Generally speaking, about 2/3 of children have so-called safe attachment.
When the mother leaves, the child will show obvious signs of missing him, usually crying. When the mother comes back, the child will take the initiative to greet the mother and usually seek direct physical contact. Then, the child will soon settle down and explore and play again. Looking back at the observations from home visits, parents of these children are very sensitive to their attempts to connect their children. They can understand their children's signals and effectively meet their children's needs.
This is a statistical result for the U.S. population. The results may vary depending on the culture being studied. Studies of high-risk populations, such as those living in poverty, drug addicts, or people with mental health problems, may show varying degrees of insecure attachment. Anthropologists also suggest that we should avoid classifying these subjects as pathological. The idea of an "unsafe" attachment relationship is derogatory to children. In other words, the problem is not that children are "unsafe" people, but that their interpersonal relationships are not the most suitable, so they are unsafe.
About 20% of children will show avoidance attachment to . They are always focused on the toy or explore the room, and when mom leaves, they show no signs of sadness or anger; when mom comes back, they either turn a blind eye or take the initiative to avoid mom. What do you think the first year of these children’s lives is like? You may be able to guess that home visit observations show that parents of these children do not respond to their children's signals in a trustworthy and sensitive way, and they may even ignore these signals and seem indifferent to their children's sorrow. Some children will gradually understand: "Since my mother doesn't help me or comfort me, why should I care about her leaving or coming back?" Avoiding behavior is an adaptation to this relationship. To cope with this relationship, children minimize activation of attachment neural circuits.
Another 10% to 15% of children have contradictory attachment, also known as resistance attachment, they will resist other people's comfort. In this case, the baby’s first year’s life is full of inconsistencies. Sometimes parents can coordinate with him, are very sensitive and can respond, but sometimes they cannot. If you were a baby, how would you react? Would you contact such parents to comfort the grief caused by the activation of the limbic system? In strange situations, infants with paradoxical attachment appear cautious or painful and melancholy even before separation. When they reunited, they seek comfort from their parents, but they are not easily comforted. They kept crying instead of going back to play with the toys soon, and they might also hold their parents with a worried or disappointed look on their faces. Being with parents obviously doesn’t bring them a sense of relaxation, and their attachment circuit is overactivated.
In later studies, researchers added a fourth category, called disordered attachment . This type of children accounts for about 10% of the total number, but among high-risk groups, such as children whose parents take drugs, the percentage of this type of attachment is as high as 80%. When the mother returns, the baby's performance is very disturbing. They looked frightened and would approach their mother, but then retreated; they either froze, fell to the ground, or turned around and left while sticking to their mother crying. Disturbance attachment occurs when parents are seriously lacking in coordination with their babies, or when the baby is afraid of their parents, or the parents themselves are full of fear. In the previous three attachment patterns, infants developed organized strategies to cope with caregivers that are either sensitive or indifferent, or inconsistent. However, in disordered attachment, infants cannot find any effective coping strategies. His attachment strategies failed.
