Bonding and Attachment
'In 1971, Robertson, in coordination with his wife Joyce, began to publish influential articles...us the term bonding for parent-to-infant attachment'. For the Robertsons, '"bonding" refers to the feelings parents have for their children and "attachment" to the feelings children have for their parents...they run in parallel'. They distinguished the two on the grounds that 'Bonding is a mature form of loving. But the attachment of child to parent is an immature form of loving - unstable in the early months and years'. They considered that 'bonding progresses down the generations to promote the well-being of each new batch of babies...where the parents are not bonded to the children, the children are put at risk'.
Read more about this topic: James Robertson (psychoanalyst)
Famous quotes containing the words bonding and/or attachment:
“The bottom line on bonding with multiples seems to be that if you see bonding as a static event—a moment in time at which you must have eye contact and skin contact simultaneously with two or more infants—you may indeed be in trouble.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)
“Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)