many a critic today.
The introduction rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed to me belligerent and contentious. It gives the impression that you are wholly critical of attachment theory and attachment research to date, whereas I know full well that you intend only to take issue with specific points in attachment theory that you either feel have been erroneous (or perhaps overstated) while at the same time you are generally working with the same framework.
If you read Bowlby really carefully it should prove a salutary lesson—as indeed it has to me. You should note…that he tends to be modest, hypothetical, reasoned, and tentative in most of his statements and arguments…
I think you have overstated the “claim” for fathers. I think your findings speak for themselves. I don’t think you have to denigrate people who have (often for purely practical reasons) focused on mothers in order to point out that fathers have been neglected. Often an understatement is more effective than an overstatement…
Now the next thing I would like to discuss is the notion of “monotropy,” which you correctly interpret as the notion that it implies that one figure usually the mother is the principal (and/or primary) attachment figure, rather than that this figure is the sole attachment figure…Time and time again in clinical studies one runs across evidence that in the “crunch” one attachment figure (nearly always the mother figure) is the figure the child most wants…
Personally, as a daughter who found her father more nurturant (as well as more interesting to interact with) than her mother, I can acknowledge that in some cases it might be the father rather than the mother who is wanted even in a “crunch.” But evidence to date, even though of an anecdotal sort, suggests that for most babies and young children it is the mother—not because she is the natural mother, but because she has been the principal caregiver…
If you read Infancy in Uganda carefully, you will see that I certainly drew attention to babies’ attachment to fathers. I expressed amazement that fathers, who having been absent for months, could return home and so quickly establish an attachment relationship…
Now let us suppose! Suppose that a baby had no principal caregiver—no mother figure. Could a father, returning home after a long absence, establish within a few days an attachment relationship that was the first that a baby had experienced? I don’t really know the answer to that. However, my hypothesis is that a baby first establishes an attachment relationship with the figure with whom he has the most and the most satisfactory interaction.
After several pages of line-by-line, very concrete critique, Mary writes: