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From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
6
Taking Culture Seriously
A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment
Gilda A. Morelli, Nandita Chaudhary, Alma Gottlieb,
Heidi Keller, Marjorie Murray, Naomi Quinn,
Mariano Rosabal-Coto, Gabriel Scheidecker,
Akira Takada, and Marga Vicedo
Abstract
This chapter presents an alternative view to classic attachment theory and research,
arguing for systematic, ethnographically informed, approaches to the study of child
development. It begins with the observation that the attachment relationships children
develop are locally determined and insists that these features of attachment can only be
captured through observing, talking with, and listening to local people as they go about
living their lives, including caring for children. It reviews the profound ways in which
child care around the world differs from the Western model, upon which attachment
theory was founded and myriad recommendations have been derived. This worldwide
account perspective of child care is profusely illustrated with ethnographic examples.
Network theory is then discussed: from the full range of social networks to relational
ones (i.e., smaller sets of individuals to whom children may become attached). The
chapter considers attachment theorists’ resistance to the idea of multiple attachments,
historically and still today. Discussion closes with a summary of the implications of our
theoretical rethinking and the questions that remain.
Introduction
The lives of infants, young children, and their families differ in many ways
around the world for a great number of reasons. Communities differ in the
Group photos (top left to bottom right) Gilda Morelli, Nandita Chaudhary, Alma
Gottlieb, Mariano Rosabal-Coto, Heidi Keller, Naomi Quinn, Marjorie Murray,
Akira Takada, Marga Vicedo, Heidi Keller, Gabriel Scheidecker, Naomi Quinn,
Mariano Rosabal-Coto, Marjorie Murray, Nandita Chaudhary, Gilda Morelli, Gabriel
Scheidecker, Marga Vicedo, Akira Takada, Nandita Chaudhary, Alma Gottlieb
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
140 G. A. Morelli et al.
ecosystems of which they are a part, as well as in the availability and pre-
dictability of physical and social resources. The real-life problems that people
must solve in their communities also differ, as do the ways in which they are
approached and managed. Communities vary in how they are organized and in
how community members relate to one another. Within communities, families
differ in ways that often change with status, privilege, social class, wealth,
ethnicity/race, and religion. Within and across generations, people react to
community expectations and create new ones. Despite this heterogeneity, all
communities have in common variation and change and thus must be viewed
as dynamic systems, responsive to both the opportunities and the constraints
that people encounter in their everyday lives.
Given the many ways that families and communities diverge, is it reason-
able to expect that there is just one “best” way to care for infants and young
children that will promote their ability to survive and thrive in the communities
of which they are a part? We pose this question because attachment theorists
propose a view of care for all children, worldwide, and describe the role that
this care plays in attachment relationships and later development (Mesman et
al. 2015). These theorists posit that typically developing children form attach-
ment relationships in the same way and for the same reasons. They identify
patterns of care and attachment relationships, the relation between the two, and
the implications of both for healthy development.
Attachment theory has been widely accepted by scholars as well as the
general educated public in many nations since Bowlby’s original formulation.
This most likely transpired because theorists claimed support from a multi-
disciplinary platform that drew from evolutionary biology, animal behavior,
psychiatry, neuroscience, and psychological research on non-Western commu-
nities (van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz 1999, 2008; Mikulincer and Shaver
2014). Today, attachment theory is psychology’s most infl uential theory of re-
latedness, setting standards for what constitutes healthy relationships for all
people. The reach of attachment theory to real-life situations is impressive.
Pediatricians are trained in the principles of attachment to identify problem-
atic parent-child interactions in an effort to promote healthy ones. Educators
use these principles to recognize and support children who are considered at
risk for poor classroom learning. There are attachment-based therapeutic ap-
proaches for children, families, and couples. In addition, courts use attach-
ment theory to make decisions regarding parental rights, and the cornerstone
of international agencies’ programming for families and children is grounded
in attachment theory.
Attachment theory has had its critics, but such views have largely been
ignored (Mead 1962; Vicedo 2013, this volume). One reason is that the theory
was safeguarded by generations of scholars who shared a deeply held philoso-
phy of personhood, self, and human development. Another is that the theory
was disseminated in the teaching and research of generations of students edu-
cated in diverse fi elds of study, as well as in the practice of professionals.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 141
Increasingly, however, attachment theory is being questioned. The break from
the main tenets of attachment theory began (a) when anthropologists, cultural
psychologists, historians, and scholars in related disciplines drew attention to
the diverse nature of infants’ and young children’s care experiences, as well
as the cultural and ecological processes underlying them (for summaries, see
Quinn and Mageo 2013; Otto and Keller 2014) and (b) when scholars from
places not well represented in the attachment research community voiced con-
cern about the global application of culture-specifi c patterns of care and rela-
tionships (Chaudhary 2004; Nsamenang 2006). But these challenges were not
widely recognized until recently.
Attachment theorists acknowledge the cultural and contextual nature of
people’s lives, and the role of these factors in close relationships. For example,
certain types of otherwise problematic attachments are considered adaptive un-
der certain conditions, such as when parents are unable or unwilling to invest
emotionally in, or care for, their infants. The extent to which infants experience
separation from the people who care for them in everyday life is also taken
into account when their distress is interpreted in the procedure designed by
these scholars to study attachment. Yet these accommodations, while enabling
a more nuanced view of attachment, remain grounded in the main tenets of at-
tachment theory (Morelli and Henry 2013). As such, we view them as deeply
concerning.
In this chapter we argue that an alternative approach to classic attachment
theory and research needs to be taken. We agree that the ability to develop
social relationships is part of our human legacy, representing a universal need
to belong to social groups and to form meaningful ties with others (Baumeister
and Leary 1995; Keller 2015). We agree, as well, that children form attach-
ments to people in relationships that are distinct in particular ways. However,
our approach insists on the central role of sociocultural processes and struc-
tures, in dynamic interplay with ecological processes, in the relational oppor-
tunities available to children and in the attachments they develop. We make
our case in the following way: We introduce key aspects of attachment theory
to demonstrate its support of species-wide, attachment-related processes. We
consider examples of children’s early care and relational experiences from di-
verse communities that call this position into question. We present a standpoint
on ethics related to personhood and self to understand systematic variation
across communities in these experiences, and we present a conceptual model
that situates these ethics in an ecocultural frame (Keller and Kärtner 2013).
Finally, we discuss social and relational networks, including attachments, as
well as features and contexts of care that are important for distinguishing rela-
tionships as attachments.
Our conclusion is that children are cared for in culturally defi ned and eco-
logical responsive ways, and this care is the basis for the relationships they
develop. Attachment theory and research must be nimble enough to accom-
modate the diversity in the realities of children’s lives. As long as attachment
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
142 G. A. Morelli et al.
theory does not take this imperative seriously, real-world application of attach-
ment theory is deeply concerning. We examine these concerns separately in
Chapter 14 (this volume).
Classic Attachment Research and Theory
Attachment theory is about infant survival and the evolution of child behav-
iors that elicited care essential for this fundamental goal (Bowlby 1958, 1969,
1982). Bowlby was interested in the physical safety function of attachment
behaviors (e.g., crying). He reasoned that when a young child is afraid or dis-
tressed, it is in the child’s best interest to act in ways that bring him into the
protective solicitude of his primary caregiver, most likely his biological moth-
er. With age, the child increasingly directs attachment behaviors toward his
mother, as she is the person who responds most readily in appropriate ways to
him; this makes the child feel safe in her presence in times of need. Based on
consistent repetition of these types of experiences, the child forms an attach-
ment to his mother.1
Attachment theory is also about infant psychological development. Bowlby,
with his colleague Mary Ainsworth, was interested in the psychological secu-
rity function of the attachment system. The attachment relationship refl ects an
emotional tie of a child to his mother; the child loves his mother and typically
greets her with joy. The child feels suffi ciently safe in his mother’s presence,
assured that he can return to her for comfort and protection if necessary. This
“ felt security” provides the child with the support needed to explore the envi-
ronment on his own, at a distance from others, with confi dence, and to master
the physical and social world. Mothers act both as a safe haven and as a secure
base from which their child can explore; in effect, mothers are the lynchpins in
the link between, and the balancing of, the attachment and exploration system
for the child (Ainsworth and Bowlby 1991).
It did not take long for interests in the psychological function of attachment
to dominate theory and research (LeVine and Norman 2001:86; Vicedo 2017).
Questions about individual differences in children’s attachment relationships
were studied using a laboratory procedure to assess how well children were
able to organize attachment and exploration behaviors during a period of mod-
erately escalating distress designed to activate the attachment system. In this
laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, children are repeatedly separated
from their caregivers—most often their mothers—for a brief period of time,
and are either left on their own or with a stranger. Children who are secure in
their attachment relationships are comforted by their mother’s return and are
1 Bowlby (1982) acknowledged that the person to whom a child develops an attachment rela-
tionship depends on who cares for the child in particular ways. This caregiver did not have
to be the biological mother, although references made by Bowlby to this caregiver are most
always the mother.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 143
then able to use their mothers as a secure base from which to explore. Children
who are insecure in their attachment relationships are unable to do this. The
difference between securely and insecurely attached children was attributed to
differences in children’s history of sensitive maternal care (Ainsworth et al.
1978; Cassidy and Shaver 2008).2
The sensitive care that fosters security in attachment relationships is care
that responds to a child’s explicit positive and negative signals. It is exempli-
fi ed by caregivers who
• are appropriately receptive and contingent in their response to the
child’s signals,
• follow the child’s lead to structure and support the child’s endeavors in
unobtrusive and fi ttingly challenging ways,
• respect the child as a separate person with a will of his/her own,
• rely on encouragement, praise, and reasoning to motivate the child,
• are affectionate and affectively engaging, and
• encourage expressions of positive emotionality.
