By PERRI KLASS, M.D. 

"In pediatrics, attachment is the emotional connection that develops between a young child and a parent or other caregiver.

Attachment theory was developed in the mid-20th century by a British psychiatrist, John Bowlby, whose own upper-class British upbringing included the loss of a beloved nanny, and an early trip to boarding school. Mary Ainsworth, his student and later collaborator, devised what is known as the strange situation procedure, in which a 1-year-old is briefly separated from the parent or caregiver, and then reunited, and the behavior during reunions is closely observed.

These experiments, which stressed the child briefly, but then immediately ended the stress, were correlated with in-home observations of parent-child relationships, and researchers built a kind of taxonomy of attachment, reading children’s behavior in the strange situation as an index to the quality of the bond with the parent.

“The reason the strange situation is so important is because early research and repeated studies showed that what parents did at home or in various situations predicted how children behaved in the strange situation,” said Virginia M. Shiller, an assistant clinical professor at Yale University Child Study Center and author of the “The Attachment Bond: Affectional Ties Across the Lifespan.”