This is where our early relationships seem to play a critical role in shaping our self. Initially babies like everyone but that changes somewhere around the first half-year of life. Now babies become increasingly discerning. Not only do they restrict their preference to their own mother, they can become terrified of strangers. This fear will increase over the next year until they start daycare school. You can even gauge the age of an infant if they burst into tears when you approach them. This phase of social development marks the beginning of mother–infant attachment and the corresponding appearance of stranger anxiety.35 Of course, most parents, especially mothers, have already formed a strong emotional bond with their infants from birth. For a start, our babies look cute because of ‘babyness’, a term coined by our bird expert, Lorenz, to describe the relative attractiveness of big eyes and big heads that is found throughout the animal kingdom.36 Big-headed, doe-eyed babies are adorable to adults, which explains why we think that puppy dogs, pop star Lady Gaga, who manipulates the size of her eyes, and even cartoon characters such as Betty Boop or Bambi look cute. They all have relatively big heads and big eyes. It’s one reason why women (and some men) from cultures around the world have used makeup to emphasize the eyes for beauty. Babyness also explains why pre-pubescent girls prefer to look at pictures of adults, but when they hit puberty, they prefer to look at babies.37 Nature has wired in baby love for those ready to have them.
Social bonding with babies is a chemically coordinated event that engages the reward centres of both brains – mother and child.38 The potent hormonal cocktails that flood the reward centres generate the feelings that accompany our thoughts. Just as hormones regulate social bonding, they are also released in times of social stress. This is why most mothers and their offspring cannot be easily separated. If you try to take an infant rhesus monkey away from its mother, you get maternal rage, a violent reaction typified by extreme aggression, arousal and the release of cortisol.39 Cortisol is the hormone that floods the body to motivate and prepare for action. It breaks down fats and proteins to generate extra energy while putting other systems on temporary hold. Combined with other hormones, such as adrenaline, our arousal system is activated to prepare us for life’s three big Fs: fighting, fleeing and fornication.
When it comes to fighting, people can rarely be more aggressive than a mother separated from her child. During a routine security check at an airport, my wife Kim was travelling with our first daughter and nanny through immigration. At one point, she handed the baby to the nanny in order to retrieve the necessary documentation. However, the nanny and baby were ushered through security to the next stage of processing and a glass barrier slid across to separate mother and baby. Realizing the situation, Kim attempted to push through the barrier, whereupon the security guard raised an arm and told her to wait. Kim, with her cortisol raging, threatened to overpower the armed guard and smash through the barrier to retrieve her newborn if the gate was not opened immediately. The male guard recognized the maternal rage and crazed look and immediately let the young mother through. This is why most animal experts caution against approaching young offspring when the mother is about.
At about six months, babies start to show the same strong emotional reactions to separation from their mothers. Now they do not want to be held by others and will scream and wail if you try to separate them from their mother. As their cortisol levels spike,40 they unleash that piercing wailing on separation that is almost unbearable until the infant is consoled and returned to the comforting arms of the mother. This is no laughing matter. There are few things more distressing to a mother than the sound of her own infant crying. This ‘biological siren’41 ensures that even if they are not yet mobile, the Machiavellian baby can still control the movements of their mother from within the confines of the playpen. When they do actually begin to crawl and toddle, towards the end of the first year, babies will literally hold on to their mothers’ apron strings as they go about their routines. A colleague of mine, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, made a television documentary42 where she filmed a young toddler and his mother as the mother went about the house doing her daily chores. When speeded up, it was as if the toddler was attached to his mother by an invisible elastic band, never letting her get too far away.
John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist, was one of the first to describe this early social attachment behaviour.43 He had been very influenced by Lorenz’s imprinting in birds and reasoned that attachment was a similar evolutionary mechanism that ensured that mother and infant remained in close proximity. In Bowlby’s view, children are a bit like batsmen in a game of baseball or cricket – they feel secure when they are touching the bases or while behind their creases, but become increasingly anxious and insecure as they step farther and farther away from them. The mother serves as a secure base from which to explore the world.
Bowlby predicted that children not given the opportunity to form a secure attachment as infants would end up as maladjusted adults. Much of this was based on his observations of children separated from their parents during the Second World War and relocated to institutions that did not provide the nurturing environment for attachments to form. He found that children separated early in life failed to develop normally with many exhibiting antisocial behaviour as adolescents. In France a similar picture emerged out of war-torn Europe when children were separated from their families.44 The way children were treated during early development had influenced the way they behaved as adults. Their reflected self, which had emerged in a chaotic, uncontrollable social world, had led them to shun social cohesion and conformity as adults.
In the 1960s, one of Bowlby’s colleagues, Mary Ainsworth, invented an experiment to reveal the nature of young children’s attachment using a temporary enforced separation from the mother in a strange environment.45 It began with the mother and her infant in a waiting room. A strange woman would come in and begin a conversation with the mother. At this point the infant was usually happy playing nearby with the toys in the room. After a couple of minutes, the mother would leave her infant in the company of the stranger as she left the room for three minutes. The stranger would try to interact with the infant until the mother returned. This sequence was then repeated. What Ainsworth discovered was that infants reacted to their mother’s separation in different ways.46 Most would start crying when their mother left but would settle again when she returned. These infants were described as securely attached, demonstrating the appropriate strategy of raising the alarm when the mother was too far away but settling on her return. Other infants were insecurely attached which was described as ‘avoidant’ or they were inconsolable and ‘resistant’ even when she returned to try and settle them.
There are two important limitations of the attachment account of the developing self. First, emotional attachment to the mother is found across the world but it is displayed in different ways, depending on the individual child and the way they are raised.47 Second, as any parent will know, especially those who have raised twins, children come with a whole batch of dispositions and tempers that shape how they interact with others. Some kids are just clingier than others and this temperament reflects how they respond to stress and uncertainty. Their emotional brain centres are trip-wired to overreact to uncertainty and they probably inherit that part of their personality from their parents. My former Harvard colleague, Jerry Kagan, called this natural disposition ‘inhibition’, which reflects the reactivity of the amygdala. In his research, Kagan found that around one in eight children were born inhibited and destined to respond fearfully to new situations.48 At the other extreme, around one in ten infants are born disinhibited, which makes them more fearless and able to cope with uncertainty and new situations. The remaining babies lie somewhere in between. Kagan found that he could identify the temperament of the infant at as early as four months of age, and this would predict their personality seven years later.