Both touch and attachment are crucial to an infant's development.?

Question

What are some of the problems that could occur later in life if an infant failed to form a proper attachment with her/his caregiver?

Answer 1

One of the very worst things that can happen is that the child will be unable to trust other people. They will doubt themselves, and not feel as though their basic needs are important, and that they are undeserving of love & affection. They will be unable to bond with other people, not able to experience the joy of being loved "just because" and sometimes, be unable to demonstrate love in return. Often people who have had inattentive or neglectful caretakers work very hard to meet the needs of other people, at the expense of their own feelings -- almost as if they have to earn the right to an even playing field. It is truly quite sad. I wonder if this isn't the sole root of many of the personality disorders.

Answer 2

Disorganise/Disorientated attachment is consistently related to high hostility and aggression during the preschool and school years which are big factors associated with criminal offending, then there is the problems with forming intimate relationships.

Secure attachment tend to have better relationship with peers, closer friendships and better social skills. So these children should have few problems forming intimate relationships.

Within relationships, those who are not securely attached will probably have problems with needing to consistently know they are loved (the clingy type of person) or might do anything to please their partner because they do not want to be alone (submissive types).

Answer 3

well apparently it means they will have trouble forming meaningful and lasting relationships as they get older. It also means they find it hard to form bonds and could get behind in social, physical and mental development. But remember this is all theory and different things affect different children. It has also been proven children can form strong attachments with more than one person. dunno if this will be of any help

Answer 4

You have said "infant", so I assume you mean a baby under, say, the age of one year old.

Bonding is something that takes place over time, so it isn't like there's one day or one week in which bonding must take place or else the child is damaged forever. Much of a child's personality is formed in the first three years of life, with a substantial part of it being formed in the first two. If a child hasn't formed attachment by the age of two there is likely to be problems later, but, I think, even then there is the opportunity to bond to some degree.

I have an adopted child who had a less than ideal early infancy, and I've got two biological children. I've also had another family member who was adopted after being removed from an abusive home at two and a half years old, and in spite of the good care and love she received from her adoptive mother this person appeared not to have the usual bonding behavior with her own infant or the usual maternal instinct toward her toddlers. The degree of problems are person may have, though, is probably related to whether or not they had any kind of bonding and affection at all and whether, and to what degree, they may have suffered abuse or neglect.

There is obviously a huge difference between a baby (like mine) who stayed in the hospital for a couple of weeks or so and lived in an incubator and without my being able to have normal physical contact with him and the child who had a mentally ill mother and provided no warmth, bonding, or affection for two and a half years.

It depends, too, on how long the baby was allowed to go without normal bonding and affection and probably on whether and when proper bonding and affection ever occurred. Because it is said that even a damaged brain in an infant is more likely to completely recover it would stand to reason that the infant's brain is probably also able to recover from any loss of connections that result from lack of attachment if the bad situation is corrected soon enough.

There has been talk about how the mothers of premies may not bond properly because they cannot touch their babies and hold them soon enough. Part of it (if what is said is true) may be because mothers are afraid to attach out of fear that the baby will not live. My premie was not one of those tiny, tiny, premies. He was six weeks early, and there was no doubt I was afraid of his small size and the fact that he would use up too many calories from drinking a tiny amount of milk. I didn't get to really hold him until he was two days old, and even then there was the scrubbing up and the incubator and whatever else went with having a premie. I went home without him and went in to feed him a few times a day. All I can say about my own experience is that there could be no better bonding or attachment than what I had with my baby.

I do know that whether it was with my adopted son or my premie or the daughter I later had, they were all strangers to me until I got to know them and build that bond. There didn't appear to be any bonding problems with any of them, although my adopted son did develop some mysterious learning difficulties in spite of not appearing to have anything diagnosable. I now think I've figured out that with the normal nervousness of beginning school at five my son probably had a higher level of cortisol, which caused him to have trouble concentrating in school while being entirely able to concentrate at home. Whether or not he had bonded properly in early infancy I have no way to know. I do know he had been abused and/or neglected.

Just recently I have read that if the right connections are not made during the first few years of life, and if a baby is under stress, his brain may be programmed to forever respond to stress with higher than average levels of cortisol. This can lead to the person's having high blood pressure (as my son does, in spite of his eating right, not smoking, being slim, young, and exercising). I read, too, that what goes on in infancy and toddler years can lay a foundation for the immune system as well.

It is said that children with the personality traits of a sociopath didn't "mold" to the shape of the adult who held them. They remain more "frozen". This is, I believe though, also said about some children with autism Obviously, if a baby or toddler gets to the point where they don't mold their bodies when held there is a greater risk of serious problems than there would be for the baby who had an bad beginning but was removed from that early enough.

Just from my own experience, I know that the bonding process was something that began as I "met" each of my babies and that turned into a "fierce love affair" between me and each of them over the years to follow. I would assume (and I'm only bringing up my assumption so you may have some direction when it comes to researching more legitimate sources than I offer) that since babies are in a "bonding mode" during most of the first year of life that may be the best time for them to be able to bond. At around a year they first become aware that they are not one with their mother/caretaker. It seems to me that with my own children the year between one and two just made the bond grow bigger and stronger, maybe because the baby makes that shift in his brain that the person he loves is separate from him. I almost wonder if this is the key year for bonding.

The second year of a baby's life also is the year that he moves from just himself and his caretaker to being more socialized. If you assume that he must first go through bonding, then separating, then seeing his caretaker in a different way, and finally moving out to being socialized with other people you can imagine how as long as at some point the baby has the opportunity to bond there could be the chance that he won't have serious problems. This is something to further research if you have the interest.

Based on my own experience with knowing how the bonding process occurred with all three of my children, even if my oldest son spent about five months in a bad environment and another couple of weeks or so in a hospital; if I were given the opportunity to adopt an infant tomorrow and that infant was under a year old I'd jump at the chance. At the same time, from what I know of toddlers who get to be two or so and don't appear to have shown signs of being able to bond with a caretaker, I would be very reluctant to take on the potential problems that child may later show.

I can't help but believe there is the chance that if a child is removed from the wrong kind of caretaker soon enough he may have no problems in the future, and if any they would be extremely minor; but that answer is not based on scientific studies, and there is the very real possibility I'm wrong. Still, studies sometimes come up with results that don't always match what goes on with individual cases.

While I know I haven't given you the kind of answer you want, I thought some of what I've said may give you ideas for doing searches and other research.

Answer 5

they can become sociopaths.