These are remarkably different reactions to what is on the surface the same event. The first child experienced a devastating rejection. The second child did not. In fact, he may not have experienced “rejection” at all. He may have seen the turndown as something about the little girl or simply as not very consequential. The first child experienced another blow to self-esteem, while the self-esteem of the second child likely was enhanced, for he once again experienced that persistence leads to success. This event meant something very different to these two children. In fact, it is not possible to fully understand their behavior without taking meaning into account.

How do such profound differences in the meaning of experiences emerge? Are they part of a broader, organized network of meanings? What do they forecast regarding later ways of interpreting experiences? Finally, how does meaning making change with maturation? These developmental questions are of both theoretical and clinical importance. Exploring meaning is crucial for understanding individual personality. It is also at the center of the therapeutic process.

It is clear from the start that meaning is personal. Meaning is subjective. The individual construes meaning, based on a particular history of experiences. We see things as we are, rather than as they are (Nin, Reference Nin1961). Meaning does not lie in the event itself, but in the interplay of the event, individual history, and the surrounding circumstances. When there is shared meaning that is because there are shared histories and perspectives.

Meaning is also subjective in the sense that it involves the investment of the individual. A meaningful experience matters to the person. Meaning thus involves emotional as well as cognitive processes. Meaning involves more than the objective facts about any particular event or situation. It is influenced by the person’s background mood and what the person feels regarding a particular situation and how these feelings color what is perceived.

Consider the simple example of a town square clock striking 10 times on a sunny morning. Leaving aside the case of human groups who do not artificially mark time by hours, for millions of people this event conveys the shared meaning of mid-morning. For some, of course, this may indicate time for a coffee break, for others a time to begin work or attend a class, or for a religious observance. So there is meaning that derives from culture and society. However, even this simple event can have profoundly different individual meanings. If a grown-up child or a parent, unseen for many years, is arriving on a 10:15 train, it may stir eager anticipation, excitement and joy for one or both of the individuals involved. In contrast, if one expects shortly to be taken to the executioner by a guard, dread, resignation, and terror would be expected. In both cases, without doubt, the striking of the clock is meaningful.

All of this is obvious, but meaning is, of course, much more nuanced than this. For our waiting parent or adult child both the meaning and reaction depend on the relationship history, both recent and cumulative. If when they parted, they were in the midst of an argument and the last words heard were, “I never want to see you again,” the meaning of the hour would be quite different than if the last words were, “Be safe and know we love you.” It also matters whether that argument was imbedded in a longstanding contentious relationship or was an atypical reaction to an acute stress. Is this a dreaded encounter or the fulfillment of a long-standing hope?

The entire developmental history of the individual all the way back to the earliest years and months of life also comes into play, especially experiences promoting or eroding trust. For some of us, fears of abandonment and loss are easily triggered; even the slightest hint of criticism can portend rejection. For others, expectations remain positive even in the face of threat. For some, each potential action must be scrutinized with regard to approval or disapproval from others. Some become anxious when certain feelings arise, regardless of the cause. What situations mean, whether they are seen as threats or opportunities, manageable or overwhelming, depends heavily on our acquired beliefs about our own coping capacities, our expectations regarding the availability of others, and our abilities to tap both internal and external resources.

The Power of Meaning

In her book The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith (Reference Smith2017) draws on an extensive literature, from existential philosophy to modern social and biological science, to make the case that seeking meaning is the preeminent human motive. We continually need to make sense of our perceptions and to seek order and coherence in our experience. “We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder … we see faces in the clouds, hear footsteps in the rustling leaves, and detect conspiracies in unrelated events. We are constantly taking pieces of information and adding a layer of meaning to them …” (p. 104). Human beings seem to be intrinsically motivated to extract meaning from experience. We cannot do otherwise. As cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson frequently points out, pattern recognition is in our nature. Human brains appear to be hardwired to seek order and to organize experience.

One example of the way our brains function to maintain organization of experience comes from a study of brain scans of people before and after experiences of low gravity in a space flight. After the low gravity experience, researchers found reduced activity in brain regions involved in “bodily self-consciousness” (images of our body position in the environment). Normally, our brain combines information from systems involving motion, balance, and vision to create a coherent experience. Being in low gravity alters some of these messages, so the brain apparently switches them off in order to fend off the incoherence that would result. Such an idea has striking implications for the clinical phenomenon of dissociation. When children experience chaos, trauma or unfathomable experience, dissociation is a means for maintaining some semblance of order in a disordered world.

