style="font-size:15px;"> Sophie made self-sufficiency and people-pleasing her mantra. Sandra, on the other hand, relied on her parents for everything. She constantly mooched money, demanded attention, and whined whenever she didn’t get her way. Though she demanded constant affection, she herself was not particularly affectionate, treating her parents with a confused jumble of sycophancy, indifference, and disdain.
Unlike Sophie, Sandra didn’t take well to school. She struggled to pay attention in class and spent most of her time daydreaming and doodling. Though not one to act out, Sandra scarcely made an effort and squeaked by with poor grades. By the time she finished high school she was already married to a man four years older than her, and the only job she could find was at Burger King.
Now an adult, Sandra has three children and barely enough money to feed and clothe them. Her husband works at a warehouse loading boxes of frozen food onto trucks. He spends most of his time playing video games, ignoring Sandra pretty much completely. Sandra takes her aggression out on the children. She constantly calls on Sophie for help, but Sophie has her own problems and there’s only so much she can do.
As for Darren, he was still in the womb when Sophie and Sandra’s home life started to crumble. His mother took care of him as best she could, but some days the weight of her life grew much too heavy and she stayed in bed, ignoring his cries and flicking through channels on a small, grainy television. His father convinced himself that Darren wasn’t really his child and he offered the boy nothing but insults and barbed criticism.
At school, Darren was habitually sent to the principal’s office. He picked fights, talked back to teachers, and disrupted classes. Not a month went by where he didn’t face suspension. Twice he was held back a year for failure to complete any of the course material. In seventh grade, he was expelled for stabbing a classmate in the arm with a compass and had to enroll in another school across town. By grade 10 he was expelled again, this time for selling pot. When he was 18, he was squatting in a friend’s downtown apartment.
Darren worked briefly as a stock boy at a grocery store, but mostly he sells drugs — soft stuff like pot and pills. He doesn’t have the connections or the muscle necessary to move crack or heroin, but he doesn’t really mind. That stuff is far more dangerous to work with, and he doesn’t need to earn that much. He crashes on couches, eats fast food, and spends the rest of his cash on booze and cigarettes. He has a child he never sees with a woman who nearly had him arrested for domestic abuse.
A Tale of Two Theories
Attachment theory, as defined by Dr. Mary Ainsworth, divides 12- to 24-month-old babies into three groups based on how they act in relation to their parents — when and how they seek comfort, the affection (or lack thereof) they display when their parents hold or play with them, and the degree to which they are comfortable exploring their environment. To distinguish between groups, Ainsworth represented each one by a letter, giving us attachment types A, B, and C. Each group of babies has developed a different and distinctly recognizable strategy to ensure that their attachment figure (parent) provides them with protection, comfort, and the necessities of life. Without a successful strategy for attachment to a caregiver, babies would be hopelessly alone and vulnerable to all manner of threats — disease, starvation, predators, and exposure to the elements. Attachment is therefore an evolutionary adaptation to ensure survival.
Groups A, B, and C represent three distinct attachment strategies, each comprised of specific behaviours that children adopt in order to cope with and function in the world around them. The strategies derive from infancy but persist over the lifespan and affect behaviour and mental health into adulthood.
Type B children are securely attached. They are comfortable being left alone for short periods but happy to see their parents return. Type A children, called “avoidant,” tend to avoid contact with caregivers. They have come to expect neglect or disinterest on the part of their guardians, often because their early cries for attention have gone unheeded. As a result, they aren’t bothered by spending short periods of time on their own, nor do they seem at all excited to see their parents when they return. This is in direct contrast to Type C or “reactive/ambivalent” children, who fuss and cry upon being left alone for even a moment, but are not consoled by, and often show resentment toward, their parents’ presence. Type C behaviour is often a response to inconsistent or partial neglect — when a parent comes running at the first sound of their child in one instance, but leaves them unattended for hours in another. Type A behaviours, on the other hand, come from consistent neglect. Children whose parents never answer their cries or react indifferently to their presence learn to seek comfort from themselves, developing a fierce inward yearning for self-reliance and emotional numbness to outside caregivers. There is, we believe, another cause of Type A attachment: “Tiger” parenting. The Tiger Mother, a term popularized by Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, emphasizes control, harsh discipline, and a relentless drive for scholastic pursuits in child-rearing. Proponents of Tiger Mothering argue that children lack the capacity for self-motivation needed to achieve their best, and a firm, strict, and unwavering pressure, applied by the parent, is necessary to make children reach their full potential. The parent becomes a kind of crucible, facilitating the high temperatures necessary to smelt a child’s raw components into a strong, successful adult. However, predicating affection purely on scholastic or musical success can create in a child an overwhelming need to please others. Using affection as a reward for good behaviour is essentially a sort of Pavlovian conditioning and leaves children with a fairly tenuous grasp on their self-esteem. Children reared in this way often find their sense of self-worth hinges on the approval of others, creating a person not unlike Sophie: outwardly successful, but inwardly pained.
Type B children are well-adjusted for today’s world, while Type A and Type C children adopt alternate strategies to assure attention from their parents. These strategies are initially adaptive, meaning they improve a child’s ability to form attachment relationships with their caregivers. But as children grow, those once-advantageous behaviours of infancy become trap doors of childhood. These trap doors swing open perilously beneath their feet as they attempt to navigate their widening social and emotional landscape.
For Type A children, this means that indifferent behaviour in infancy can lead to excessive people-pleasing in childhood, promiscuity in the teenage years, and an externally assembled adult self, in which the individual’s entire personality is derived from his or her interactions with others. Externally assembled individuals equate praise with self-worth and criticism with self-hatred. Their self-esteem is as capricious as a flag in the wind, held aloft by the breeze and changing direction with each passing gust or zephyr. For Type C, the path embraces contrasting yet ultimately connected aspects of internalizing and externalizing behaviour, ranging from aggression and passivity in milder forms to sadism and seduction, and finally, in extreme forms, rabid paranoia.
We can see these trends in Sophie, a classic Type A child, and Sandra, a typical Type C. Both are haunted by their past, but each woman’s burden takes a distinct shape. Sandra suffers more overtly, her fractious behaviour making relationships difficult and sabotaging her education, leaving her unequipped to function in society. Ostensibly, Sophie did much better. Type A individuals are often outwardly successful people, as their need to please others and thirst for self-sufficiency and approval find natural outlets in career-building. But their drive comes at a price. Type A people find it extremely difficult to trust others, yet at the same time desperately seek their positive regard. We saw as much in Sophie, whose successful teaching career masked the many psychological issues festering beneath the surface: her obsessive people-pleasing, her postpartum depression, and her recurring bouts of crippling anxiety. A harsh word from a student or colleague would slice her to the bone.
Mind you, not every Type A or Type C child will stray to the corrosive fringes of this continuum. Neither Sophie nor Sandra is doomed to a life of rabid paranoia; with professional help and family support, they may even grow more secure over time. Patricia Crittenden’s Dynamic Maturation Model of Attachment eschews rigid
