"If a community values its children it must cherish its parents."
― John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health
A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development
As Bowlby himself points out in his introduction to this seminal childcare book, to be a successful parent means a lot of very hard work. Giving time and attention to children means sacrificing other interests and activities, but for many people today these are unwelcome truths. Bowlby’s work showed that the early interactions between infant and caregiver have a profound impact on an infant's social, emotional, and intellectual growth. Controversial yet powerfully influential to this day, this classic collection of Bowlby’s lectures offers important guidelines for child rearing based on the crucial role of early relationships.
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Attachment and Loss: Attachment (Volume I)
This first volume of John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss series examines the nature of the child’s ties to the mother. Beginning with a discussion of instinctive behavior, its causation, functioning, and ontogeny, Bowlby proceeds to a theoretical formulation of attachment behavior—how it develops, how it is maintained, what functions it fulfills.In the fifteen years since Attachment was first published, there have been major developments in both theoretical discussion and empirical research on attachment. The second edition, with two wholly new chapters and substantial revisions, incorporates these developments and assesses their importance to attachment theory.
In this classic work of psychology John Bowlby examines the processes that take place in attachment and separation and shows how experimental studies of children provide us with a recognizable behaviour pattern which is confirmed by discoveries in the biological sciences. He makes clear that human attachment is an instinctive response to the need for protection against predators, and one as important for survival as nutrition and reproduction.
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Attachment and Loss: Separation - Anxiety and Anger (Volume II)
Separation, the second volume of
Attachment and Loss, continues
John Bowlby's influential work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health.
Here he considers separation and the anxiety that accompanies it: the fear of imminent or anticipated separation, the fear induced by parental threats of separation, and the inversion of the parent-child relationship.
Download Attachment and Loss: Separation - Anxiety and Anger here.
Dr Bowlby re-examines the situations that cause us to feel fear and compares them with evidence from animals. He concludes that fear is initially aroused by certain elemental situations - sudden movement, darkness or separation - which, although intrinsically harmless, are indicative of an increased risk of danger.
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Free Ebook - Attachment and Loss: Sadness And Depression (Volume III)
In this third and final volume
John Bowlby completes the trilogy
Attachment and Loss, his much acclaimed work on the importance of the parental relationship to mental health. Here he examines the ways in which young children respond to a temporary or permanent loss of a mother-figure and the expression of anxiety, grief and mourning which accompany such loss. The theories presented differ in many ways from those advanced by Freud and elaborated by his followers, so much so that the frame of reference now offered for understanding personality developement and psychopathology amounts to a new paradigm.
Download Attachment and Loss: Sadness And Depression here.
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Maternal Care and Mental Health
John Bowlby demonstrates the devastating effects on children of maternal deprivation - effects that ripple through the generations as neglected children often become neglectful parents.
In 1949, Bowlby's earlier work on delinquent and affectionless children and the effects of hospitalised and institutionalised care led to his being commissioned to write the World Health Organization's report on the mental health of homeless children in post-war Europe. The result was
Maternal Care and Mental Health published in 1951.
Download Maternal Care and Mental Health here:
Bowlby drew together such limited empirical evidence as existed at the time from across Europe and the USA. His main conclusions, that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” and that not to do so may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences, were both controversial and influential. The 1951 WHO publication was highly influential in causing widespread changes in the practices and prevalence of institutional care for infants and children, and in changing practices relating to the visiting of infants and small children in hospitals by parents. The theoretical basis was controversial in many ways. He broke with psychoanalytic theories which saw infants' internal life as being determined by fantasy rather than real life events. Some critics profoundly disagreed with the necessity for maternal (or equivalent) love to function normally, or that the formation of an ongoing relationship with a child was an important part of parenting. Others questioned the extent to which his hypothesis was supported by the evidence. There was criticism of the confusion of the effects of privation (no primary attachment figure) and deprivation (loss of the primary attachment figure) and in particular, a failure to distinguish between the effects of the lack of a primary attachment figure and the other forms of deprivation and understimulation that may affect children in institutions.
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The Continuum Concept introduces the idea that in order to achieve optimal physical, mental and emotional development, human beings - especially babies - require the kind of instinctive nurturing as practiced by our ancient relatives. It is a true ‘back to basics’ approach to parenting.
