with toddler girls and boys.”
What a tangled web of biological interdependence we weave.
And while the research on attachment has not yet ventured into the variety of family constellations people create today—two fathers, two mothers, an extended mix of bio and adopted parents—study after study assessing the outcomes of children raised in gay and lesbian families have come to the same conclusion: these children are thriving, sometimes even more than children from hetero families. So even though we don’t have the attachment studies to prove it, I think it’s fair to extrapolate that sexuality and family structure are in no way factors in attachment.
The same goes for the cross-cultural assessment of attachment. While different cultures skew differently in terms of the patterns that are likely to appear (for instance, in some African cultures, the avoidant patterns appear to be nonexistent), and attachment behaviors themselves are context-specific (for instance, babies and parents in Uganda don’t kiss like Westerners do), the verdict is indeed in: attachment is real, and it is influenced by sensitive parenting, which occurs within an infinitely complex web of culturally specific causes and conditions.
What’s more, attachment patterns in individuals have been found to affect our conditions, for instance, our health, the onset of puberty, and our brains—big-time. This line of ever-refining is still a matter of exploring the ways our environment (how we were raised, aka “nurture”) affects the individual’s body and mind (our nature). The recent documentary Three Identical Strangers brilliantly explored this question through the harrowing story of identical triplets separated at birth by asking us to choose a side: Why were these triplets who spent their lives apart so much alike? Was it a matter of nature or nurture? In the end, we see that in some important ways they weren’t so much alike after all, and we were asking the wrong question all along.
Interestingly, this film draws our attention to the importance of a child’s relationships with his or her parents in their development. Though the filmmakers don’t use the word “attachment,” we can understand it that way; I certainly did! And, even better, the focus in this film was on the relationship between three sons and their adoptive fathers. The mothers were in the background.
NATURE/NURTURE IS NOT A THING: ATTACHMENT AND EPIGENETICS
Some of the most stunning research to come out of the twenty-first century has been in the field of epigenetics, the study of the role the environment plays on our genes. Even the most basic reading of epigenetics reveals the fact that nature and nurture are, in fact, not two distinct forces but instead always intersecting. Epigenetics helps us understand attachment ever more deeply.
When Dr. Nadine Burke Harris finished her residency in pediatrics at the University of California, Davis, she wanted to work somewhere where she could really feel like she was making a difference. So when, in 2007, she was recruited by the California Pacific Medical Center to create a clinic in a “high risk” area of San Francisco, a neighborhood called Bayview–Hunter’s Point, she was thrilled. In her book The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, she writes about how, as soon as she started her work there, she began to see that “something medical was happening with my patients that I couldn’t quite understand.”
It started with the proliferation of diagnoses of ADHD and asthma, which at first appeared to be pretty typical childhood ailments, but were appearing in large numbers. But it wasn’t long before “day after day I saw infants who were listless and had strange rashes. I saw kindergartners whose hair was falling out…Kids just entering middle school had depression.” And in some cases, as with her young seven-year-old patient Diego, kids had stopped growing. When Diego’s mom brought him to Dr. Burke Harris, he had asthma and eczema, was suspected of having ADHD, and was in the fiftieth percentile of height—among four-year-olds.
Burke Harris was struck by the sheer number of serious health concerns her young patients faced, and, at the same time, the violence and harshness they were exposed to. When Burke Harris asked one of her young patients’ mothers if she had noticed any triggers for her asthma (pet dander and cockroaches being the usual suspects), her