Attachment theory

Introduction

From nature, every relationship starts with a bond created at a given time in one’s life. Attachment theory explains the degree of association between the parents and their children. Parents should attach themselves to their children to help them meet their basic needs and avoid them from stressing themselves. Parents also have the role of showing love to their children.

John Bowlby with James Robertson came up with this theory, to explain the reasons as to why children keep on being affected by the absence of their parents even if they are being taken care of by other caring guardians. They, therefore, explained how the parent-child relationship should come out strong to have sustained and healthy growth.

Assumptions of attachment theory

The theory goes by the assumption that human beings adapt to given behaviors in their lives. The young ones tend to familiarise themselves with the nearest family members; this is the reason as to why a child will always know the mother first followed by the father because these two are most near the child as he or she grows. Again the theory assumes that, as the individual develops, he or she passes through different phases which h shape him or her differently. Therefore, parents should always be around to influence the development of their children positively. Another assumption is that, during their stressful times, the children need specific figures for guidance, an example of a mother. Likewise, day to day changes of the caregivers affects the adaptive behavior of the children in a way.

Key concepts

The main concepts include the opportunity for attachment and quality caregiving; for example, the orphans do not have someone specific to attach themselves to unlike children with parental care. On the side of quality caregiving, children with ruthless guardians may fail to have trust in a specific figure for attachment.

Focus of analysis

The focus of this theory is the evolutionary behavior of kids. It focuses on the importance of the parent in supporting the life of a young baby. The consequences of detachment from the kid carry the more significant part of the theory.

Explanation of the cause of the problem

The primary reason for the problem is ignorance by the parents to give full parental care to their young ones. Some engage in activities that do not provide them with time to check on their children development

Case study

The client, in this case, is Jake Levey. He visited the hospital to get help to come out of his drinking habit. He claimed that his wife threatened to divorce him under the argument that jakes proximity to their son was impaired.

The primary cause of the problem is drinking which affected jakes way of interaction with others.it has affected his psychology so much that he always think drinking is all he wants in life.

Social wise, this problem led to the threat of being discontinued from work. The fact is that no employee would like to have alcoholic people in the job.

The questions to Jake include; how he ended up in alcoholism, now sees himself in the future, and how he thinks the consequences of the behavior are. The primary purpose of these questions is to know how to solve the challenges he is facing.

The strength is that the theory uses the current and observable behaviours that can be changed over time. The limitations with this theory are that the behaviours are only analysed from the first association and not from a range of the same. If a variety of characteristics stood in, then the theory would have more meaning.