I am not questioning the importance of secure attatchment at all. Children who trust their parents will be able to base future relationships off of the love and trust they felt growing up. Though a secure base is optimal and will definitely cause the child a better childhood than another with the same conditions otherwise, traumatic events could drastically change this. A death in the family or divorce, the latter occuring increasingly as often, are just two examples of an event that could completely shatter a child's "secure base." Also, it is very possible for people who exhibited insecure attachment as a child to still grow and live a successfull healthy life in the future. This may be because the insecure attachment was based upon harsh living conditions, but the children were able to grow and leave this behind.
You say that children can grow and leave their harsh living conditions behind, but should they not be able to leave death of a family member behind as well? There are plenty of people in the world who are successful and well off, yet still have had a close relative die when they were young.
I would think it would be easier for a child to overcome a lack of a "secure base" to begin with then to have one and have it immediately taken away (in the case of a sudden death). This child without the secure base won't have to go through the situation of trying to replace what they lost while the other child will no longer have that base and have to deal with the grief of the loss.
I don't think that you addressing the question at all. You are saying that there could be reasons for there to not to be a correlation, you aren't really giving an alternate reason for the correlation between a "secure base" and a successful future. Certainly there are multiple reasons for why there might not be a correlation such as a traumatic event, but that doesn't necessarily become a disruption of the cause-effect. If they don't leave it behind, their success is still dictated by the attachments they formed early on, the attachments have just changed. The correlation he gave in class was about .51. All of the extenuating circumstances combined still won't account for a difference that significant and all of the cases you mentioned are not that likely. But still, this is off topic.
Penname: Hypercube
-- Edited by 102intro on Tuesday 7th of April 2009 07:32:22 PM