This care is considered the gold standard by which all care, worldwide, is to
be compared and evaluated. When children are cared for in these ways, they
develop a sense of themselves as being in control, competent, and worthy of
help—assured that help will be available if needed (Bowlby 1980). When chil-
dren are not cared for in these ways, they feel less secure in the presence of
their mothers and are unable to achieve the same confi dence in themselves or
in others, or mastery of the environment. They are at risk for developing be-
havioral problems later in life (Thompson 2006; Weinfi eld et al. 2008).
The way that attachment theorists conceptualize sensitive care, secure at-
tachment relationships, and children’s competencies is based largely on their
understanding of well-educated, middle- to high-income, urban-dwelling fami-
lies of European ancestry (living in postindustrial Western societies, sometimes
referred to as “Western” families). The values of such families typically sensi-
tize children to personal preference and choice, as well as to internal psycho-
logical qualities; these principles are important to the way that people relate to
others and in the way that people experience others in relationships with them
(Shweder et al. 1997; Suh 2000; Raeff 2006; Kitayama et al. 2007; Markus
and Kitayama 2010; Keller and Kärtner 2013). This approach to representing
“self” in relationships refl ects specifi c cultural philosophies of personhood and
self, which children develop in ways described by attachment theorists. Yet
when one looks around the globe, one discovers that other philosophies of the
person and the self exist, and these support other ways to care for children that
2 Sensitive care only modestly predicts attachment security (de Wolff and van IJzendoorn 1997).
Some researchers also consider mother’s ability to verbalize and interpret the mental and psy-
chological states of their child (e.g., wishes, preferences, and intentions), and to treat the child
as an intentional agent (see Sharp and Fonagy 2008).
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
144 G. A. Morelli et al.
are consistent with the philosophies. Below, we consider a selection of these
philosophies and the corresponding childcare systems.
Representing Others and Self in Relationships
Children’s day-to-day social engagements provide them with the opportunities
to learn what it means to be an acceptable, good, and moral person as well as
how to organize, interpret, and make sense of experiences about the world
(Shweder et al. 2000). These senses of personhood and self are fundamentally
relational in character, cultural in origin, and signifi cant to the attachments that
children develop. Personhood is a social status granted by others to individuals
who meet culturally constituted standards for legitimacy in their community.
When so designated, a person is considered a social being with moral status
who is obligated to act (has agency) in moral ways toward others, as others
are obligated to act in moral ways toward this person. Personhood standards
vary from one community to the next; in many places, a strong emphasis is
placed on qualities and attributes that indicate readiness to assume one’s role
and responsibilities in the social world as a relational being. For the Mapuche,
an indigenous people of southcentral Chile and southwestern Argentina, to be
che (a “person”) means being capable of productive sociality: to be a giver and
receiver (Course 2011). The idea of giving as a condition of personhood is ob-
served in many other communities, including the Baining of Melanesia (Harris
1989). Baining infants and elderly are not considered persons because they
are not able to give food. For them, personhood is transient: it is something
acquired and then withdrawn.
Alongside relatedness-based notions of personhood are notions that empha-
size autonomy (choice and volition). The individuality of Mapuche children,
for instance, is recognized at an early age (Sadler and Obach 2006) as exem-
plifi ed by the Mapuche word püchiche, which literally means “little person”
(Quidel and Pichinao 2002; Sadler and Obach 2006; Course 2011; Williamson
et al. 2012; G. Llanquinao, pers. comm.). Mapuche children are considered
as being able to manifest and even (sometimes) impose their will on adults
(Sadler and Obach 2006; Williamson et al. 2012). In other words, “early so-
cialization is predominantly respectful of their che (personhood)” (Williamson
et al. 2012:140).
Whereas personhood, in general terms, designates a social agent with a
moral career (i.e., progressive changes in a person’s moral status) as part of
the social order in a particular society, self designates individual awareness of
a unique identity as the knower (percipient) and the known (perceived) (Mauss
1985; Walker 2013). Although the two concepts are somewhat distinguishable,
together they foster a person’s understanding of who s/he is within the context
of relationships with others. The self is an inherently socially constituted, rela-
tional construct that may only be understood in the light of an “other than the
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 145
self.” A child’s sense of self develops by participating in the everyday life of
the community. This participation is organized, in part, by the meanings and
activities that community members share and convey to children, and which
are differently appropriated by communities with a common cultural identity.
In this way, communities adapt to local circumstances. Under most circum-
stances, however, communities hold onto tried-and-true practices (i.e., cultural
models) because the risk of independent (individual) solutions to recurring
challenges (which may fail) is too costly (Quinn 2005).
In the rich history of research and theorizing on conceptions of self in cul-
tural contexts (Hallowell 1955; Howard 1985; White and Kirkpatrick 1985;
Markus and Kitayama 1991; Holland 1992a; Quinn 2003; Kagitcibasi 2005;
Wang and Chaudhary 2005), there is agreement that the “culturally constituted
behavioral environment” forms the self in different ways (Hallowell 1955:87;
see also White and Kirkpatrick 1985). Ideas about self put forward by Markus
and Kitayama (1991) set in motion a wave of research that initially supported
their thesis but later questioned it. They claimed that people constructed no-
tions of self in two fundamentally different ways: an independent self (e.g.,
autonomy/agency) and an interdependent self (e.g., relatedness-heteronomous/
agentic). With time, more nuanced conceptualizations of self were advanced,
but these continued to juxtapose the independent and interdependent notions
of self.
There are other, quite different, views of self that acknowledge autonomy
and relatedness as equally important, coexisting human needs that are part of
any human action and situation. Individuals need communion as well as agen-
cy (Bakan 1966), love and belongingness as well as self-actualization (Maslow
1968), and closeness and interdependence with others as well as control over
their own lives (Ryan and Deci 2000). These human needs are conceptual-
ized in culture-specifi c forms and are necessary for a person’s health and well-
being. Keller and colleagues offer a way to conceptualize the coexisting needs
of autonomy and relatedness that acknowledges their cultural nature (Keller
2012; Keller and Kärtner 2013; Keller 2016b). They propose that children are
sensitized in different ways to the relevance, experience, and expression of
each of these human needs. The ways in which this happens depend on cultur-
ally mediated, contextually based cultural regularities in children’s experiences
with others, which correlate closely with certain sociodemographic variables.
According to Keller and colleagues, one sociodemographic cluster repre-
sents educated (especially mothers), urban, middle- and upper-middle-class
families who live in postindustrial economies. In these families, children’s
experiences sensitize them to value personal preferences, choice, and person-
al qualities such as traits, attributes, and talents. These children’s autonomy
is psychological in nature, based on self-refl ection that centers on personal
desires, wishes, and intentions. Autonomy underlies conceptions of related-
ness such that relationships are defi ned and negotiated from the child’s point
of view. This self-conscious and self-contained child is the cultural ideal for
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
146 G. A. Morelli et al.
families from this cluster, and this way of thinking coincides with the concep-
tion of autonomy and relatedness expressed in attachment theory.
A second cluster is made up of rural families, with little or no formal educa-
tion (especially mothers), who live in subsistence economies. In these fami-
lies, children’s experiences sensitize them to group expectations as well as
social roles and responsibilities. Relatedness is hierarchical and underlies con-
ceptions of autonomy as self-regulated actions that meet socially constituted
obligations and fulfi ll community responsibilities. For example, among the
Mapuche, children are granted personhood status when they are able to give
food (meeting social expectations). They are also expected to help with family
chores (e.g., looking for fi rewood, taking care of animals) in the proper way,
without having to be reminded.
Even though we associate particular conceptions of autonomy and related-
ness with particular sociodemographic clusters, rapid social change (resulting
from both global fl ows of information and people, as well as from internal
processes such as civil war) may alter this association. For instance, after the
civil war in highland Peru, adults in Quechua-speaking communities continue
to expect children to contribute to the well-being of their families, animals, and
communities from a young age, just as they have for generations, by observing
and imitating adult work. However, a strong national emphasis on public edu-
cation has greatly altered the daily routine of children. Even illiterate grand-
parents who do not speak Spanish encourage their grandchildren to exert their
best efforts to do well at school, as this is perceived to be necessary to excel in
life and get good jobs (Robins 2017). Intentionally combining components of
tradition and modernity is fast becoming “the new normal” in many communi-
ties across the Global South. As people in communities adapt to accommodate
such changes, we may see shifts in how autonomy and relatedness needs are
met as well as concomitant shifts in children’s care.
Conceptualizing Children’s Care and the
Diversity of Care Practices
At some fundamental level, the tasks of caring for children are the same all
over the world (Benedict 1955; LeVine 1974). Most caregivers want children
to survive and thrive in the communities in which these children live. This
means keeping children healthy and safe as well as providing them with op-
portunities to learn about and from their social and physical environments in
culturally organized ways. Yet the way these tasks are both defi ned and carried
out varies, even as they are considered necessary and commonsensical in any
given community (Murray 2013; Gottlieb and DeLoache 2017).