Meaning is prominent in what we abstract from our experience. In a study carried out decades ago by John Bransford and Jeffrey Franks (Reference Bransford and Franks1971), college students were given lengthy paragraphs to read, and then tested regarding them weeks later. They were asked which of two paragraphs was the one read before. One paragraph used vocabulary and wording that overlapped almost completely with the original, but it was constructed such that the meaning was entirely different. The other used virtually all new language but conveyed the same meaning as the original. This was the one uniformly recalled as the same one that had been read before. This launched an entire set of studies regarding the meaning–extracting nature of human cognition.

The motive to seek meaning is rivaled only by the motive to survive, and at times the two motives are related. In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl describes how only searching for and finding meaning enabled people to survive in horrendous concentration camps during World War II. Stripped of all worldly possessions, separated from family, and existing in the harshest of conditions, some were still able to survive starvation and cold because they were able to find something to live for – some meaning for their continued existence. Sometimes this was a loved one whom they could someday care for again. For others it was some task in the future they hoped to undertake, some contribution that they could make to society.

Smith describes studies showing that finding meaning in life also seems to be important for physical health. Even when compared to measures of happiness, degree of meaning in one’s life is the stronger predictor of cardiovascular and other aspects of health in large survey studies. As philosophers such as Sartre said, finding meaning is the purpose of life. It also apparently supports a healthy life.

In this book we will explore the nature of meaning making, from the very beginnings of meaning in infancy to the complex networks of meaning in adulthood. We want to understand how meaning making changes with development, and we want to understand how individuals form the particular organizations of meaning they do. By this we refer to the broader, integrated worldview of the individual and the unique network of meanings of each person. We believe that these individual organizations of meaning are the outcome of development, emerging from early beginnings and building step by step in a coherent, systematic way. A process in which each phase is built upon what was there before, yet also provides the foundation for what is to come, always characterizes development.

Meaning, Synthesis, and Integration

Meaning is the outcome of a process of synthesis and integration. For decades, psychology has recognized the interplay and reciprocal and cyclical nature of emotion and cognition (e.g., Sroufe, Reference Sroufe1996). What one perceives influences what one feels, but at the same time what one feels influences what one sees as well. Affect and cognition are “non-dissociable,” as Piaget (Reference Piaget1952) said. There are no cognitions without affect and no affect without cognition. We once said that temperament and experience are not carried in separate suitcases; there is only one suitcase (Sroufe & Fleeson, 1986). The same is true of cognition and emotion.

Moreover, emotional reactions unfold, and they do so in the social context. The same event in one context will entail different percepts and feelings than in another context. Meaning derives from the totality of the synthesized experience. For example, as Dan Siegel (Reference Siegel2020) says, emotion is, in fact, a “value system for the appraisal of meaning.” It both guides cognition and responds to cognitive interpretations. Even before there is “thought,” infants make connections between sensations or actions and emotions, as we will discuss in Chapter 3. Without such an integrated process, meaning will be curtailed, distorted, or even obliterated.

A poignant example is the story of “Elliot” presented by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (Reference Damasio2006). Following surgery for a large frontal lobe tumor, Elliot’s perception and logical reasoning were intact. He could perceive and describe in detail the events of his life – losing his job, losing his wife, losing his house, and becoming destitute. But his emotional reactions were completely blunted and not integrated with these perceptions. He felt nothing but indifference in the face of calamity. Without such integration, nothing was of personal significance. It had no meaning

The totality of feelings, cognitions, and awareness of the social context always governs the interpretation of a situation and always guides behavior from the earliest years forward. For example, without an attachment figure present, toddlers are generally not very comfortable playing in a laboratory. With an attachment figure present, they are comfortable, and the play improves noticeably in both amount and quality. Next design the playroom so that a screen blocks the view of the adult from where the toys are placed. Toddlers play dramatically less and spend a good deal of time going to where they can see the parent. They know the parent is there; their memories are fully adequate for that. And what is most noteworthy, without the screen they rarely look at the parent; rather they are reassured by the mere knowledge that they could look if they wanted to. The meaning of the whole situation is dramatically changed by the introduction of the screen and the concern it arouses.

