5Intergenerational Transmission of Attachment: A Move to the Contextual Level

Attachment theory has been presented by John Bowlby (1907-1990) in the three volumes of Attachment and Loss (Bowlby, 1969/1984, 1973/1980, 1980/1981). During the last decade it has become so widely known that a brief overview will be sufficient here. Bowlby postulated that for children, the contact with their parent or caregiver is very important, especially when under stress. By nature, children seek proximity and contact and show behavior that brings about such contact (e.g., crying or crawling) or that is meant to maintain contact (e.g., smiling). For toddlers it is the parent's psychological.ivailability rather than his or her physical presence that is supposed to be essential. Children who are securely attached to their caregivers are confident of the caregivers ' availability; they know that they can rely on them when distressed (Bowlby, 1969/1984). Children who are securely attached are prone to grow up äs socially competent preschoolers (Arend, Gove, &c Sroufe, 1979; Waters, Wippman, & Sroufe, 1979). Infant-parent attachment relationships can, however, develop less favorably äs well. Bowlby (1969/1984) already formulated criteria for observing differences in patterns of attachment, but it is Mary Ainsworth (born 1913) who devised a laboratory observation procedure that enabled researchers to discriminate systematically attachment patterns amon