John Bowlby's Theory Of Attachment

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John Bowlby 1907-1990:
Bowlby was a psychoanalyst, he recognised that attachment was important and that children are influenced by their relationships with their mother or carer. The mains aspects to his theory are: (1) Babies have the need to attach to themselves to one main person and this needs to be achieved within the first six months. (2) Bowlby states that children need continuous care from this main carer for at least the first two years as this is a critical stage, any disruptions in this stage could have lasting effects on the child’s development, for example aggression or depression. (3) He later stated that children are capable of multiple attachments to people and that it is important for children to have an attachment to at least one other carer in their early years setting.
Bowlby believed that our mental health and behaviour problems could be related to early childhood. His theory suggests children are biologically born with a pre-programmed form of attachment that helps them to survive and form the close relationship with the main care. He felt that children having a fear of strangers was down to a survival mechanism and is built in by nature. Bowlby also believed that that children’s attachment behaviours are …show more content…
He believes that children learn through observing others and not through being taught. He said that children will simply copy adults as well as their peers without needing to be told to do so, this means that their learning is classed as spontaneous. Bandura felt that in order for children to copy behaviour of a role model they should follow the modelling steps (1) be encouraged to pay attention to the behaviour, (2) retention, remembering what was seen or heard, and having the ability to store information (3) have the capability to mimic the behaviour, modelling the retained information (4) have the motivation to want to reproduce the modelled

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