Likewise, the reactions of the two children in our opening example cannot be explained by simply considering differences in cognitive ability. As 5-year-old children, these two boys had a common cognitive understanding of what happened. They both knew their request was received, and they both knew it was declined. What differed were the feelings that were activated. These feelings colored their interpretation of the event – the meaning it had for them.

Meaning and Behavior

In his book The Undoing Project, writer Michael Lewis (Reference Lewis2016) summarizes the groundbreaking work of cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Of greatest interest to us, Lewis traces the evolution of this work across several decades. Even in the early years of their collaboration, the work yielded insights into the complicated workings of the mind. The mind, it seems, imposes order on fragments of sensations and experience, rather than the world imposing order on the mind. However, the early work was largely focused on cognitive operations, in that it was concerned with the logical errors that we all make. This was a great contribution, of course, meriting a Nobel Prize in economics for Kahneman following Tversky’s death. Nonetheless, important as uncovering these errors was, it made it seem like they were due to simple faults in our cognitive machinery.

Soon they recognized that these errors were systematic and predictable. Then it became clear that more than faulty problem-solving machinery, the difficulty was in the perception of the problem. Increasingly, a role for emotion entered into the work. Decisions made by people, whether in economics, health, or any other human arena, are not simply made via cool calculus, but in terms of feelings as well. For example, it hurts more to lose something you already have than lose out on something you simply might get. Thus, people are more cautious with decisions framed in terms of potential loss, even when judgments regarding probable outcomes are not altered. Financial decisions aren’t just economic decisions; they are emotional as well. As Lewis concluded, “to create a theory that would predict what people actually did when faced with uncertainty, you had to ‘weight’ the probabilities the way people did, with emotion” (p. 271). People make decisions and behave in terms of what a problem means to them, and what it means is emotional and cognitive in unison.

Kahneman and Tversky came to see that there were good evolutionary reasons for the mind to work the way it does. Avoiding harm and pain were more important to survival than always having the probabilities right. We would add that there are also individual historical reasons for viewing problems the way one does. Exaggerating threat, for example, or totally denying its existence, are the only ways for some children to survive malevolent childhoods, however illogical and maladaptive such perceptions may later appear to the outside. The integration that leads to meaning includes history as well as current events.

So, clearly, personal feelings aroused influence how we perceive things – what we make of them. “We see things as we are, not as they are, as Anais Nin points out.” Yet, at the same time, our cognitive activity influences our emotions, and it is this totality that yields the meaning we make of situations. In the famous experiments of Stanley Schacter (Reference Schacter and Spielberger1966), for example, some research subjects were given placebo and some were given epinephrine (more commonly known as adrenalin). Adrenalin, of course, speeds up the heart rate and raises blood pressure, among other things. However, the participants were not told that it was adrenalin (which would be expected to make them feel keyed up and even anxious), but rather that it was a new medication, and varying effects of the drug were suggested to different groups. Depending on what they were told (the “cognitive set” provided), the participants had a hugely varied range of behavioral and emotional reactions. Some even became drowsy when that suggestion was made! Moreover, those given the drug had stronger paradoxical reactions than those given placebo; that is, the drug was having an effect, but the interpretation of the bodily reactions was key. The physiological changes happened for all the subjects given the drug, but it was the integration of the physiological changes and mental activity that determined the particular reactions; that is, what the feelings meant to the person.

Conclusion

Others before us have, of course, taken on the topic of meaning, and we are indebted to them for their insights. Individual variations in meaning making and their embeddedness in social experiences has long been recognized.

One prominent position in this past work is what was called “appraisal theory.” For decades, psychologists, such as Magda Arnold, George Mandler, and Richard Lazarus, recognized that different individuals appraise or evaluate situations differently and therefore react to them differently. Mandler (Reference Mandler1975) even referred to appraisal as “meaning analysis.” All of these theorists acknowledged that emotions influence thought but at the same time they pointed out how interpretations reciprocally impacted emotion. This back-and-forth interaction between emotion and thought is in continuous operation. Appraisal theory was a powerful position, calling our attention to the evaluative component to one’s reaction to events. More than the event itself, it is how we appraise or evaluate it that impacts us.

