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Commentary
Human Development 2005;48:108–112
DOI: 10.1159/000083222

Attachments, Social Networks,
and Developmental Contexts
Michael E. Lamb
Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK
Key Words
Alloparenting
Child
Early experiences
Infancy
Parent attachment
Whereas the first two thirds of the twentieth century were characterized by the
creation of, competition among, and dominance by grand overarching theories, the
decades that followed have spawned narrower, more focused, and less ambitious
‘nano theories’ as well as more inclusive but vague frameworks and perspectives.
In many ways, attachment theory has served as a bridge between these two eras.
Bowlby’s [1969] crowning achievement was the integration of cybernetics, evolu-
tionary biology, and psychoanalysis – three grand theories – into a coherent ac-
count of the processes by which infants formed their first social relationships. Evo-
lutionary considerations led Bowlby to emphasize the extent to which infants de-
pended on the protective nurturance of their parents during the periods of life dur-
ing which they were most vulnerable and dependent, while psychoanalytic assump-
tions led him to emphasize the life course-defining formative impact of the result-
ing parent-child relationships on subsequent psychological health and adjustment.
Empirical research has demonstrated that the quality of early infant-parent
interaction indeed has a reliable impact on the quality or ‘security’ of the resulting
relationships, and that this quality in turn affects both the child’s interactions with
other individuals and his or her behavior in diverse challenging circumstances [De
Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; Lamb, 1987]. Such findings validate some of the
fundamental formulations and predictions of attachment theory. Unfortunately,
however, zealous proponents of attachment theory have misinterpreted and exag-
gerated the power and utility of the attachment theory in ways that several papers in
this special issue illustrate and question.
First, whereas Bowlby’s psychoanalytically inspired concerns led him to focus
on the formative significance of infant-mother interactions and relationships, evolu-
tionary biologists, anthropologists, and developmental psychologists have persua-
sively documented that humans grow up in more complex and diverse social groups
than the infant-mother dyad [e.g., Hewlett & Lamb, in press; Lewis & Feiring,
1981; Lewis, this issue], and that formatively important experiences continue to
shape individual development long after infancy. As early as the 1970s, researchers

Attachments, Social Networks
and Developmental Contexts
109 Human Development
2005;48:108–112

documented that infants developed affectively and formatively significant relation-
ships with fathers and that many infants were fascinated by the activities of their
siblings [Lamb, 1977a, 1977b, 1978; Lamb & Lewis, 2004; Lewis, this issue]. Fur-
thermore, the quality of infants’ interactions and relationships with all members of
their families are demonstrably affected by the quality of the relationships among
those individuals [Cummings, Goeke-Morey, & Raymond, 2004; Lewis & Feiring,
1981; Parke, Power, & Gottman, 1979]. The importance of the social interactions
and experiences with an array of conspecifics, even in infancy, was recognized
slowly by researchers, in part, perhaps, because the majority lived in, were most
familiar with, and studied Western Anglo-Saxon countries characterized by isolated
nuclear living arrangements that are highly unrepresentative of the living arrange-
ments experienced by most humans, either historically or cross-culturally. Even in
the ‘environment of evolutionary adaptedness’ stressed by Bowlby in his formula-
tions of attachment theory, infants and mothers are surrounded by and embedded in
complex social groups, mostly comprising relatives, who play a crucial role in car-
ing for, protecting, socializing, teaching, and feeding infants and young children
[Hrdy, 1999, in press].
Second, in industrial contexts, recent rapid increases in the rates of maternal
employment have led parents to seek assistance from unrelated adult care providers
who attend to groups of unrelated infants, toddlers, and young children [Lamb &
Ahnert, in press]. Most researchers and social critics have expressed concern that
such arrangements might damage child-mother attachments, and as a result less
attention has been paid to two other, more predictable consequences, i.e., opportu-
nities to form meaningful relationships with other adults (care providers) and op-
portunities to interact with and learn from peers, with whom infants and toddlers in
isolated nuclear families seldom spend much time. Such consequences underscore
the breadth of the young child’s social world and the costs of focusing exclusively
on infant-mother interactions in isolation.
Third, researchers such as Bornstein [2002] have emphasized that parenting
has multiple facets and purposes beyond the nurturant caretaking interactions that
are the focus of attachment theory. For example, parents introduce their children
to and prepare their children for the wider world in a variety of ways (com-
municative, social, and cognitive), shaping their children’s developing char-
acteristics and skills through dyadic and extradyadic domains that appear to be
largely unrelated to one another [e.g., Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda, 1990]. Fur-
thermore, specific types of parental behavior (such as responsiveness to distress as
opposed to nondistress signals) have implications for specific aspects of child be-
havior and development (such as attention spans, level of symbolic play, or level
of distress) rather than global effects [e.g., Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda, 1997].
Such findings and perspectives do not mean that attachment theorists were wrong,
but they clearly underscore that their focus was limited, i.e., they provided a valu-
able and surprisingly robust understanding of but one important aspect of parent-
child relationships.
Fourth, researchers have clearly demonstrated that later adaptation and adjust-
ment is not exclusively a function of the quality of early child-mother attachments.
From a purely empirical perspective, the quality of parental behavior explains only
a small part of the variance in child-parent attachment, while variations in attach-
ment quality explain only part of the variation in children’s later adjustment [De