Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development [Hardcover]

Jean Mercer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 2005

Is maternal instinct fact or fiction? What special challenges do adoptive parents face? What kind of daycare is better, one with many caregivers or one with few? When is separation anxiety normal in a child? Do the experiences of early childhood always influence our ability to build and maintain social relationships as adults? Understanding Attachment helps to answer these questions and many others. This book is perfect for the reader who wants or needs a thorough understanding of attachment, but does not have time to indulge in lengthy study. Parents, child care providers, teachers, nurses, social workers, attorneys, therapists, students, and counselors will all appreciate this work.

Is maternal instinct fact or a myth? What special challenges do adoptive parents face? What kind of daycare is better, one with many caregivers or one with few? When is separation anxiety normal in a child, and when is it a sign of a developmental problem? Do the experiences of early childhood always influence our ability to build and maintain social relationships as adults? Understanding Attachment helps to answer these questions and many others. This book is perfect for the reader who wants or needs a thorough understanding of attachment, but does not have the time to indulge in lengthy study. Parents, child care providers, teachers, nurses, social workers, attorneys, therapists, students, and counselors will all appreciate this work.

Mercer defines attachment and related terms, discusses the history of the idea, and describes ways in which this aspect of emotional life can be measured. She explains developmental change and the way attachment continues to alter from infancy to adulthood. The importance of social experiences with parents and other caregivers is emphasized. Outcomes of good and poor attachment experiences are discussed, and there is material on attachment disorders. The book concludes with a description of recent work that gives a new perspective on attachment.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A useful companion to Mercer's Attachment Therapy on Trial, written with Larry Sarner and Linda Rosa with Gerard Costa (CH, Dec'03, 41-2488), this book will be especially valuable for those unfamiliar with attachment theory and research. Mercer provides a concise and jargon-free summary of attachment theory and successfully reveals how developments in the assessment of attachment promoted the evolution of attachment theory to what it is today….Recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; technical students; practitioners; general readers."

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Choice

"Secure attachments are a matter of both nature and nurture, the individual and the environment. Some of the most nurturing parents in the world will have insecure children, and some secure children will survive the most erratic and troubled parents. That said, Mercer's recommendations for creating attachment-friendly daycare practices and interventions, based on the child's changing developmental needs, are sensible. Attachment, like grass, will emerge through even the tiniest of cracks. Whether we then water those tendrils or trample on them is our choice."

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Times Literary Supplement (London)

Review

"Clear, concise and engaging, Jean Mercer's Understanding Attachment is a trustworthy guide for any reader who wants to learn about what the author calls the most important way of thinking of emotional development. Mercer goes back more than a century to describe psychoanalysts' and ethologists' contributions to understanding infants' intense relationships to their caregivers….After describing what we know about attachment and how we know it, Mercer ventures beyond the limits of research findings to suggest the implications of attachment theory for contemporary infants, young children, and parents….She challenges makers of public policy, lawyers and judges, the child care community, and parents to make the effort to truly understand attachment-- and to use new knowledge on behalf if all young children and families."

(

Emily Fenichel, Editor, Zero To Three Journal

)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Praeger; 1 edition (November 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0275982173
• ISBN-13: 978-0275982171
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #696,631 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jean Mercer is a developmental psychologist, with a doctoral degree from Brandeis University. She taught infant and child development, statistics, experimental psychology, and history of psychology for many years at Richard Stockton College in Pomona, NJ. Jean has two sons, two stepsons, and two grandsons, and hopes they have not stopped making little girls-- although boys are a lot of fun too.

Jean's most recent book, "Child Development: Myths & Misunderstandings", came out of her teaching experiences and her awareness of the things everybody knows, that don't happen to be true. She is pursuing the same issues on http://childmyths.blogspot.com and on http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/child-myths. She would like instructors who are considering using "Myths & Misunderstandings" to note the unpublished paper on childmyths.blogspot-- a discussion of the use of critical thinking concepts in teaching developmental psychology.


Readers who are surprised at the highly variable ratings of Jean's books on Amazon should note that not everyone likes their myths and misunderstandings to be corrected!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and informative overview of attachment through the lifespan, October 6, 2008

By 

John Christiansen (Windsor Heights, IA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development (Hardcover)

Interesting overview of attachment as a general emotional phenomenon through the lifespan. I skimmed over some of this-- adolescence, for example, which is just too terrifying for me to think about this early (which tells to what extent I'm really looking at this from a parenting standpoint, I guess), and some about severe attachment disorders at the psychopathology level. It was interesting for me to read about the infant and toddler stages and about some of the basic data and means of gathering it. I'm not expert enough to really evaluate Mercer's accuracy, so I'll stop short of five stars, but the information was presented very clearly, certainly at a level appropriate beyond the academic and psychological professional community and accessible to an interested general audience.
There's also some compelling information about trends of attachment parenting and attachment therapy, neither of which, as Mercer presents it, seems to be firmly based on real study of attachment psychology, in spite of a fair amount of apparently loosely employed terminology and lip-service paid in both trends to figures and ideas in the historical development of a cohesive idea of attachment-- Mercer is clearly hostile to attachment therapy, and justifiably if she presents it accurately. Attachment parenting is coolly critiqued, but not proscribed.
This lukewarm-to-hostile range on these topics is certain to ruffle the feathers of fervent attachment-parenting and attachment therapy advocates (such as the one-star review below, whose author has devoted his only reviews to Mercer's three books). Attachment parenting comes off in the book as a little bit self-deluding, with many practices built on untested assumptions about their good to the child-- though they are likely very comforting to the parents (presumably mothers, from much of the information cited) who practice them and largely emotionally healthy, illusions aside about whose primary good they pursue. If it's fair to say (if overly general) that what's emotionally good for the mother is good for the child, it may be splitting hairs to point out that doing something to promote a bond from the mother to the baby is different than doing something to help the baby itself bond.

My casual recommendation is meaningless to serious students of psychology, but I'd recommend this book to new parents who want to know about their child's emotional development and how to foster it for a solid start to a lifetime of good emotional health.

1.0 out of 5 stars Written by an unlicensed and not trained teacher...NOT a professional, May 28, 2009

By 

ParentTrainer "KarenR" (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development (Hardcover)

This author has flooded Amazon and Journals with books and articles without an ounce of clinical experience. She has only taught college and has never ONCE seen a real-live patient. This book, along with the others, are so far off base and have no inclusion of important DSM IV and V criteria; differential diagnosis and solid clinical experience. yet she touts herself as an expert without ever evaluating or treating a child? Impossible to believe a word in any of her publications as she is skewed in relying on only " her teaching a a few research articles" vs true clinical practice. yet she pontificates from her ( retired ) teaching at a small college and criticizes true experts and feels she is some type of expert. Not even licensed.....another book written by an amature and non professional.

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book helped me get on a better track for my son's future, July 17, 2006

By 

CJ Krause "Mom finding science about children" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Understanding Attachment: Parenting, Child Care, and Emotional Development (Hardcover)

This was a very helpful book in terms of understanding the theory and research on attachment in children. (This book in not about Attachment Parenting, though the book discusses a number of child rearing philosophies, including Attachment Parenting). Many take home lessons about raising children, including setting up negotiation skills in preschoolers for when we parents want to leave them to go somewhere, so that in high school our children are willing to negotiate when when want to be away from us. Attachment is lifelong, and influences much about relationships throughout our lives. Reading this book helped me understand a number of adults better, too. As with all books on children, needs to be taken as a piece in a puzzle.