As valuable as it was, we seek to go beyond this work in several ways. First, appraisal theory was focused on the meaning of specific events. We seek to understand the cumulative history of experience – the broader worldview of the person. Everyone puts together a story of their life which is more or less coherent (e.g., McAdams, Reference McAdams2013). It can be called making sense of or coming to an understanding of one’s life or finding meaning. It is a, more or less, well organized view of the world and one’s self in that world. It is a process that starts early and never ceases. In time, individuals vary greatly in how elaborated and/or coherent the story is.We sought to understand how this happened.

Second, appraisal was at times made to sound like a rational, analytical process. While emotion was seen as an “influence” on cognition, cognitive activities were given priority. But making sense of one’s life/existence/experience is always subjective, primarily because the process begins much before conscious awareness of one’s self. Before an individual can reflect on any interaction with an important caregiver, countless events have transpired that form the foundation of understanding. Therefore, as one becomes able to reflect upon and put together a story of one’s life, there are already deep biases and expectations about the world that color how one thinks about current events. At this level of integration, one cannot separate emotion and cognition. They are, as Piaget said, “non-dissociable.”

Related to this, the process of making sense of one’s experience occurs on two levels. On one level, one consciously reviews one’s experiences and arrives at an acceptable understanding. On another level, there is unconscious integration of experience, through habitual patterning of mind/brain functioning, further aided by the dreams of REM sleep. This is not voluntary and can only be altered through deliberate and sustained effort. Individuals vary greatly in their interest in self-examination and, even then, it can be useful or not.

Finally, we will emphasize the process of development; that is, how do individual people come to see the world the way they do. How do they come to engage and appraise different situations in the way they do? The starting point for appraisal theorists was the presence of the individual differences in adulthood. We want to go beyond that. We want to know why there are these differences. The major goals for this book are to answer questions concerning the origins and unfolding of individual differences in appraisal and in unique worldviews.

We have also received inspiration from numerous other scholars who have emphasized the role of social relationships in the development of meaning. Many of these were writing early in the twentieth century, and we will touch on them in the final chapter of the book. One more recent theorist is Robert Kegan (Reference Kegan1982). Is his insightful book The Evolving Self, Kegan discussed many of the themes that we will also emphasize. He stressed the sociocultural embeddedness of the person from cradle to grave and rejected the idea of the free-standing individual. He also argued that meaning making was a lifelong activity. Meaning was so central in his position that he suggested that “it is not that a person makes meaning, as much as that the activity of being a person is the activity of meaning-making” (p. 11). His theory is clearly developmental, and he cites many of the same authors we will, such as Erik Erikson and John Bowlby.

We embrace Kegan’s theoretical viewpoint and his core ideas. Our goal is to put flesh on these theoretical ideas by providing a more detailed, step-by-step account of how persons in fact construct the meaning systems they do, as well as to provide the much-needed empirical support for this position. How do some come to see their world as responsive and their actions as potent, while others have negative expectations regarding support and doubt their power to have any impact on their experience? The necessary longitudinal data are now available.

The process of finding and making meaning is complex, nuanced, and multifaceted. Moreover, aspects of this process and its complexity change with development. Age by age, new capacities for meaning making emerge. Likewise, individual systems of meaning evolve based upon individual histories of experience. Still, throughout all of this development there are four features of meaning making that are pervasive. These will be themes carried throughout this book.

The first feature or theme is that humans are inherently motivated to seek meaning. No one has to be taught to seek meaning. Humans seek to find meaning in their experience from the first time they are able to make connections with the environment, and the striving for meaning continues throughout life. Seeking meaning and coherence is a preeminent human motivation

The second theme, which is quite closely related to the first, is that meaning making is an active process. Humans impose order on experience. Meaning is always an interaction between events and the people experiencing them.

The third theme concerns the dynamic or “transactional” nature of the development of meaning. Meaning is a product of experience; yet, at the same time, past meanings govern what kinds of experiences are sought, how they are interpreted, and what is extracted from them. This is a cyclical or reciprocal process that goes on throughout individual development.