Most people care for children in the best way they know, taking into con-
sideration (consciously or not) many factors: local ecological conditions
(Keller 2007, 2016b); available economic, medical, social, and other resources
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 147
(LeVine et al. 1994); competing demands (Rogoff 2003); relationship to and
history with the child (Lancy 2015); and the child’s age, health status, and
temperament (Scheper-Hughes 2014). The complex interplay of such factors
has been represented conceptually in different ways (LeVine 1974; Whiting
and Whiting 1975; Weisner 1984; Super and Harkness 1986). The ecocultural
model, as described by Keller and Kärtner (2013), is most useful for our pur-
poses as it considers how the dynamic co-action of the physical environment,
ecosocial context, and caregiving beliefs and practices relate to children’s de-
velopment. The physical environment (e.g., climate, water and food supply)
signifi cantly contributes to the ecosocial context of a community; that is, to
family structure (e.g., extended, nuclear) and ways of making a living (e.g.,
subsistence, cash-based economy). Parental education is a key characteristic of
this context. The ecosocial context, in turn, signifi cantly contributes to a com-
munity’s system of care: it shapes socialization goals (what caregivers want for
children), ethnotheories (ideas about how best to achieve goals), and practices
(what caregivers actually do). These constituent parts, in dynamic interplay,
are important to psychological processes that underlie children’s developing
conceptions of autonomy and relatedness.
This model clarifi es that children’s care and development are local phe-
nomena that refl ect the particulars of a community’s physical environment and
ecosocial structures in relation to the community’s organized set of practices,
beliefs, and traditions. To illustrate, let us consider the case of child care among
the Ju|’hoan (Takada 2005; Konner 2010; Takada 2010): a San group living in
the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa—a harsh environment covered mostly
with brush and grassy hills, where water is scarce for most of the year, food is
unpredictable, and temperatures range from freezing to blistering hot. In the
past, these people subsisted by hunting and gathering, traveling long distances
on any given day. Child care among the Ju|’hoan protects infants from the vi-
cissitudes of this environment in a way that allows people to manage other de-
mands. For example, Ju|’hoan infants live their days in the arms and laps, and
on the backs of people. This practice buffers infants from harm on the ground
and allows them to nurse easily and stay hydrated. It also calms infants (Barr
1990; Barr et al. 1991; Esposito et al. 2015) and keeps their distress at low
levels. This is important because distress is energetically demanding (Rao et al.
1993) and can compromise infant health if it persists. Moreover, it is easier for
caregivers to take content infants with them on gathering and other excursions,
which they often do. At the same time, caregivers encourage infant walking at
an early age. The Ju|’hoan believe that a child who is not taught to sit, stand,
and walk will never perform these behaviors, and the bones of the child’s back
will remain “soft” unless teaching occurs (Konner 1973, 1976). Children who
are able to follow caregivers on their own on foraging trips are less of a burden
than are children who must be carried.
The study of hunter-gatherers elsewhere shows similarities as well as differ-
ences in child care (Konner 2010). The !Xun, for example, is a post-foraging
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
148 G. A. Morelli et al.
Namibian group of San that shows considerable sociocultural similarity to the
Ju|’hoan (Takada 2005, 2010, 2015). However, in contrast to Ju|’hoan children,
!Xun children are weaned earlier, and caregivers are more likely to be siblings
or cousins. This observation raises questions that merit further study: Why are
these changes associated with a more sedentary lifestyle in the !Xun? What
other changes occurred as a result? What do these changes mean for a child’s
social relationships?
The care of children from diverse communities around the world provides
an important counterpoint to claims made by attachment theorists. The care
described as sensitive by attachment theorists is different from that which is
practiced by a large proportion of people in the world. Similarly, the com-
petencies that this sensitive care fosters—sensitizing children to experience
themselves as separate and distinct, with needs and desires of their own; to
act based on what they think and believe; and to change their environment
accordingly (Ainsworth 1976; Bretherton 1987)—are less important to many
of the world’s people. Instead, care that controls a child’s actions, anticipates
a child’s needs, or dampens a child’s emotional expressiveness describes the
warm, responsive care practiced by most communities in the world.3 It ori-
ents children to others and fosters children’s responsiveness to them. Children
learn to see themselves as others see them, and this intensifi es children’s so-
cial connections and strengthens actions that maintain them. These actions
are acts of obedience, compliance, conformity, proper demeanor, and respect
(Harwood et al. 1995; Keller 2003; Quinn and Mageo 2013; Morelli et al.
2014; Otto and Keller 2014). Care such as this supports socially oriented no-
tions of autonomy and relatedness grounded in meeting social obligations and
responsibilities in contrast to care that supports self-oriented notions of au-
tonomy and relatedness on which attachment theory is predicated. In what
follows, we describe care practices that orient children to others, drawing on
previous work (Morelli 2015).
Care that controls what children do is representative of a global pattern,
but it does not meet the standards of care advocated by attachment theorists: to
follow the child’s lead and support the child in nonintrusive, unobtrusive, and
fi ttingly challenging ways. In their study of 12 communities in India, Japan,
Kenya, Liberia, Mexico, Philippines, and the United States, Whiting and
Edwards (1988) noted that, except for U.S. mothers, all mothers ranked highest
or second highest in training and controlling their children. (In these communi-
ties, people in all but the U.S. and Indian communities farmed for a living.)
Similar fi ndings have been reported for caregivers in other communities in
Africa (LeVine et al. 1994; Keller 2003), East and South Asia (Chao and Tseng
2002; Rudy and Grusec 2006), the Middle East (Kagitcibasi 1970; Sharifzadeh
1998), South and Central America (Posada et al. 2002; Seidl-de-Moura et al.
3 The fi rst time we reference a community, we include the community’s geographic location and
mode of subsistence, when known.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 149
2012; Rogoff et al. 2015), and non-middle-class populations in the United
States (Ispa et al. 2004).
In most of the world’s cultures, controlling children is what good parents do.
Chinese parents and parents in other Confucian cultures practice guan (gover-
nance): they care for and love their children by taking control, directing their
behaviors, and placing demands on them (Tobin et al. 1989; Chao and Tseng
2002). Puerto Rican parents act in similar ways to teach children to be calm,
attentive, and well-behaved (Carlson and Harwood 2003), as do Cameroonian
Nso farming mothers, who teach children to show good manners and to share
(Keller and Otto 2009; Keller et al. 2012). Balinese mothers intentionally pro-
voke jealousy and even rage in their toddlers by breastfeeding and playing with
other babies. They remain impassive to their toddlers’ displays of emotion, as
one way to teach these children to calm their own feelings of jealousy and pro-
mote self-restraint (Diener 2000). Bara pastoralists of Madagascar prefer calm
children and see calm behavior in the presence of elders as a sign of respect
(Scheidecker 2017).
In these communities, care includes expressions of warmth (Ispa et al.
2004; Schwarz et al. 2005; Halgunseth et al. 2006), which children experi-
ence in a positive way (Fracasso et al. 1994; Aviezer et al. 1999; Posada et al.
2002; Carlson and Harwood 2003; Ispa et al. 2004; Howes and Wishard Guerra
2009). Japanese and Korean adolescents perceive guan as a sign of parental
acceptance and warmth (Chao and Tseng 2002), and Latina and Portuguese
adolescents living in the United States in families with low incomes see direc-
tive care as affi rming their parents’ protection (Taylor 1996).
Care that anticipates children’s needs is another way to care for children
that does not meet attachment theorists’ standards of contingent responsiveness
to children’s explicit signals. This practice of meeting a child’s needs before or
around the time they are expressed blurs the child’s sense of self as distinct and
separate from others and accentuates the group as the child’s primary referent
of action. Caregivers rely on situational cues, prior history, and the child’s
subtle signals—which are often nonverbal—to do this. This anticipatory care
is observed in communities around the world: among Efe hunter-gatherers in
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Morelli et al. 2002a), the Nso (Keller
and Otto 2009; Keller et al. 2012), Makassar farmers in Indonesia (Röttger-
Rössler 2014), the Bara (Scheidecker 2017), Sinhala farmers and wage earners
in Sri Lanka (Chapin 2013b), Yucatec Maya farmers (de León 1998), as well
as across Japan (Rothbaum et al. 2006).
Care that dampens or discourages expressions of emotions (positive as well
as negative) is different from care advocated by attachment theorists that re-
sponds to a child’s overt positive and negative signals and encourages posi-
tive ones. Among the Chinese and other Asian peoples, intense emotions are
considered immature and socially disruptive (Kitayama et al. 2004; Wang and
Young 2010). Puerto Rican middle- and working-class mothers (Harwood
et al. 1995) and Costa Rican mothers (Rosabal-Coto 2012) prefer calm,
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
150 G. A. Morelli et al.
well-behaved children as do the Gusii farmers of Kenya (LeVine 2004) and
the Nso, who believe that a calm child fi ts best into its social group (Keller and
Otto 2009). Whereas many caregivers address negative signals by responding
to them (quickly), they tend to do the opposite with positive signals. In some
communities, such as the Gusii, caregivers are relatively unresponsive to posi-
tive signals (e.g., to childish babbling).
These types of social-orienting practices are important to a child’s develop-
ing sense of self as connected with others, as “a part of encompassing social
relationships” (Markus and Kitayama 2010), and as “defi ned and made mean-
ingful in respect to such others” (Kitayama et al. 2007). There are other simi-
larly motivated practices that complement the ones described here.
