What research tells us (the science bit)

What the research tells us: Attachment – the emotional bonds young children develop with a parent or carer – underpins the way early years professionals care for young children. It is why we have a key person for each child in a setting. But researchers in the USA have found it is incredibly powerful. Just having a parent nearby can change the way a child’s brain learns to react to positive and negative experiences.

What they found: In 2019, five researchers including Nim Tottenham sought to explore if children’s choice was influenced by a parent’s presence. This followed earlier experiments using rat pups. Here researchers created mazes for rats. If the pups took one route, the rats received a negative stimulus – a shock to their tail. Down a second route, they received a positive stimulus – a tail stroke. The rats learned not to go down the route where they were shocked. However, this meant they never had the chance to discover if there might, on occasion, be something different down that route, such as some cheese. These rats were not good explorers, and therefore had fewer opportunities to learn. But when the experiment was repeated with the mother accompanying the pup, they preferred the route with the negative stimulus and did more exploring.

In Tottenham’s experiment, 106 three- to five-year-olds took part in a test where the researchers asked them to press a button when shapes appeared on a screen. The children also wore headphones. When one shape (a blue triangle) flashed up, the children heard a loud, high-frequency metallic scraping noise. With another shape (a purple triangle), they heard nothing. All children did this test, but one group did it with their parent sitting nearby (although not interacting), while the other group did it alone.

Having learned to associate one shape with an unpleasant sound, and the other with silence, the researchers asked children to explore a ‘maze’. The children were shown there were prizes behind two doors. One door had the unpleasant-sound shape on it, the other the silent shape. Children who had learned the association without a parent consistently chose the silent door. However, those whose parent had been with them showed a ‘modest, yet significant’ preference for the other.

What does this mean for me? The researchers concluded children develop a preference for cues associated with a parent, even if they are adverse. This makes children with good attachment more willing to explore, rather than avoiding potentially negative experiences. The researchers also pointed out this helps explain why children develop attachment even to abusive parents. It is a reminder of how powerful attachment is on children’s development.

Read more about ‘Parental presence switches avoidance to attraction learning in children’: https://tinyurl.com/25a58vvj