Could responding to your child's physical and emotional needs also influence his or her cognitive skills? A recent study by Bernier, Beauchamp, Carlson, and Lalonde (2015) supports this idea. The authors were interested if the type of attachment that children share with their mothers may relate to certain abilities that predict success in school.
You may recall that Mary Ainsworth and colleagues developed one way to study Attachment quality: briefly leaving toddlers in a Strange Situation and then reuniting them with their caregivers to observe how the children react. The majority of children got upset, but not hysterical, when left alone and were very glad when their caregiver returned: they ran to them; wanted to be held; and stopped crying almost immediately.
These children, like most American children, demonstrate a Secure Attachment relationship with their caregivers. This Secure style is associated with parents who notice when their children need something - physically or emotionally - and they respond to those needs in a prompt way. Children who share a Secure relationship learn to trust that their parents will come through for them.
In contrast, children may have an Insecure Avoidant relationship with parents who cannot be trusted to notice or take care of their needs. In this case the children don't want to be with the parents and do not rely on the parents for help.
Children can also share an Insecure Ambivalent relationship with parents who are unpredictable and unreliable at taking care of their needs. These children are always on edge because they don't know if today will be a good day or a bad day: they may be unusually clingy but also demonstrate a lot of anger toward their parents.
Finally, children raised in an abnormal environment of abuse and neglect, or by parents who are severely mentally ill, may just seem confused. This type of attachment relationship would be described as Insecure Disorganized.
We know that having a Secure Attachment relationship is associated with children demonstrating better social skills, emotional control, and improved behavior as they grow older. Bernier et al. hypothesized that this sort of attachment as a toddler would also be associated with better Executive Functioning skills during kindergarten. These Executive Functioning skills are largely regulated by the brain's prefrontal cortex and are very important for success in school. For example, relying on working memory, demonstrating the ability to plan and reach goals, and having control over your behavior are all requirements of kindergarten through college.
The authors considered 105 children who were tested at 15 months, two years, and when they were in kindergarten (age 5-6). At 15 months and age two, research assistants used a Q-Sort method to assess the attachment quality between the children and their mothers. The assistants came to each child's home and observed mother-child interactions. Based on those observations the assistants sorted 90 phrases into nine categories that ranged from "very unlike the child's behavior" to "very similar to the child's behavior." The resulting piles were compared with the piles we would expect from a Secure attachment relationship: if there was a strong match, the observed child would also have a Secure relationship with his or her mother. For example, children with Secure attachments would be rated as very similar to, "If held in mother's arms, child stops crying and quickly recovers after being frightened or upset," and rated as very unlike, "Child rarely asks mother for help" (p.1180).
At age 5 or 6, the same children were tested for general cognitive ability and specific Executive Functioning skills. General cognitive ability included an assessment with a delicious name, the Lollipop Test, which measures knowledge of colors and shapes, understanding of spatial relationships like "above" and "below," number knowledge, and letter knowledge.
Five assessments measured the children's Executive Functioning. Four of these directly tested the children's working memory, ability to follow rules, planning skills, and selective attention. Higher scores on these tests were associated with higher Executive Functioning skills. The children's kindergarten teachers completed the final assessment: they rated the children on 63 items related to problems with self-control, flexibility of thought, and metacognition (working memory combined with planning/organizational thinking). Thus, a low score on this rating was associated with higher Executive Functioning skills.
The results supported Bernier et al.'s hypothesis. Children who had earlier demonstrated Secure attachment relationships with their mothers scored higher on all of the Executive Functioning tests and received lower scores from teachers on problems with Executive Functioning. In other words, children whose parents had been responsive to their physical and emotional needs early in life were more likely to become kindergarten students with strong Executive Functioning skills. These skills in turn predict higher school success for these children.
Moreover, having a history of a Secure attachment was better at predicting good Executive Functioning skills than other factors known to have such influence. For example, attachment style predicted Executive Functioning skills better than predictions based on children's general cognitive ability scores. Likewise, attachment style's predictive powers trumped the children's ages, their families' income and education levels, and the amount of weeks that they had spent in kindergarten.
Although we cannot take these correlational results to mean that being a responsive parent or sharing a Secure Attachment relationship causes children to be primed for school success, they do imply that these things are likely to hang together. Returning to our meme, this research suggests that it is not solely the teacher's actions that will help children in school. If children are successful with the demands of kindergarten we can infer that they likely have a history of parents who wiped their noses, soothed their fears, and helped them regulate their emotions.
Further Reading:
The Bernier et al. (2015) journal article in Developmental Psychology can be accessed through your local college library.
If you are concerned that a child in your life has problems with Executive Functioning skills. Here is a resource from Understood.org: Understanding Executive Functioning Issues.
The Extension office at Purdue University offers concrete examples of parenting that are associated with Secure and Insecure Attachment relationships. The good news is that Insecure relationships can become Secure ones if parents change their behaviors.
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