Physical closeness: Holding and carrying children in the fi rst year of life
are common practices among subsistence-economy communities as well as
in many other farming communities across much of Africa, Latin America,
and Asia (Lancy 2015). In a study conducted among the agricultural Beng of
Côte d’Ivoire, Gottlieb (2004) calculated that young children spend two-thirds
of their daily nap time in physical contact with someone (whether on a mov-
ing back or a stationary lap), and children sleep with their mothers and older
siblings until they are about ten or twelve years old (for boys and girls, respec-
tively). In postindustrial societies, co-sleeping, co-bathing, and breastfeeding
are common. The Japanese and Koreans describe this form of physical inti-
macy with children as sukinshippu and seukinsip, respectively (both terms for
kinship). There is a tactile quality to this physical closeness (Röttger-Rössler
2014) that allows for the subtle and near imperceptible exchanges on which
anticipatory responsiveness depends. It enables children and caregivers to rely
regularly on nonverbal ways to communicate and, as a result, to coordinate
their involvement in nonexclusive and socially nondisruptive ways (Morelli,
Verhoef, and Anderson, pers. comm.).
When children are not in actual contact with others, they are kept physically
close to them. Balinese mothers use fake fear expressions to keep their young
children close (Bretherton 1992). Gusii and Hausa (shepherds in Nigeria) care-
givers prevent children from crawling away (LeVine 2014). Japanese mothers
stay close to their children (Ujiie and Miyake 1985; Rothbaum et al. 2000a).
In some communities, such closeness is defi ned broadly to include not just
close family members but larger social groups. In Beng villages, toddlers as
young as two years old are encouraged to roam freely around the village, in the
knowledge that all adults and older children will keep a watchful eye out for
their safety (Gottlieb 2004).
Social exploration: Children explore with others close by and in social
ways that differ from attachment theorists’ notion of healthy exploration (i.e.,
solitary exploration of the physical environment at a distance from others).
Japanese mothers are more likely to take advantage of social opportunities
to direct their child’s attention to the environment and to use toys for social
engagement than are Euro-American mothers (Bornstein et al. 1990). Ju|’hoan
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 151
foragers (Bakeman et al. 1990), Wolof farmers (Senegal), Beng villagers
(Gottlieb 2004), and Soninke and Toucouleur immigrants to Paris (Senegal,
Mali, Mauritania) are all more likely to respond to children when they are en-
gaged socially than when they are engaged with objects (Rabain-Jamin 1994).
For these African immigrant children, activities are structured around people,
whereas for native-born Parisian children, activities are centered on the explo-
ration of inanimate objects.
Orienting children toward others: Some social-orienting practices may ex-
plicitly orient the child toward others. In many subsistence-economy commu-
nities, for example, children are positioned so that their gaze is directed out-
ward when carried or sitting; this draws a child’s attention to its surroundings.
This practice is complemented by an expectation common to people in these
communities: children learn by attending carefully to others in the absence of
explicit instruction (Rogoff 2003; Rogoff et al. 2014). Efe and Mayan families
(farmers and wage earners in Guatemala; Morelli et al. 2002b) as well as Costa
Rican urban families (Kulks 1999) expect this of children.
Other practices orient children to social interdependencies by accentuat-
ing the social group. Teasing, shaming, and name-calling ( Samoans, Samoan
Islands, farmer-foragers; Mageo 2013), abrupt weaning ( Pirahã, forag-
ers, Amazon rainforest; Everett 2014), and withholding empathic attention
(Bhubaneswar, India; Seymour 2013) are examples of these practices. They
direct children away from individual relationships and toward the social group
as a whole. In extreme cases, mothers may discourage infants from becoming
too attached to them, as some Beng mothers do when they break the gaze of
their infants toward them (Gottlieb 2004). Care and protection by many others
instill in children a sense of dependence on them and the group, rather than
on a single individual (whether the mother or anyone else), for meeting their
needs (Everett 2014; Morelli et al. 2014). Beng mothers actively draw people
to their babies, by applying beautiful paints and jewelry to their infants twice a
day, to establish a pool of babysitters (Gottlieb 2004).
Still other social-orienting practices teach children to see the world as
others do and to adjust to their reality accordingly, without reference to the
child’s own mental state as separate and distinct from the other (Kärtner et
al. 2010a). Beng adults (Gottlieb 2014), Kaluli caregivers (farmer-foragers
in Papua New Guinea; Ochs and Schieffelin 1984), and Mapuche mothers
(Course 2011) speak for their children. Kaluli mothers also teach children
what to say.
Social-orienting practices such as these contrast with self-orienting prac-
tices that are important to psychological autonomy and relatedness. Examples
of self-orienting practices include:
• Keeping children physically separated from their caregivers (i.e., on
their own and in their own space); this enables the type of exploration
that attachment theorists emphasize.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
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152 G. A. Morelli et al.
• Encouraging talk as the major form of communication in face-to-face,
dyadic orientation.
• Celebrating the child’s accomplishments (e.g., through praise) and at-
tributing them to the child’s efforts.
• Negotiating with the child out of respect for the child’s interests
and needs.
Such self-orienting practices of care, and the attachments they foster, represent
attachment theorists’ notions of good care and healthy development. We take
a very different view.
Attachments Conceptualized
In our view, the attachments that children develop are different from those pro-
posed by attachment theorists. Our approach builds on the ecocultural model
and conceptions of autonomy and relatedness as human needs: it places great
importance on community conceptions of good care and good children, takes
into account the ecosocial conditions that play a role in how these conceptions
infl uence caregiving practices and thus a child’s experience of care, and allows
for fl exibility in thinking about how attachments are expressed and the role
they play for the child across both time and contexts. We begin our description
of this way of thinking about attachments by calling to mind the provocative
claim made by Shweder et al. (2000:219) that “the knowable world is incom-
plete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of
view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular.” Faced with these
three alternatives, Shweder et al. opt for an incomplete or partial view of the
world, and so do we. Our approach to attachments is partial in at least two
ways: First, it identifi es the basics of attachments but relies on the knowledge
of a given community’s practices and beliefs relevant to relationships, chil-
dren, and their care to understand the attachments that children develop in that
community. Second, it is a view in the making; both its conceptual and empiri-
cal foundations require further development.
Social Networks
Our conceptualization of attachments starts with social network theory. This
approach appeals to us because it puts relationships at center stage for study.
What is relevant to social network theorists is the structure of the network—the
nature of a person’s ties with people and the ties these people have with oth-
ers—and the relation between network structure and the phenomenon of inter-
est. Social ties are characterized by network size, the extent to which people
know one another (density), the ability of the network to endure severance of
ties (robustness), and more (Smith and Christakis 2008). The entire complex
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series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 153
of ties that provides a given network its structure has properties that are not
explained by or present in the parts that make up the network. This theoreti-
cal approach has a wide reach. It is used, for example, to study issues as di-
verse as social cooperation (Nowak and Highfi eld 2011), social change (Lane
et al. 2009), health behavior (Smith and Christakis 2008), health-care systems
(Castellani et al. 2015), schools (Daly 2010), and terrorism (Krebs 2002).
The use of social network concepts in the study of children’s relationships is
most welcomed because they take us beyond the mother-child dyad to the com-
plex interdependencies that characterize many children’s relational systems
(e.g., Levitt 2005; Lewis and Takahashi 2005; Rubin et al. 2009). Children are
seen as participating in different social systems, for different reasons, and these
social systems include people who know the child, as well as one another,
in different ways and to varying degrees. These people, in line with social
network theory, may be involved directly with children as partners in social
activities or involved indirectly, which includes children watching them. The
character and contexts of children’s lives are inextricably linked to their social
networks. In many ways, networks determine the physical, social, and psycho-
logical resources available to children, as well as what is required of them to
gain access to these resources. A child’s social network, for example, provides
her with opportunities to watch, interact with, and learn about and from others.
Reciprocally, the people in a child’s network have the opportunity to watch and
interact with the child, which may affect whether and how they invest in the
child, including the child’s care.
In most cases, a child inherits her fi rst social network at birth.4 This fi rst
network may change from place to place at a given point in and over time
(Smith and Christakis 2008). Many factors contribute to why a child’s social
network is the way it is at a particular time and place. One factor is the child’s
living arrangement, which partly refl ects the family’s residence practices (who
lives near the family) and structure (who lives in the family). In an extended
family structure, for example, the family unit goes beyond the nuclear family
and typically includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. This structure
is common across many parts of Asia, the Middle East, Central and South
America, and sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, Child Trends (2015b) reported that
more than 70% of families were extended families in South Africa; in India,
Colombia, and Turkey this was true for 50%, 58%, and 58% of families, re-
spectively (Scott et al. 2015).5 Yet, the makeup of extended families varies
considerably within and across communities.
4 A child may inherit her fi rst social network even before birth. For societies oriented around a
philosophy of reincarnation, a “newborn” is seen as emerging from a previous life, where a
former family has decided to allow the child to be born. In such a scenario, childcare practices
revolve around the parents of “this life” paying micro-attention to the infant’s momentary needs
to discourage the child from “returning” to the previous family of the “afterlife” (Gottlieb 2004).
5 This report does not include data from many African countries and may under represent the
percent of extended families as a result.
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154 G. A. Morelli et al.
The living arrangements of children in the United States and in many
European countries (in particular, northwestern Europe) differ from the re-
gions just described. Today, in many communities, for example, the typical
family structure consists of mother, father, and dependent children. While this
continues to be the image of what a family should be in these places, family
arrangements increasingly have become diverse. In the 1960s in the United
States, over 80% of children lived with two parents, whereas in 2015 about
70% did (Scott et al. 2015). Similar trends have been noted for the United
Kingdom (Knipe 2015). This picture becomes more complicated when ethnic-
ity and social class are considered (Sawhill 2013). In the United States, for
example, Child Trends found that 34% of black, 60% of non-Hispanic white,
and 83% of Asian children lived with two married parents.6
This consideration of social networks illustrates the substantial variability
on a global level in children’s social networks and, as a result, in children’s op-
portunities to engage with different people and to secure resources from them.
