Introduction: bringing dads back into the family
Philip Cowan2019, Attachment & Human Development
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Abstract
This Special Issue of Attachment and Human Development provides a family systems perspective on fathers and attachment, and represents a response to a sad fact. Research on mother-child attachment has grown astronomically since the publication of Bowlby's seminal theory (Bowlby, 1969), Ainsworth's development of the Strange Situation Procedure , and Main and her colleagues' creation of the Adult Attachment interview . But over the same period of time, as the authors in this Special Issue all note, attention to the role of fathers in their children's development has been relatively neglected. Of the small number of researchers who include both parents and their children in their studies, most observe that mothers' parenting behavior, especially sensitivity, accounts for the child's security of attachment more strongly than fathers.' A vicious cycle has been created in which fathers are seen as absent in the role of primary caretaker of young children, and that cycle has reinforced the culturally stereotypic message that fathers are therefore less important, or even unimportant in children's development of attachment security. Based on the literature, many conclude that it is not worth the effort that it takes to recruit fathers to participate in new attachment studies. After listening for years to our protests about the persistent mother-centric nature of the field, Howard Steele, Editor of this Attachment and Human Development journal, challenged us to address father absence in the attachment literature by soliciting and editing papers for a Special Issue to highlight studies of fathers, attachment security, and child outcomes. And so, we have joined with 5 other research teams from different parts of the U.S. and Europe to present 6 papers, each of which demonstrates that fathers have an important role to play in the child's or adolescent's development of security or insecurity in their relationships with their parents, and in one case (Lux & Walper, 2019, pp. xx-xx) with their peers. The relative absence of fathers in attachment theory and research is not attributable simply to choices made by attachment theorists and researchers. Attachment research began in a time when ignoring fathers was standard practice in academic psychology and in the design of services to address the needs of children and their families. In the 1950s, research on fathers was focused on the impact of father absence due to war service and deatha concern continuing into the 1990s and beyond with father absence due to increasing rates of divorce and single parenthood. As both a cause CONTACT Philip A. Cowan
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Babies and young children develop 'attachments' to the people with whom they interact regularly. This has nothing to do with the child being physically 'attached' to a caregiver. Attachments are interpersonal connections at relationship level.
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