Can a child’s attachment to a primary caregiver influence his/her cognitive skills? The short answer is yes.
According to attachment theory, children develop attachment relationships with primary caregivers during the first years of life. Within these relationships, children seek feelings of safety and security. Attachment relationships compose a motivational control system that regulates children's wishes to maintain proximity to caregivers and to explore the environment. When children are anxious, their attachment systems are activated, and their exploratory systems, which encourage children to interact with their environments, are deactivated, leading to their engagement in behaviors that bring them close to their attachment figures. On the other hand, when children are comfortable, their attachment systems are deactivated and their exploratory systems activated, leading to their use of attachment figures as secure bases from which to explore the environment. In other words, the attachment system acts in concert with the exploratory system to control children's interactions with their environments and to influence their development.
All children, except those who experience severe neglect, develop attachments to their primary caregivers; however, children demonstrate varying patterns of attachment that reflect differences in caregiver sensitivity and responsivity.
At the most basic level, children develop either secure or insecure attachments.
Secure attachment is associated with high levels of caregiver sensitivity and responsivity. Secure children trust that they will be attended to in times of need and, thus, effectively use caregivers as secure bases from which to explore their surroundings.
Insecure attachment is associated with relatively low levels of caregiver sensitivity and/or responsivity. Insecure children do not trust that they will receive support when threatened. As such, insecure children's attachment systems are more frequently activated and exploratory systems deactivated than those of secure children. Thus, insecure children are not as effective as secure children in their use of caregivers as secure bases.
Research on attachment and cognitive skills, including ability, intelligence, memory, and reasoning, indicates that secure children have more advanced skills than insecure children.
Theory and research indicate that these associations exist due to pathways or mediating mechanisms through which attachment may influence cognitive skills. Several of these pathways or mechanisms are: children's exploration, parental instruction and children's social relationships.
Secure children take part in much higher levels of investigation and gain more cognitive stimulation from their investigations than insecure children. Secure children also evidence higher levels of task exploration and engagement than insecure children. This investigation and task persistence is in turn related to higher level cognitive skills.
Parents of secure children are more contingently responsive; give more task-relevant, appropriate instruction to their children; and encourage more academic skill development, in both formal and informal instructional interactions, than mothers of insecure children. This instruction in turn support’s children’s learning of new skills.
Social relationships are another area important for cognitive skill development. Both the number of friends children have and the quality of their friendships are predictive of cognitive skills. Children with higher quality relationships gain more cognitive stimulation from their friends than those with lower quality relationships. Specifically, children have more dynamic conversations, engage in more mutual problem solving during tasks, and remember more about tasks completed with friends than acquaintances. Consequently, children with more friends and with higher quality relationships demonstrate greater cognitive skills than children with fewer friends and lower quality relationships.
Teachers also serve an important function in children's development of cognitive skills.
Teachers provide children with cognitive stimulation and formal and informal instruction that is necessary for optimal cognitive development. Children are more comfortable during and subsequently better able to obtain cognitive stimulation from didactic interactions with teachers with whom they have harmonious relationships. Additionally, children with high-quality relationships express their understandings of concepts more readily to their teachers than children with low-quality relationships, as they trust that teachers will respond sensitively. Teachers are thus better able to modify their instruction to meet the needs of children with whom they have high-quality relationships. Not surprisingly, children with higher quality relationships with teachers evidence greater cognitive skills in elementary school than those with lower quality relationships.
Extensive research demonstrates associations between maternal attachment and children's relationships with friends, playmates, and teachers. Secure children have more friends than insecure children and develop higher quality peer relationships. They also develop higher quality with relationships with teacher throughout life.
So, what does this research tell us?
It supports the value of warm and responsive interactions with our children and also show us the complexities of development. It is not the attachment styles per say that are impacting cognitive skills but rather the behaviors associated with them. In other words, when we think about research and development, it is always important to ask why we find that things are related to one another.