It also illustrates the importance for development of both the child’s social
network as a social unit and the child’s individual relationships.
As increasingly more children (alone or with family) move from place to
place because of confl ict, persecution, economic inequality, or instability, their
social networks are likely to become more fl uid and dynamic. UNICEF (2016)
estimates that nearly 50 million children live under transient conditions: of
these, 31 million live outside their country of birth, including 11 million child
refugees and asylum seekers. This unprecedented level of migration (across
country borders) and displacement (within country borders) of children presses
us to understand better the changes in these children’s social and relational ties,
and how these ties might support their positive development.
Relational Networks
The social networks in which children are involved provide them with the op-
portunity to develop relationships. How many relationships develop depends on
whether the many or few individuals available to the child are willing and able
to engage the child, and whether the child is willing and able to engage them.
At birth, children are able to take advantage of relationship opportunities,
aided by basic neurobiological processes relevant for social affi liation that ma-
ture during fetal development. There is evidence, for example, that the per-
ceptual biases of very young infants predispose them to direct their attention
to social information. Newborns are more likely to attend to human speech
than nonspeech sounds (Vouloumanos and Werker 2007), and to human faces
and face-like stimuli than other stimuli (Slater and Quinn 2001; Farroni et
6 One reason for the low rate of married parents living with children among black families may
be that single-parent families have deep roots in practices developed from the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, which deliberately separated families.
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 155
al. 2005). The facial features most likely to interest newborns (e.g., upright
compared to inverted faces, direct gaze compared to averted gaze) suggest that
they are attracted to cues that indicate a person’s readiness to engage with them
(Farroni et al. 2005). These early biases and other nascent capabilities (e.g.,
the ability to orient gaze and body position toward people who arouse a child’s
interest) help the child connect socially with others (e.g., Reis et al. 2000; Lee
et al. 2009). In addition, very young infants are able to sustain others’ involve-
ment and interest in them, for instance, by matching (refl exively) facial expres-
sions and temporally coordinating nonverbal activities (e.g., body movements)
with that of their social partners. Other ways develop with age, such as using
“face, voice, hands, and entire body” (Shai and Fonagy 2014:187).
The nature of a child’s fi rst relationships is likely to differ from one person
to the next, and this continues as the child matures. Why this is so is compli-
cated. One explanation concerns the activities that characterize a child’s in-
volvement with others, since these activities are often related to role-based
expectations. For example, among the Murik (marine foragers of Papua New
Guinea), it is common for a mother’s family to share completely in the care of
her child during the fi rst six months or so of a child’s life (Barlow 2013). By
comparison, a Makassar mother (subsistence farmers of Sulawesi, Indonesia)
is usually her child’s primary caregiver for the fi rst four to six weeks of the
child’s life (Röttger-Rössler 2014). Yucatec Mayan adults do not usually play
with children (Gaskins 1999), whereas middle-class educated U.S. adults do
(Roopnarine 2011). The activities that children and partners engage in together
are likely to change over time and place, as the needs of and demands on the
child and her social partners change. These examples show that the socially
distributive nature of children’s engagements differs: in some settings, one
or a few people may do most everything with and for the child; in others,
many people may do most everything with and for the child; in still others,
some variation in-between may exist (Quinn and Mageo 2013; Otto and Keller
2014). In addition, people may alternate with each other as the child’s primary
caregiver, and people’s roles may change if caregiving is organized as a divi-
sion of labor (Scheidecker 2017).
The incredible variation in relational opportunities for children and in the
relationships they develop is striking but not surprising, given the cultural and
ecological dimensions inherent in children’s relationships, coupled with other
features (e.g., a child’s age, competencies, relationship histories). Even so,
some researchers claim that there are features common to all of the relation-
ships people develop across the life span, although some features may be more
prominent than others for some relationships, for some people, at some time in
their lives (e.g., Sutcliffe et al. 2012). While these features are cornerstones of
all relationships, communities differ in how they are perceived and acted upon
in everyday life, as earlier examples in this chapter demonstrate. Core features
of relationships involve:
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156 G. A. Morelli et al.
• Mutual infl uence: what social partners are doing and experiencing de-
pends on and has consequences for one another (e.g., coordination, co-
regulation, mutual responsiveness, and synchrony).
• Emotional connection between relational partners: what social part-
ners feel for each other and how these feelings are communicated (e.g.,
emotional intensity, emotional regulation).
• Time: social partners have a history and anticipate a future; this al-
lows them to act on expectations based on past experiences and future
expectations.
• Holism: social partners are sensitive to patterns based on interactions that
form the relationship context, and act based on the context as a whole.
The last feature, holism, is consistent with Hinde’s views of relationships: “a
relationship is more than its constituent interactions” (Hinde 1999:326). Thus
the idea of holism extends beyond individual relationships to consider their
complex interplay with the relational and social networks of which they are
a part (Reis 2000; Brown and Brown 2006; Sutcliffe et al. 2012; Kuczynski
et al. 2015).
What we learn from these features is that people in relationships matter to
each other. They have mutual interests and feelings for one another. In addition,
how people act toward each other in the present likely refl ects a shared under-
standing of each other based on past experiences as well as a shared expectation
that the relationship will continue for some time in the future. For these reasons,
people in relationships are appropriately receptive and responsive to each other,
and may act in other ways to sustain the relationship. Over time, people may de-
velop a preference for each other (rendering one or both as special) and perhaps
consider each other as “irreplaceable” (Brown and Brown 2006:7).
Relational attributes of preference and irreplaceability are likely to be more
characteristic of relationships that people describe as “close” (e.g., Brown and
Brown 2006). These relationships are likely to be more “affect laden” (Reis
et al. 2000:845), and people in them are likely to show more mutual concern
and caring for one another, for instance, by setting aside their own needs and
interests to attend to the needs and interests of their relational partner (Brown
and Brown 2006; Reis 2014). Promoting the well-being of one’s relationship
partner is important to trust building, and perceptions of a person as trustwor-
thy are important to the development and maintenance of relationships distin-
guished as close.7
It is important to note that relationships, including ones considered “close,”
are not always positive and supportive. Multiple agendas, confl icting inter-
ests, and time constraints may alter the dynamics of a relationship. Concerning
7 The descriptor term “close,” when applied to relationships, is conceptually vague (Reis et al.
2000:844), although it often implies an emotional intensity between relational partners. Given
this, and the likelihood that “closeness” is differently experienced and expressed across com-
munities, we use this term judiciously when describing relationships.
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 157
parents and infants, Trivers (1974) argued that offspring are selected to de-
mand more than their parents are willing to give at different points in time, thus
creating an inherent confl ict in their relationship. Weaning is one such time.
Breastfeeding is an energetically demanding activity (Dewey 1997), and at
some point, mothers may decide to shift investments from their current child to
the conception of another child (to increase reproductive success).8 This period
is wrought with distress for many children the world over (and their parents
as well), and Trivers claims that strategies such as temper tantrums may have
evolved to help children sustain their mothers’ investment in them. Mothers
have devised different ways to curb their infants’ interest in breastfeeding.
Among the Efe, for example, mothers paint their breasts with bitter-tasting
substances, make their breasts inaccessible, or send children to relatives in
another camp for a period of time. Similar practices have been reported among
the Ju|’hoan (Shostak 1981) and the Nso (Yovsi and Keller 2003). The confl ict
that arises during weaning may be particularly intense if few people are avail-
able to care for the child.
Attachment Networks
Children develop relationships with people in their social networks. Over time,
some or all of these relationships develop into relationships that are distinct
(i.e., close) to the child in specifi c ways. Before we consider care that may
make these relationships distinctive for children, we refl ect on why people
other than mothers care for children, and the psychological processes that sup-
port this care.
Caring for Children
Even though children’s attachments develop in the context of relationships,
most studies are paradoxically one-sided—concerned with what the child gets
from the relationships (e.g., protection, security) and the child’s qualities that
may infl uence this (cf. Roisman et al. 2013; e.g., Bakermans-Kranenburg and
van IJzendoorn 2015). Even research on the care of children approaches things
from a child’s point of view. Far fewer studies ask why people give care to
children. Addressing this fundamental question could, however, broaden our
understanding of attachment and help us learn more about the reasons behind
attachment (e.g., integration into the social group), the distribution of attach-
ments (e.g., many at the same time), and the commutable nature of attachments
(e.g., communal, fl exible). It could also help us learn more about competencies
that make attachments likely (e.g., care that fosters a child’s social nimbleness)
8 There are other reasons why mothers shift investments away from the child, including the
child’s risk of death (Scheper-Hughes 1992).
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158 G. A. Morelli et al.
and the psychological processes that refl ect and underlie them (e.g., autonomy,
relatedness, theory of mind, empathy). Our grasp of these issues is partial at
best, although research suggests that we are on the right track (Meehan and
Hawks 2013; Morelli et al. 2014).
Our Human Legacy: What Evolutionary Accounts May Tell Us
We know from studies of extant hunter-gatherers that mothers alone are un-
able to meet the dietary demands of keeping themselves and their nutrition-
ally dependent children healthy. Mothers require the help of others to do both
(Hewlett and Lamb 2005; Hrdy 2005a; Crittenden and Marlowe 2008; Kramer
and Ellison 2010; Meehan and Hawks 2013). A child’s relatives are usually
among the fi rst to help with child care (Hamilton 1975; Briga et al. 2012),
but the sharing of care goes well beyond kinship (Hamilton 1975; Briga et al.
