Child Attachment

Schaffer explains his theories on attachment in child social development, particularly with babies and young infants; he outlined different stages in which his studies concluded various stages in children’s social development. When we look around us, we can often relate to the stages he talks about when we study young children and babies, for example its often clear that a child becomes attached to its parent when it constantly relies on them to take them somewhere or engage in a particular activity with them and we can see the children that are reluctant to their parents or carers.
Schaffer’s stages were as follows:

Stage and Age of infant	Attachment stage
Asocial- 0-6 weeks old	Babies imitate people and objects
Diffuse- 6 weeks to 6 months	Babies show no particular preference for any one individual and will be comforted by anyone
Single strong attachment- 7 to 12 months	Babies now show a strong attachment for a single individual and will fear strangers
Multiple attachments- from 12 months	Babies will show attachment towards several people, by 18 months some have made as many as 5 attachments.

To critise the work of Schaffer you could argue that babies simply make the same expressions that older people do and dont intentionally copy any actions that they see from others, from the age 0-6 weeks babies can't speak and so perhaps the facial expressions they make are to communicate with the care-giver so they can respond to their needs, not because they are immitating them to communicate otherwise. Arguably at the Diffuse stage, babies have already attached themselves to several figures, this would explain them being easily comforted but perhaps the single strong attachment stage has already happened and the multiple attachments occuring before even 7 months. Schaffer's stages are very specific, individual babies for example some that are anxious- resistant may not experience these stages as they are more likely to avoid several strangers as well as the one main attachment figure.

Caregiver-Infant Interactions 
At a very young age, children and babies that havn't learnt to speak yet have to find other ways to communicate with the person who is caring for them. Different psychologists argue that this interaction is vital at different stages of a child's development.

Klaus and Kennell 76 argued that immediate physical contact straight after birth is vital for the babies' first bond to form they found that mothers who cuddled their baby straight after birth enjoyed better relationships with the baby. So perhaps a physical interaction straight after birth results in the set up of the relationship between mother and child for the rest of it's development.

Condon and Sander 74 found that babies would co-ordinate their actions to adult’s speech, they would engage with their conversation through their actions in a rhythm so that both can understand each other as if they are turn taking in communicating with each other, this is also known as interactional synchrony. Murray and Trevarthen 85 asked mothers to make a ‘frozen face’ expression with their babies and found that the infants became extremely upset and wanted to engage back with the mother demonstrating interactional synchrony as a way of communicating with the caregiver.

We can often see young babies and children imitating adult behaviours and particularly facial expressions before they’ve learnt to speak. Melzoff and Moore 77 investigated facial expressions in 2-3 week old infants.They found that after a video was shown to each baby of certain behaviours that they copied the behaviour straight after, this is an alternative to the other theories of care-giver interactions with infants and a behaviourist is more likely to support the idea of immitation arguing that we copy models as a basis for future relationships.

Snow and Ferguson 77 identified a specific way in which adults converse with young children in a way that certain words are paired together, it is usually slow, high pitched and repetitive and made up of short and simple sentences. Papousek 91 found that Chinese, German and American mothers tended to use a rising tone to signal to the baby that it was their turn in interacting with them. It can also be seen as a part of interactional synchrony.

As evidence has been found to support all the theories listed above, perhaps certain infants follow interactional synchrony for example and another immitation, or maybe all of the above are applied to all infants at different ages and stages in develoment. Through these caregiver-infant interactions we can see how most adults interact with their children, if a child has not received developments in these stages we can see how their future relationships develop as well as other behaviours through individual case studies e.g  feral children (the case of Genie).