Finally, fourth, the developmental process underlying meaning making is inextricably social. Comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello, in his marvelous book, Becoming Human (Reference Tomasello2019) and other writings, makes clear that human motivation for connection with others is what most distinguishes us from other animals. Other animals, especially primates, seek joint attention from partners for the purpose of meeting instrumental goals, but it seems that only humans seek joint attention simply in order to have shared experience. Our greatest adaptive advantage is that we evolved to share experience and to collaborate, even with those to whom we are not related (Wilson, Reference Wilson2019).

Meaning as an Inherent Human Motive and Active Process

How do we know that any characteristic is inherently human? Generally there are two lines of argument. The first is that it is universal. It is a characteristic that all humans across all cultures exhibit. The second argument is that it appears very early in life. Both of these criteria are met in the case of seeking meaning. We see signs of striving toward order from the very earliest days of life.

As one example, when researchers put awake and alert newborn infants in a completely darkened room, with absolutely no light, infrared cameras revealed an amazing thing – the infants continually scanned the black surround. There was nothing to be seen, but still they engaged. This is something that infants do universally. They seek to be engaged with the environment. No one has to teach them to do this. It is a stretch to assume that newborns are even capable of extracting meaning, as we would define it; yet such a built-in reflex to engage is a precursor of what we see age by age, as the individual moves from engagement to interest to curiosity and to the search for coherence.

Here is another example: Use a long ribbon to connect the foot of an 8-week-old infant to a mobile. When they kick their feet the mobile will turn. In just a matter of days or even hours they will learn to make the mobile move, and they will do so repeatedly. No one has to reward them for doing this (or even be present). The “reward” is simply in the connection between the infant’s activity and the reaction. There is an inherent interest in one’s world and an inherent desire to act upon it.

Toddlers in the early phases of language learning reveal another example of early meaning making. There is a common tendency for them to engage in what is called “crib speech.” When they awake from a nap, and no one is present, they frequently jabber away. They don’t simply make random sounds. In fact, they are playing with what they are just in the process of learning. They may repeat something like, “Ball, ball, yellow ball.” Or they may say, “Put this … up there” over and over. They are actively practicing – making sense out of – their language environment. Practicing is a tool for achieving mastery. It is again noteworthy that they do this in the complete absence of external reward.

Or consider the example of two parents pushing their toddlers in strollers from different directions. When they meet and pass by, both of the toddlers’ heads whip around as they look at each other. No one has to reward such activity. It is a part of a built-in interest in others “like them” they both have. Surely it is a beginning step in discovering the meaning of who they are.

A final example may be seen in the symbolic play of 3–5-year-olds. Especially in their solitary play, they routinely review and work through themes that are salient and challenging in their current lives. For instance, children in the midst of toilet training will frequently engage in play wherein they change the dolly’s diaper, scold the dolly for being wet, and so forth. And all child clinicians are aware of how conflicts with and between parents are acted out in myriad ways in a child’s play. Clearly, young children do this because it is one of the tools available to them to make experience meaningful and to thus explore and achieve some mastery in the world and their place in it. The main point here is that again no one needs to instruct or urge preschoolers to engage in this activity. In all cultures, children engage in symbolic play, recapitulating salient experiences.

Each of the examples here illustrates the active nature of meaning making. This is always the case. Consider the following scenario:

This example conveys something very important about the nature of meaning. Obviously, it is not the stimulus of the clown per se that leads to the pleasurable emotional reaction. It is the infant’s active interest and mental activity in this experience. The baby does not smile at the first presentation. So an infant at this young age is not smiling because it is a clown, or a toy giraffe, or any other novel object that you could choose. Clearly, the smile derives from the infant’s active involvement. After repeated study, the baby with effort can now recognize the clown as something familiar. The clown acquires meaning through this active engagement, and the smile is part of this acquired meaning. The pleasure derives from the infant’s active engagement and connection with the object. Finding pleasure in familiarity promotes further exploration of familiar objects. With repeated trials effort is no longer required. Engagement and connection, critical cores of meaning making, wane.