2012), with residency playing an important role (Hill et al. 2011; Kramer and
Greaves 2011).
The willingness of people to help mothers with child care is one way that
mothers are able to manage the ecological and social uncertainties that threaten
a child’s ability to survive and thrive. The conditions that enable cooperative
acts of care, as well as other cooperative acts, most likely trace back to the
Paleolithic era,9 although this is not known for certain. Nevertheless, we con-
sider evolutionary accounts of ancestral times because they offer a window
into the genesis of social networks, give support to core relational features such
as mutuality ( synchrony), and provide clues to children’s access to diverse
relational and attachment opportunities.
Evolutionary accounts posit that ecological and social uncertainties during
the Paleolithic era favored a suite of biological and psychological processes
which made it possible for our ancestors to live in socially complex groups and
thus to cope better with the unpredictable nature of their everyday lives. Group
living, for instance, made it possible for people to extend “exchange partners”
beyond the immediate family, which increased their chances of smoothing
over day-to-day fl uctuations in food and other resources. This, most likely, af-
fected their reproductive success favorably.10 However, the demands of group
9 Archaeological records suggest the origins and development of early human culture during the
Paleolithic era. We use “ancestral” as a shorthand notation to refer to this period.
10 Evolutionary claims consider the expression of psychological and biological processes in
terms of reproductive success. This is most commonly defi ned as the number of offspring
an individual produces to maturity. Fitness is the metric for measuring reproductive success
in evolutionary theory. It is a complex concept with a contentious history (Beatty 1992; Paul
1992). “Individual fi tness” was generally identifi ed with the intuitive concept of reproductive
success. Hamilton (1964) introduced the notion of “inclusive fi tness.” An individual’s repro-
ductive success also included the individual’s effects on the reproductive success of relatives,
weighted by the degree of genetic relatedness. In the mathematical theory of natural selection,
genetic fi tness is the measure of the contribution to the next generation of one genotype or one
allele, relative to the contributions of other genotypes or alleles.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 159
living were many and signifi cant (van Vugt and Kameda 2014), and mecha-
nisms may have evolved to offset the resulting transaction costs. Evolutionary
theorists posit that people were likely to stay in a group if (a) they experienced
positive emotions and moods in the group and felt socially connected to others
(social bonds), (b) they felt loyal to the group, and (c) they could assess and act
on threats to group cohesion. Group experiences such as these were possible if
people were able to socially coordinate actions, meanings, and goals. The abil-
ity for synchronous exchanges helped to make this coordination possible: as a
species, we are biased in both perception and attention toward synchrony, and
we respond to synchronous interactions favorably (Ravignani 2015).
Parenthetically, we fi nd intriguing the possibility that children evolved
sensitivities to cues about the precariousness of resources, as suggested by
the work of Chisholm (1996). Some of us would like to suggest that children
may have evolved strategies to minimize the threats to their survival that these
uncertainties posed. This may include the ability to solicit care broadly from
people, and to develop multiple, simultaneous attachments based on the care
that is experienced.
Further empirical evidence is needed before we are in a position to support
a specifi c account of how human sociality evolved (see Vicedo, this volume).
Even though further evidence for evolutionary claims would strengthen our
views, our views do not rest on them.
Care, Today, the World Over
Across the world, people beyond mothers regularly care for young children.
Keller and Chaudhary (this volume) address the prevalence of shared care, and
in this discussion we draw on their work to highlight several points. First, the
sharing of care is present in families from different economic backgrounds
(e.g., subsistence, wage-based), with different levels of formal education (e.g.,
none, elementary school, high school, college), and with different family struc-
tures (e.g., nuclear, extended). Nevertheless, features of child care (who pro-
vides care, in what ways, and when) vary, depending on the interplay of factors
such as views about good care, economic and other resources, religious values,
work constraints, and broader political structures. In some places, relatives
(especially grandparents, siblings, aunts, or uncles) provide the bulk of shared
care (Weisner and Gallimore 1977; Raffety 2017; Schug 2017). In others,
people unrelated to the child—neighboring children (Gottlieb 2004) or profes-
sionals (U.S. Census Bureau 2013)—provide the majority of daytime care.
Shared care may take place early in a child’s life (beginning at birth) or later,
and it may be all-encompassing (feeding, bathing, instructing) or limited (e.g.,
carrying). The essential point is that the sharing of care is practiced widely
but in different ways and for different reasons (Sear 2016). Shared care offers
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
160 G. A. Morelli et al.
benefi ts to children, their parents, and to the people providing the care (Keller
and Chaudhary, this volume).
Motives for Child Care
Why are some people willing, reliably so, to set aside personal needs, some-
times at a personal cost, to care for another person’s child? To explore this
question, we build on our consideration of evolutionary accounts of human
sociality, with the caveat that only some of us see this as a fruitful endeavor to
help understand contemporary childcare practices.
Costly investment in other people’s children, with whom there is little or
no genetic relatedness, posed at one time an evolutionary conundrum. This
enigma was partly addressed when theorists considered the reproductive needs
(e.g., protection, food) that people have in common. They reasoned that when
people, alone, are not able to meet these needs—but people together are able
to do so in the moment or sometime in the future— cooperative care makes
evolutionary sense. How, exactly, people cooperate in the care of each other’s
children has a lot to do with culturally defi ned rules (Bogin et al. 2014). These
rules are likely to adapt to changes in local conditions, with implications for
people’s investment in children (for similar arguments, see Bentley and Mace
2009; Quinn and Mageo 2013; Otto and Keller 2014).
Caring for the children of others may be in the reproductive interest of many,
and this interest may continue as long as the relationships are benefi cial to all.
We presume that relationship features, such as mutual infl uence and emotional
connection (noted earlier), are part of what makes these relationships (marked
by costly investment) benefi cial. If such features cease to exist, these relation-
ships may continue, but differently (Brown and Brown 2006); perhaps as “a
pool of recruits for more intense relationships” (Sutcliffe et al. 2012:159).
The benefi ts of cooperative care networks extend beyond relational partners
to the group as a whole. Dunbar and Schultz (2007) suggest that a person’s
reproductive success depends more on long-term considerations made possible
by the group: “relationships provide the key to fi tness benefi ts at the group
level” and “trickle-down benefi ts are reaped by the individual” (Dunbar and
Schultz 2007:1346).
The Attachments Children Develop
Children may best learn about themselves, others, and the world around them
by relying on people whom they trust to meet their needs. These people pro-
vide the child with resources to survive and thrive in the community of which
the child is a part, and they do so in a way that fosters the child’s attachments
to them. Here we provide examples of the types of care, and reasons for care,
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 161
that contribute to a child’s sense of a person as trustworthy, and thus to the
child’s attachments. When we speak about reasons for care, we tap into two
interest areas of attachment theorists: (a) threats to the child that emotionally
overwhelm the child in negative ways and (b) the function of care providers to
help the child manage these threats and thus regulate emotions (e.g., by provid-
ing the child with a secure base or haven of safety) (e.g., van Rosmalen et al.
2014). We believe it is necessary to address both the care that a child solicits
and the care that is given without apparent solicitation. Especially at a young
age, children are unlikely to intuit all threats. Threats to social group function
are an example of this, and social-orienting care practices described earlier
may help children learn about them. As our thesis assumes that multiple at-
tachments are common for children, we conclude with thoughts about why the
idea of multiple attachments remains a knotty issue for attachment theorists.
Care and Attachments
We consider relational features (along the lines we described earlier) that many
claim to be important for both individual relationships and social group living.
Given the centrality of these features for human sociality, we propose that they
may fi gure importantly in the attachments children develop. These features are
unlikely to be suffi cient, however, and may vary in importance across com-
munities and contexts (e.g., McElwain and Booth-LaForce 2006). In addition
to proposing features of care, we give examples of their expression in one or
several communities.
One feature that stands out is mutual infl uence characterized by behavioral
synchrony. Behavioral synchrony makes it possible for interacting partners to
coordinate their behaviors in time, intentionally or not. In turn, this makes it
possible for people to coordinate actions, meanings, and goals, and thus to
benefi t from the advantages of group living. Synchrony, however, is a con-
struct for which there are many meanings: reciprocity, adaptation, shared
affect, turn-taking, and more (Leclère et al. 2014). These depictions are not
equally relevant globally across all communities. However, we are drawn to
what these depictions of synchrony have in common: temporal concordance.
Feldman (2012c, 2014) defi nes synchrony in this way for processes (e.g., non-
verbal behaviors, arousal) that occur at the same time or close in time; in other
words, as temporally matched interactions (Feldman 2007a:329). The very
young child is sensitive to the temporal organization and rhythmic qualities of
stimuli (Gratier 2003) in the fi rst days of life (Shai and Fonagy 2014), and care
providers take advantage of this sensitivity by coordinating what they do with
the infant’s state of arousal, thereby providing the infant with her fi rst experi-
ence with social contingencies.
Synchrony extends beyond dyadic interactions. Gordon and Feldman (2008)
studied triadic synchrony among educated, urban, middle-class mothers, fa-
thers, and their fi ve-month-old children during play episodes. They found that
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
162 G. A. Morelli et al.
infants were able to detect changes in the support each parent provided the
other and changed their behavior (social focus) accordingly. Synchrony ex-
tends beyond temporal concordance between behavioral events. It takes place
within and across behavioral and physiological systems, for each partner and
among partners. What this suggests is that synchronous processes help create
biobehavioral connections among people, which may be important to social
group living (Feldman 2014).
