Attachment Styles are patterns of adaptive (i.e. sensible and helpful) ways for a child to respond and adapt to the environment into which they are born. Children develop their attachment styles by the age of 3 years old; this is often called the critical period (link to glossary) developing attachments. Therefore, the pattern developed in the first three years of life is then fixed unless therapeutic parenting or intervention is used to change the person’s way of relating.

The following is a summary of the four basic attachment strategies.

1. Secure Attachment

Securely attached children are confident to approach their carers and expect that their distress will be understood and responded to unconditionally. This sense of trust extends into the child’s expectations of other relationships.

Research indicates that 55% of the population display a secure attachment pattern.

2. Avoidant Attachment

Children who have an avoidant attachment pattern have learnt that their emotions are not responded to empathically. Such children have learnt to anticipate that expressions of their emotions will anger or irritate their carer. Their cries, anger, neediness or frustrations have typically been ignored or punished and so their attachment seeking behaviour has generated the opposite of what is needed from their carer i.e. distance rather than closeness.

In order to cope with such parenting, children who have an avoidant attachment have learnt that in order to avoid distance and have the best chance of proximity to their carer they should deny and/or repress their emotional needs i.e. they minimise their attachment behaviour and become insular. This can be seen as a “flight” strategy.

Children who display avoidant attachment are, at least, able to work out an organised way of achieving some access to their attachment figure.

Research indicates that 23% of the population display an avoidant attachment pattern.

Typical Avoidant Attachment presentations:

3. Ambivalent (or Resistant) Attachment

Children who show an ambivalent attachment style have typically experienced a primary carer who is inconsistent and unreliable in their ability to meet the child’s emotional needs. This may be due to the adult’s preoccupation with their own difficulties, for example depression, drug and/or alcohol use or more subtle difficulties in tuning into the meaning of the emotional expressions of their child (which can be due to the adult’s own attachment difficulties).