A somewhat related example is seen in toddler problem-solving tasks. When toddlers solve problems after some work, they frequently smile, again attesting to the meaningfulness of the activity. Most notably, the harder the problem is to solve, the bigger is the smile, as Jerome Kagan (Reference Kagan2013) noted in his study of toddlers. The more actively involved the toddler is, the greater their investment, and the more potent is the experience.

The inherent, active tendency to try to make experience meaningful is helpful in explaining much behavior that at first seems paradoxical. As just one example here, it is at first perplexing why young children, who are as mentally able as others, would repeatedly behave in ways at preschool that lead generally warm and supportive teachers to discipline them. There is, of course, the circular argument that they do such things to get attention. But why do they do it that way? A more helpful explanation is that they, like all others, are actively seeking to make this new world understandable. They have no choice about this, such is the nature of human motivation. And what they know from their experience is the behavior–punishment cycle. For them a nonpunitive response is ambiguous or confusing. It makes no sense when they act out and receive no negative response. When they in time hit on the behavior that leads to discipline, they are back in familiar, understandable territory, which gives them some sense of agency and control. The new world becomes coherent, at least to a degree.

The Dynamic Interplay of Meaning and Experience

Development is “cumulative.” Each phase of development builds upon what was there before. The issues and experiences of any given age are negotiated and processed based upon meanings derived from preceding history. These new experiences then become part of a new history that frames subsequent development. Because of the nature of development, there is a reciprocal relationship between meaning and experience, described by Arnold Sameroff in terms of a “transactional model” of development. Meaning is based on the history of experiences but meaning is also the core of what is internalized from any new experience and often drives what experiences are sought. An experience, in contrast to an event, is the personal meaning extracted by the individual. Over time individuals play an increasing role in what their experiences are, even though it is also the case that new experiences can change the organized network of meanings. This ongoing, dynamic interaction of meaning and experience is why early experience is so important. Those around the infant often largely determine first meanings. But soon, and increasingly with age, the child will actively seek and find meaning based on their individual history.

This cumulative, transactional nature of development also explains why therapeutic change can be difficult. Experiences are not just laid upon a person; they are in large part created by the person, as they have developed to that point. New relationships, including those with therapists, are seen through the lens of relationship history. Problems are seen through the lens of past experience confronting problems.

Mikel provides an example of the dynamic nature of development. In his early years Mikel experienced a very responsive environment, a kind we will describe more fully in the following chapters. Because of this responsiveness he developed positive expectations regarding himself, others, and relationships. Social encounters were seen as full of potential for enjoyment. Problems were seen as possibilities for mastery, either by himself or, if not, with aid he expected would be available from others. The meaning network he carried forward set him up well for the preschool and the early school years. His needs had been met before, so he expected the new adults in his world to be responsive as well. Partly because of these expectations, Mikel behaved in ways that in fact encouraged teachers and peers to like and support him, which led to deeper, positive social expectations. All was going well.

Then when he was 8-years-old, Mikel’s parents got divorced. This of course would be expected to impact Mikel’s meaning network, but by itself would not likely undermine the fundamental structure. The positive history would help him retain basic positive expectations about himself and others. However, this was an acrimonious divorce. Partly to punish his ex-wife, Mikel’s father moved away, taking Mikel’s older brother with him. This was enough to begin shaking Mikel’s foundation, leading to a complex picture. When we saw Mikel at age 10, he had become angry and “ready to fight someone.” Still, he had much of the self-confidence we had seen at earlier points, was doing well at school, and was popular with the other boys.

But things got worse. As he approached his teenage years, Mikel’s mother had become unduly reliant on him and he, we thought appropriately, had begun to push away. Then she suddenly died in a car accident. One can imagine the guilt he felt. On top of everything else this was too much. His view of the world and his place in it dramatically changed. He became depressed and uncommunicative and engaged in some antisocial behavior (although it is noteworthy that this never involved harming or threatening others). Other young people still liked him. They found that “underneath” he was a thoughtful and good person (see Chapter 8). But, from the outside, it seemed that the light had gone out, that he lost his belief in himself and his optimism about the future. Of great clinical significance he said in an interview at age 19 that the death of his mother only bothered him briefly, perhaps a matter of weeks. He could not accept how profoundly meaningful this loss was for him. We found this distancing from his feelings troubling but recognized that it might have been a necessary adaptation at this time to keep some of his historical meaning system intact.