Repeated experiences of synchrony are important to a child’s develop-
ment in many ways, including social and emotional regulation (e.g., Shai and
Fonagy 2014). In addition, the familiarity these synchronous processes make
possible with the style, manner, affective state, rhythms, pace, and so on of
others (Feldman 2014:150); the positive feelings they engender (Watson 1985;
Spoor and Kelly 2004); and the sense of “we” that they create (Baimel et al.
2015) may help distinguish relationships marked by repeated synchronous in-
volvements over time in ways important for attachments.
Synchrony includes overlapping and sequential temporal concordance of
events, which we believe are conceptually distinct and, for this reason, are dif-
ferently important to attachments. To illustrate this point, we consider research
on the temporal structure of events that sensitizes children to experience au-
tonomy and relatedness in particular ways. Contingency responsiveness is an
example of sequential concordance, thought to be particularly salient to infants
in the early months of life because of their limited memory span. It takes place
very quickly, within a second of the young infant’s signal, and is not done
consciously or deliberately. The overall contingent responsiveness of mothers
across communities appears remarkably similar (Keller et al. 1999; Kärtner et
al. 2008, 2010b). This is not surprising, given the intuitive nature of this reac-
tion to infant signals.
The ways in which mothers are contingently responsive diverge with a
child’s age. Kӓrtner et al. (2010) examined mothers’ auditory, proximal, and
visual contingent responses to infant signals at age 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 weeks
in 20 families in Münster, Germany, and 24 rural Nso families in Kumbo,
Cameroon. The extent to which mothers relied on each of these communicative
modes was similar up to their infants’ second month of life. After that, com-
munity differences were observed. Compared to Nso mothers, for example,
the use of visual contingent responses by German mothers in face-to-face epi-
sodes increased with child age, while the use of proximal responses decreased
(in line with experiences that foster psychological autonomy and relatedness).
This trend was related, in part, to the growing reliance on this distal form of
communication by these German mothers. In contrast Nso mothers relied on
visual and proximal responses, which were relatively consistent over child age:
low for visual responses (and signifi cantly lower than the German sample) and
high for proximal responses (in line with experiences that foster hierarchical
relatedness and autonomy as self-regulated action that meet socially consti-
tuted obligations).
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 163
The temporal concordance of events can also be overlapping or simultane-
ous; Keller et al. (2008) refer to this as synchrony. This temporal structure, for
example, can make it diffi cult for the child to take center stage, instead sensi-
tizing the child to unity with others. Gratier (2003) studied vocal interactional
patterns between mothers (middle-class, urban living, with at least one year of
university-level education) and their two- to fi ve-month-old infants in France,
the United States, and India. Indian mothers and infants were more likely to
participate in simultaneous vocalizations than were U.S. or French mothers,
and this was seen in mothers of infants as young as two months of age. A simi-
lar pattern of simultaneous speech has been observed among Japanese com-
pared to U.S. mother-infant dyads (Kajikawa et al. 2004).
There are additional features of care important to the attachments chil-
dren develop that we would like to mention. One is the emotional connection
warmth that people express to the child (and vice versa). Warmth is associ-
ated with positive feelings and it engenders affi liative experiences important
to relationships and social group living (MacDonald 1992). It is not, however,
inextricably linked to the care of children by others. For example, MacDonald
(1992:762) notes that research on the Gusii strongly suggests that responsive
parenting can take place in the absence of warmth and affection. Keller et al.
(1999) confi rmed this view by showing that contingent responsiveness and
warmth are two separate dimensions of parenting. There are different ways
to defi ne warmth (e.g., positive affective tone, giving and expressing affec-
tion, pleasurable affective response) and to express warmth (e.g., affectionate
contact, facial expressions, empathic affect, and mutual sharing of affective
displays) (MacDonald 1992; Keller 2013b). This relates, in part, to the way
that children’s needs for autonomy and relatedness are understood by their
caregivers and others. Warmth is often characterized by (a) physical contact
and closeness, when relatedness is hierarchical and autonomy consists of self-
regulated actions that meet socially constituted obligations, and by (b) facial
expressions, when autonomy and relatedness are psychologically based.
Children must spend enough time with people to learn about them and the
resources they are able and willing to provide. This is best learned when a
child’s experiences with and of others (directly or indirectly) are reliably con-
sistent, predictable, and repeated over time. As children become familiar with
the ways of others, they are better able to anticipate what others are likely to
do and to plan for it (Sroufe 1979). This allows children to better manage their
social involvements. There are different ways that people are able to create
reliably consistent and predictable experiences for children. People can act in
consistent ways toward a child, and this is the consistency often referenced in
attachment research. However, people can also create consistency for the child
by organizing their physical and social worlds in particular ways. The Efe are
interesting in this regard. Efe infants are cared for by many people on any
given day, yet the people who care for them often vary (Morelli et al. 2014).
Here, consistency is not about who cares for the child, but rather a child’s
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
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series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
164 G. A. Morelli et al.
experience of care. For example, when young Efe children (7–15 months of
age) fuss, they do so only for about 25 seconds. This is because many people
are willing to comfort the infant quickly (as quickly as the infant’s mother),
and within seconds of a response, infants quiet down (Morelli et al. 2002a).
There is a commonsense reason for similarities in the Efe child’s experiences
of care. Efe live their lives in full view of one another most days for the entire
day. People witness the care that others give and comment on it. Public dis-
plays of “good” care may also be one way that people maintain their relation-
ships with others and their good standing in their social group. The following
example supports this view: A ten-year-old girl was punished for dropping her
infant brother while in her care. The girl was ostracized from the group, made
to stand at the edge of the camp, and not allowed to return for several hours.
All the while, she wailed.
This point about consistency is similar to Quinn’s view on the constancy
of children’s experiences (Quinn 2005). She notes that for the child to experi-
ence constancy, the experience should be repeated with regularity and be un-
diluted by contradictory experiences that create confusion and ambiguity. This
is possible through “ habitual, embodied practices” which pattern “the child’s
experience deliberately, vigilantly, and persistently” (Quinn 2005:481). Thus
there are consistencies in the cultural world of children in matters of great im-
portance created by a child’s wider community.
Threats and Reasons for Soliciting and Eliciting Care
Attachment theory claims that children need to feel safe in contexts of threat
(Labile et al. 2015:37). Threats to a child’s solitary exploration of the physi-
cal world fi gure importantly in attachment theory, in part, because this type
of exploration is tied intimately to the development of psychological forms
of autonomy and relatedness. There are other threats that may undermine a
child’s ability to learn about and participate fully in her community, and we
consider some of them.
A young child’s state of arousal is an important mediator of her experi-
ences with the social world. Feldman (2007b) notes, for example, that mothers
use contingent responsiveness to heighten their infants’ alertness and are more
likely to provide visual and tactile stimulation when their infants are alert.
When the young child’s alert states are disrupted by crying and irritability, the
child disengages socially from others and is less able to benefi t from the oppor-
tunities that engagement provides. Furthermore, the distress indicated by these
signals is metabolically costly (Rao et al. 1993). If either persists, the health of
the child may be compromised.
Hunger, illness, fatigue, and pain are some of the reasons why young chil-
dren cry and fuss. There are many ways to calm a child who is fussing or
crying that go beyond attending to her physiological needs. Infants, for exam-
ple, exhibit a calming response to being carried, and carrying may go beyond
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 165
quieting a crying child: its calming effect decreases a child’s heart rate and
voluntary movements (Esposito et al. 2015). We mention this because, in many
communities, in the fi rst years of life, children are carried for a good part of
the day, often by older children (Weisner and Gallimore 1977; Gottlieb 2004).
Threats that elicit a child’s distress are likely to evoke intense negative
arousal and inhibit cortical and subcortical processes important, for example,
to attention and memory (Fonagy et al. 2014). Fonagy et al. (2014) claim that
attachments as sources of reassurance may preempt (or abate) the threat and,
as a result, reduce the extent to which important neurobiological processes are
disrupted. They posit that attachment evolved to change internal (e.g., stress)
and external conditions (e.g., threats) associated with threats to infant survival
(Fonagy et al. 2014:35).
Threats to a child’s health pose great concern to the majority of communi-
ties worldwide yet, surprisingly, the relation between child care and health, and
the attachments that children develop as a result, has been of little interest to
attachment researchers. This in itself is puzzling since protection from malnu-
trition has been cited to be “the most dramatic demonstration of the adaptive
value of attachment security” (van IJzendoorn and Sagi-Schwartz 2008:900).
Perhaps the relative disinterest in health—specifi cally nutritional health—on
the part of attachment theorists can be traced to Bowlby’s claim that “food
plays only a marginal part in the development and maintenance of attachment
behavior” (Bowlby 1969:224).
Finally, children have a need to belong; that is, a need for relatedness. This
need can be threatened as well, but differently for children who are sensitized
to notions of autonomy and relatedness as psychological, or to notions of re-
latedness as hierarchical and autonomy as self-regulated actions that meet
socially constituted obligations. Rothbaum et al. (2011) suggest that threats
perceived by children who are sensitized in the fi rst way relate to exploration
and self-esteem; here, one purpose of attachments is to make exploration at a
distance from others possible for children and to affi rm their self-esteem and
effi cacy. For children who are sensitized in the second way, perceived threats
relate to social rules and responsibilities; here, one purpose of attachments is
to reassure children of their social place in the group or that it can be regained
by correcting problematic behaviors. To elaborate on threats to social group
living, we provide two examples.
