![]() Therefore, it became clear to us that in order to empirically assess parents’ capacity for taking their children’s perspectives into consideration there was a need to develop a measure designed for this purpose. However, the parental capacity to “see things from the child’s point of view,” which we termed insightfulness and saw, following Ainsworth, as centrally important, was viewed in these new measures as but one aspect of more general representations of caregiving. This body of research represented a key development because it allowed, perhaps for the first time, to empirically assess the clinically useful concept of internal representations or working models and to examine their putative impact on the parent–child relationship. The interviews of mothers of securely attached children also reflect commitment, trust, cooperation, knowledge of self and child as individuals, and joy in the parenting experience. A number of early studies (Ainsworth & Eichberg, 1991 Bretherton, Biringen, Ridgeway, Maslin, & Sherman, 1989 Fonagy et al., 1995 George & Solomon, 1989, 1996 Slade, Grienenberger, Bernbach, Levy, & Locker, 2005 Solomon & George, 1999 Zeanah, Benoit, Hirschberg, & Barton, 1994) showed that mothers of securely attached children produce narratives that are more flexible, balanced, and integrated when interviewed about their children when compared to mothers of insecurely attached children. A particularly influential AAI-based insight was linguistic: that the organization of speakers’ narratives about attachment-related issues can reveal important features of their Internal Working Models. These assessments were based on Bowlby’s concept of Internal Working Models (Bowlby, 1982) and on the then recent development of the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI Main, Kaplan, & Cassidy, 1985). This interpretation is thought to lead to sensitive and emotionally regulating parental responses, which, in turn, enable the child to organize his or her feelings in a coherent and effective manner – as is typical of the securely attached infant.īased on these theoretical viewpoints, several researchers developed interview assessments of parents’ representations of their children (see Solomon & George, 2008, for a review). By utilizing an open, balanced, and coherent thought process, these mothers take their infants’ inner worlds into account when interpreting their behavior. According to these authors, mothers of secure children base their responses to their children on non-defensive, reflective thinking. (Fonagy, Steele, Steele, Moran, & Higgitt, 1991) suggested that the basis for infants’ security is mothers’ ability to reflect upon their mental states. Lieberman ( 1997) followed suit with her concept of negative maternal attributions: Rigid, one-sided, and negative perceptions of the child’s behavior and motivations that act as self-fulfilling prophecies and become entrenched in the parent–child relationship and eventually the child’s experience of the self.Ĭontinuing with the efforts to understand the intrapsychic processes underlying maternal sensitivity, Fonagy et al. ![]() The clinical perspective of Fraiberg, Adelson, and Shapiro ( 1975) suggested that in some cases such difficulties are rooted in unresolved parental childhood conflicts and traumas that may distort an adult’s mental representation of their child and lead to serious disturbances in the parent–child relationship. Conversely, difficulties in taking the child’s perspective into consideration and focusing instead on one’s own states, wishes, and anxieties are thought to be at the root of insensitive maternal behavior and insecure attachment. One of the most well-known proponents of this point of view was by Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978), who described how mothers’ capacity to “see things from the infants’ point of view” serves as the basis for sensitive maternal behavior, and consequently for infants’ secure attachment. As young students of developmental and clinical psychology during the 1980s, we were impressed by the work of clinicians and developmental researchers who argued that a full understanding of parent–child relationships requires a move to the level of parental representations, including the parent’s depiction of the child’s emotional world.
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