Chapter 17: Attachment in Middle Childhood
Organisation of chapter
- Nature of attachment in middle childhood
- Measuring attachment in middle childhood
- Continuity and change in attachment in middle childhood
- Associations with parents
- Associations with cognitive, social, emotional development
Middle childhood → 7-12 years
Nature of attachment in Middle Childhood
- Early childhood
- children's social world shaped by family members
- Parents are primary social figures in children’s lives
- Middle childhood
- Children’s social world expand, spend time away from parents
- Parents have less control/influence over environments and social contact children experience
- Children have clear preference for peers over parents as playmates
- Children become increasingly self reliant, more responsibility
Important advances in middle childhood
- Physical
- Puberty/bodily changes
- Cognitive/emotional
- Metacognition, Memory, Cognitive flexibility
- Self-awareness, Enhanced understanding of others
- More consideration of psychological traits
- Greater capacity to regulate emotions
- Middle childhood can also be distinguished from adolescence; during the latter period, children gain
increasing independence:
- Dismissing attitude toward parental attachments between late middle childhood and early
adolescence
- Emergence of other attachments, including romantic ones, to peers in late adolescence
4 defining features of attachment in middle childhood (Bowlby)
(1) Attachment system changes from proximity to the availability of the attachment figure → longer
separations are okay, as long as child knows they will reunite
(2) Parents still principal attachment figures → When asked about situations likely to invoke the need for an
attachment figure (e.g., times when a child is afraid or sad, or specific situations such as separation from
home), even 11- to 12-year-old children show a strong preference for parents over peers (eg: when feeling
ill/scared)
(3) Greater coregulation of secure base contact child <-> parental figure → child/parents jointly work
together to solve the child’s problems, as a way to prepare a child to be able to cope better on his or her
own
(4) Attachment becomes a goal-corrected partnership → parents are used as a resource not a panacea to all
problems
(a) Bowlby → “emerges sometime after age 3, when a child is better able to understand a parent’s
desires, communications, and decisions, and is able to take these into consideration when
developing plans and goals”
(b) Waters, Kondo-Ikemura, Posada, and Richters (1991) → “this shift in attachment may emerge
later, during middle childhood, which they termed the emergence of a supervisory partnership”
Attachment figures in middle childhood → safe/secure base that support a child’s exploration
- Early attachment more focused on safe base of attachment
- By middle childhood, as children’s worlds expand, attachment figures also provide support for exploration
