Scientists from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurobiology, endocrinology, and molecular biology, explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from varying scientific perspectives.

The Attachment Bond: Affectional Ties across the Lifespan draws together and evaluates the vast body of research on the causes and consequences of attachment security in infants, growing children, and adults. Reviewing and synthesizing the results of five decades of attachment theory and research in the fields of developmental, clinical, and social and personality psychology, Virginia M. Shiller succinctly summarizes the most important findings regarding the significance of early as well as ongoing security in attachment relationships. Conclusions from studies conducted around the globe inform the reader of the impact of relational experiences in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood on the social, emotional, and physical well-being of individuals.

Multiple placements, delay in achieving deadlines, and emancipation have increased the burdens on already vulnerable foster children. The child welfare and court systems, despite good laws and policies, have generally failed to provide children with permanent homes in a developmentally timely manner. Ignorance of the nature and critical importance of bonding is a major cause of this lack of success. Attachment and bonding are words that have been used loosely to describe a variety of personal relationships, beginning with the theories of Bowlby and Ainsworth. Bonding is defined in practical and objective terms that are research-based. It is important and significant because its disruption can lead to significant increases in mental illness, crime, and homelessness. An overwhelming number of statistical studies have documented and affirmed this. Readers will learn how to perform a bonding evaluation and how to present the findings in court. The roles of the birth parent, foster parent, adoptive parent, child, case manager, mental health professional, attorneys, and the court are all considered for their part in achieving permanence for children in temporary care. Finally, the authors share innovative recommendations about ways to improve the system and reduce time in foster care. Every child has the right to a permanent home.

Your resource for raising a healthy child from the moment of conception! Studies have shown that parents have more influence over their child, both emotionally and physically, during pregnancy and the first years after birth than at any other point in life. With The Attachment Pregnancy, you will learn how to use this important time to form a deeper connection and introduce your child to a loving environment--even before birth. Childbirth experts Tracy Wilson Peters and Laurel Wilson guide you through each stage of development with advice for providing consistent and nurturing care as your baby grows, so that you can ensure that every need is always met. From the moment your child is conceived to the day of delivery, The Attachment Pregnancy shows you how to strengthen your bond and give your baby the best life possible from the very beginning.

A comprehensive guide to attachment parenting, which asserts that consistent parental responsiveness to a baby's needs will lead to happy and emotionally well-balanced children. Photos.

An invaluable resource for students and professionals as well as parents, this text offers a composite case study of one child's development following years of abuse and neglect. Blending theory and research into a powerful narrative, Hughes offers effective strategies for facilitating attachment in children who have experienced serious trauma.

Ethological attachment theory is a landmark of 20th century social and behavioral sciences theory and research. This new paradigm for understanding primary relationships across the lifespan evolved from John Bowlby’s critique of psychoanalytic drive theory and his own clinical observations, supplemented by his knowledge of fields as diverse as primate ethology, control systems theory, and cognitive psychology. By the time he had written the first volume of his classic Attachment and Loss trilogy, Mary D. Salter Ainsworth’s naturalistic observations in Uganda and Baltimore, and her theoretical and descriptive insights about maternal care and the secure base phenomenon had become integral to attachment theory. Patterns of Attachment reports the methods and key results of Ainsworth’s landmark Baltimore Longitudinal Study. Following upon her naturalistic home observations in Uganda, the Baltimore project yielded a wealth of enduring, benchmark results on the nature of the child’s tie to its primary caregiver and the importance of early experience. It also addressed a wide range of conceptual and methodological issues common to many developmental and longitudinal projects, especially issues of age appropriate assessment, quantifying behavior, and comprehending individual differences. In addition, Ainsworth and her students broke new ground, clarifying and defining new concepts, demonstrating the value of the ethological methods and insights about behavior. Today, as we enter the fourth generation of attachment study, we have a rich and growing catalogue of behavioral and narrative approaches to measuring attachment from infancy to adulthood. Each of them has roots in the Strange Situation and the secure base concept presented in Patterns of Attachment. It inclusion in the Psychology Press Classic Editions series reflects Patterns of Attachment’s continuing significance and insures its availability to new generations of students, researchers, and clinicians.

This tightly edited volume provides an integrative overview of human bonding from infancy through adulthood. Through an attachment lens, the book synthesizes classic and cutting-edge research on close relationships and their profound impact in everyday life. Topics include infant-caregiver attachment, human social nature, child and adolescent social development, mate selection, love and sexual desire, hooking up and online dating, keys to relationship success, predictors and consequences of relationship dissolution, and the role of social connectedness in psychological adjustment and physical health. Readers get a solid grounding in the concepts, theories, and methods that define contemporary relationship science.

The mighty bond between parent and child is one of the enduring wonders of psychology. John Kennell and Marshall and Phyllis Klaus bring decades of research, insight, and clinical practice into one book that offers parents, and those who care for them during pregnancy, everything they need to know to enhance this essential relationship. This important work explores the effects of various birth practices and situations—prenatal testing, labor support, testing of newborns, breast feeding, prematurity, and adoption—on the parents' feelings and on the development of later attachment and independence.

Scientists from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurobiology, endocrinology, and molecular biology, explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from varying scientific perspectives. Attachment and bonding are evolved processes; the mechanisms that permit the development of selective social bonds are assumed to be very ancient, based on neural circuitry rooted deep in mammalian evolution, but the nature and timing of these processes and their ultimate and proximate causes are only beginning to be understood. In this Dahlem Workshop Report, scientists from different disciplines—including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, and behavioral biology—come together to explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from diverse perspectives. In their studies they seek to understand the causes or the consequences of attachment and bonding in general and their different qualities in individual development in particular. They address such questions as biobehavioral processes in attachment and bonding; early social attachment and its influences on later patterns of behavior; bonding later in life; and adaptive and maladaptive (or pathological) outcomes. The studies confirm that social bonds have consequences for virtually all aspects of behavior and may be protective in the face of both physical and emotional challenges.