The fi rst concerns the discipline of Murik children (Barlow 2013) and we
have chosen this example precisely because discipline lies outside of attach-
ment theorists’ thinking about attachments (Kuczynski et al. 2015). Murik chil-
dren are disciplined by their mothers when they do not share food, and moth-
ers are extremely consistent in enforcing this behavior. Others shame children
into sharing by teasing them. Food sharing is something a good Murik person
does; it is the “quintessential expression of relatedness, caring, and belonging”
(Barlow 2013:177). Murik children are also disciplined for misbehaving (e.g.,
nursing when a child is considered too old). Mothers, however, do not typically
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
166 G. A. Morelli et al.
discipline their children for this reason; rather they invite senior fi gures to do
so. Barlow (2013) claims that these seniors express their authority in this way,
and, as a result, stress the age-grade system of control observed among these
people. Children are often distressed when disciplined. Nonetheless, they are
able to return quickly to their good standing in the social group (e.g., by being
given the opportunity to share), and are often quickly comforted and reassured
by the people who disciplined them. For Barlow (2013:174), ordinary disci-
pline “guides attachment emotions and behavior along cultural norms” and
many people have disciplinary functions.
The second example illustrates distancing practices used by Samoans
(Mageo 2013). The purpose of these practices is to direct children—begin-
ning around the age of three or four—away from affi liative relationships with
individual people toward an affi liative relationship with the group as a whole.
Samoans sensitize children to attend to others, to serve elders obediently, and
to assume their proper status in the group. Children who demand attention,
act in self-centered ways, or are aggressive toward others for individual gain
threaten their tie to the group and are shamed, teased, or hit by adults and other
children alike.
Children’s Trust of Others and Attachments
Children are likely to consider people trustworthy when (a) their experiences
with people are appropriately contingent (synchronous), (b) people help chil-
dren meet the threats they experience in a manner that engenders feelings of
safety and security, and (c) these and other experiences take place in the stead-
fast ways we have described. Feelings of trust are important for attachments
to develop.
Children’s Multiple Attachments
Even though much of early attachment theory was informed by the care prac-
tices of U.S. middle-class, college-educated families, attachment theorists do
not ignore the possibility that children may form attachments to others who
care for them besides their mothers: “a child can also get attached to other
caregivers who are in regular contact with the child and make it feel secure in
times of need” (van Rosmalen et al. 2014:12). Views such as these, however,
often safeguard the role of mother as the primary attachment fi gure: “Human
babies, however, do not have an instinct that causes them to become attached
to the fi rst living thing they encounter. They get attached to the person who
cares for them the most during the fi rst few months of life. In most cases,
that is the mother” (van Rosmalen et al. 2014:13, italics added for emphasis).
Attachment theorists’ struggle with fully integrating multiple attachments into
theory and research is also visible in other ways, such as their near-exclusive
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
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Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 167
selection of mothers for study. This struggle is not new and echoes Bowlby’s
uneasy relation with the same idea.
In the 1969 edition of Attachment, Bowlby acknowledged that infants may
have more than one attachment fi gure based on who in the household cares
for them (Bowlby 1969). However, he argued that infants developed attach-
ment preferences in the fi rst year of life based on the care they received. He
reasoned that, at fi rst, infants orient toward their social world in a nondis-
criminatory way. Over time, based on differences in the ways that people “act
in motherly ways” toward the infant (e.g., engage in lively social interaction
and respond to signals and approaches), infants become selective in direct-
ing attachment behaviors (Bowlby 1969:306). He argued that mothers are
biologically primed to behave in “motherly ways” and are likely to be bet-
ter at behaving in these ways than are other people. Bowlby did not believe
that plural attachments lessened the importance of each attachment, but rather
that infants developed a hierarchy of preferences, in which the mother was
normally the most preferred. Using the research of Schaffer and Emerson, he
stressed that children’s primary attachment to their mothers was likely to be
more intense than the greater number of attachments these children developed
in the fi rst months of life (Bowlby 1969:202).
Bowlby’s decision to give preference to mothers as children’s fi rst and pri-
mary attachment fi gures was likely based on the thinking of the day about
mother-infant relationships, taken from psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and pri-
matology (Plant 2010; Vicedo 2013, this volume). Bowlby, for example, inter-
preted Harry Harlow’s work on rhesus monkeys as proving that maternal love
and care was necessary for an infant’s development (Vicedo 2011). However,
Bowlby was selective in the research he used to advance his thesis. At the time
of his writing in the 1960s, Bowlby knew of Harlow’s work which suggested
multiple, simultaneous attachments. For further discussion on Bowlby’s selec-
tive use of Harlow’s work, see Vicedo (2009, 2013).
Multiple Attachments, Multiple Questions, Multiple Implications
Our thesis in this chapter is that children may develop multiple attachments
with different people, at the same time, because people can assume a variety
of roles and responsibilities that matter for attachments. This gives children a
lot of fl exibility in who they are able to rely on to meet their various needs at
any given time and over time, and it may allow children to seek out people who
seem most able and willing to help them at a particular moment for a particular
reason. The elasticity of children’s experiences that are made possible by their
varied social relationships raises questions for us and we offer our thoughts on
some of them.
Currently, we know little about children’s attachments beyond the mother,
and what we do know draws primarily from procedures developed in studies
of urban, educated, middle- to high-income families in postindustrial societies.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
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168 G. A. Morelli et al.
The care of children in these families typically fosters autonomy and relat-
edness as psychological. There are some exceptions, with fi eld studies rely-
ing on orchestrated mother/caregiver-infant separations in which the infant
is left with an unfamiliar adult (e.g., Kikuyu farmers of Kenya; Leiderman
and Leiderman 1977), or on the natural comings and goings of mothers (e.g.,
Aka foragers of the Congo Basin Rainforest; Meehan and Hawks 2013). These
studies suggest that in these particular communities, which practice multiple
caregiving, infants develop multiple attachments. There is a need for more
research on this issue, using people and communities not well represented in
current studies, and methods adapted to community circumstances, including
local values. Gaskins et al. (Chapter 13, this volume) discuss potential ways in
which this can be done.
Not surprisingly, our discussions exposed more questions about children’s
attachments than they answered. To encourage future lines of research, these
are summarized below for further consideration:
• Must the attachments children form be ranked in terms of prefer-
ence (i.e., hierarchy of preferences)? We don’t think so. We believe a
child’s relational networks, and the roles and responsibilities of peo-
ple in these networks, play important roles in their lives. At one ex-
treme is the situation where a child is cared for primarily by a single
person (typically the biological mother). This child may develop a
strong preference for this attachment fi gure. At the other extreme is a
child cared for by many people who share roles and responsibilities.
This child may develop a strong preference for many of these attach-
ment fi gures.
• Must attachments involve dyadic regulatory systems? We don’t think
so. The breadth of some children’s attachment networks, along with the
multiparty and physical nature of their involvements (e.g., more than
two people in physical contact simultaneously with the child) suggest
that many people may play a role at the same time in similar or differ-
ent ways in a child’s regulatory processes. This may take place on a
regular enough basis for it to be meaningful to the child.
• Can children’s trust (and their sense of security) go beyond their care-
givers to the group as a whole? We think so. If a child has trustworthy
experiences with many people in her group, the child may extend these
feelings of trust to others whom she knows less well but is willing to
“test out.” Along this line, Mesman et al. (2015:110) suggest that “the
notion of secure base may be applied to a group experience....In cultur-
al contexts where caregiving is characterized by a network of (simulta-
neous) caregivers, the secure base is provided by the total network, not
by a single individual.” We add that children with multiple attachments
are unlikely to experience them as a collection of single attachments,
but rather as an integrated system of relationships.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.
Taking Culture Seriously: A Pluralistic Approach to Attachment 169
Final Refl ections
The pluralistic approach to attachment proposed in this chapter is an alterna-
tive approach with substantive theoretical and empirical differences to clas-
sical attachment theory. We argue that no theories of child development and
of the emotional needs of children can be developed without research from a
wide range of communities. This research must rely on serious ethnographic
work that investigates the role of the complex interplay of the physical envi-
ronment; the ecosocial, political, and economic contexts; cultural views and
practices (especially views of personhood and self) on children’s care; and
the relational and attachment networks children develop. For each commu-
nity studied, methodological tools must be empirically sound, meaningful, and
ethically respectful.
Our approach accommodates the great differences in children’s living ar-
rangements around the world without prejudice. We believe that it has the po-
tential to revise current understanding of children’s attachments for children
from a diverse array of communities, including those disrupted by political and
economic reasons, and to advance inquiry into the role of cumulative adversi-
ties on the well-being of children. Our approach seeks to comprehend sup-
portive contributions of children’s relational and attachment networks in the
context of family and community, even as both change. Palestinian communi-
ties in the southern West Bank and Gaza provide one example of this. Many
of these families share residences with relatives beyond the ‘a’ila [ nuclear
families]: “The atmosphere of these family-based communities is village-like,
with families sharing meals if they live in the same building, and women help-
ing each other with domestic responsibilities” (Akesson 2017:96). Within such
settings, a child’s network of relationships offers a source of great strength
and offsets the unpredictable, often violent circumstances related to military
occupation.
As we discuss in Chapter 14 (this volume), scientifi c methods need to en-
gage with the diverse realities of children’s lives to complement knowledge
reached experimentally in psychological laboratories. Real communities are
dynamic and ever-changing systems. Our science should be as well. Many
of the ideas presented here may be modifi ed by future research. We hope that
is the case. Equally, however, we hope that the methodological imperative to
erect general theories based on empirical research takes culture seriously.
From “The Cultural Nature of Attachment: Contextualizing Relationships and Development,”
Heidi Keller and Kim A. Bard, eds. 2017. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 22,
series ed. J. Lupp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-03690-0.