Dr. Susan Woodhouse Designs a Research Project on Caregiving, Attachment & Regulation of Emotion in Babies and Young Children.
Babies and young children do best when they can feel secure in their relationships with the important people in their lives. Secure attachment to parents in infancy is associated with later healthy emotion regulation, mental health, positive peer relationships, and school readiness. In contrast, insecure attachment in infancy has been linked to later mental health problems, especially in the context of additional risk factors, such as the stresses of having a low income. For this reason, the promotion of secure attachment is a prime target for preventive interventions, especially for infants facing other risk conditions.
Dr. Susan Woodhouse, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education (College of Education), designed the CARE project to examine aspects of parental caregiving that contribute to the development of secure attachment. The more we understand about the behavior of parents of secure children, the more we know what to focus on in interviews aimed at parents who may be struggling with child rearing.
Traditionally, interventions to promote attachment security have targeted parental sensitivity—parents’ ability to respond promptly and appropriately to a variety of infant cues. The problem is that sensitivity is not the best predictor of infants’ secure attachment especially in low-SES families.
Dr. Woodhouse and her colleagues addressed this problem in an earlier qualitative study. They found nearly all of a racially diverse group of low-income mothers were rated high on insensitivity with their 6 month-old babies, yet half of the infants were securely attached at 12 months of age. The researchers found that as long as mothers exhibited particular positive behaviors—and avoided certain negative behaviors—their babies showed secure attachment. This research resulted in a new conceptualization of parental caregiving termed Secure Base Provision (SBP). In fact, Dr. Woodhouse found that SBP predicted attachment in a diverse group of low-income infants, but sensitivity did not.
Dr. Woodhouse explains, “In essence what we are doing is going back to the basics of attachment theory. We are keeping the focus on whether parents provide a secure base from which the child can explore and to which the child can return for comfort when needed. This can happen even if the parents have a ‘no-nonsense’ instead of a ‘sensitive’ style.”
The CARE project will compare SBP and sensitivity as predictors of infants’ attachment, as well as important physiological indicators of stress reactivity and emotion regulation, and adjustment. This work will have important implications for parent education.
Finally, CARE will contribute to understanding emotionally challenging aspects of parenting, such as infant crying. As Dr. Woodhouse explains, “Parenting can be emotionally evocative and stressful, yet there has been little research on how maternal stress reactivity, particularly during infant distress may be linked to the quality of caregiving mothers offer.”
When complete, the CARE project will involve 200 low-income mothers and their infants, recruited from an urban area of Pennsylvania. The study will include a lab visit and home visits at 6 months of age and a follow-up at 12 months of age to assess infant attachment and other important outcomes.
The CARE project has completed a pilot study funded by the CYFC, and a proposal to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development was scored in the top 3%, with an anticipated start date of January 1, 2012. Co-investigators include Kristin Buss (Psychology), Rob Petrin (Statistics), Elizabeth Skowron (Educational Psychology, Counseling, and Special Education), and Doug Teti (Human Development and Family Studies).