Then, in his twenties, the situation improved. Mikel married a very supportive woman who, while complaining about his emotional guardedness, recognized a good heart. When interviewed at age 26, Mikel was much more open regarding his feelings about the losses he had experienced. When his son was born, he became a devoted and warm father, one of the best we observed. This and many cases we studied revealed the back and forth process between meaning and experience over time. We often saw that those with solid beginnings were able to capitalize on new opportunities – to reconnect with meanings from the past (see Chapter 11). This was certainly true for Mikel.

Systematic research has amply demonstrated these same transactional processes. Some of the most comprehensive work has been done by Grazyna Kochanska and her colleagues at the University of Iowa (e.g., Kochanska et al., Reference Kochanska, Boldt and Goffin2019). Measures in her early studies included toddler difficult temperament (including anger and other negative emotional reactions), parental coercive discipline, and later child noncompliance and other problems. She found, as others had before, that negative temperament predicted mother coercive behavior which in turn predicted poor child outcomes. The simple conclusion would be that difficult temperament causes harsh parenting and later problems. But she did not stop there. She showed that such a link was only true when there was an earlier history of infant–parent relationship problems; namely, an insecure attachment (see Chapter 4). When there was a secure attachment history, a difficult toddler temperament led to neither parental harsh discipline nor to later child problems. Her most recent work utilized measures of parent and child representation to explain these findings. What does it mean to a parent, for example, when a toddler behaves in a negative manner? How do they see this behavior? It seems that those parents whose infants have insecure attachments with them are “primed” to see even mild negativity as challenging and to react more negatively to it; that is, it means something more negative to them. Likewise, children with histories of insecure attachment expect their parents to react in negative ways and are therefore ready to escalate their negative behavior. Children with secure histories tend not to make such interpretations.

Another illustration of the transactional nature of development comes from the work of Michael MacKenzie and Susan McDonough (Reference MacKenzie, McDonough and Sameroff2009). They followed the development of a large number of children in the first 30 months of life. They had measures on both infants and their mothers. There were interview measures with the mothers, similar to those of Kochanska, and they measured the amount of crying and fussiness of the infants at ages 7- and 15-months. Then they measured broader aspects of toddler temperament and problem behavior at age 30 months. The results again demonstrated the importance of a longitudinal data base and a transactional view of development, because only the later measure of fussiness at age 15 months predicted 30-month behavior problems. If this had been the only information in the study one might have thought that inborn temperamental differences cause behavior problems. But, as we are seeing, development is more complex than this. The amount of crying at 7 months did not predict later behavior problems or even crying at 15 months. What did predict crying at 15 months and later problems was how the parents experienced the crying of the younger infants; that is how much the crying bothered them, what it meant to them. This had no relation to the actual amount of crying. It was related to a representational measure of the mothers that captured their expectations of themselves in close relationships. This finding is consistent with other work that showed what expecting mothers expected the temperament of their infants to be in fact predicted later “temperament” (Vaughn & Bost, Reference Vaughn, Bost, Cassidy and Shaver1999).

To summarize: The meaning that the parent brings forward from an integration of their own histories of experiences colors their reaction to their young infants crying. These parental reactions – what these infants experience from their parents when they cry – impact later infant behavior. Those infants, whose parents were most bothered by whatever degree of fussing the babies in fact did, cried more later and became more difficult toddlers. This is again the power of meaning, and in particular how meaning systems adults bring forward to their parenting provide the foundation for beginning meaning networks of the child.

The Social Embeddedness of Meaning

Humans are thoroughly social creatures. Meaning is created in social groups, from dyads to families to communities to society as a whole. As evolution scholar David Sloan Wilson (Reference Wilson2019) states in his book, This View of Life, “individuals are products of their social interactions.” What are often thought of as individual traits, such as our statures, our physical health, and our personalities, are “the result of social processes that stretch all the way back to when our distant ancestors were born if we take all evolutionary processes into account” (p. 146). We literally become ourselves through others (Vygotsky, Reference Vygotsky1978). It is in a social setting that one can work toward deeper and fuller understanding. We really can’t write our own story alone. We need others to listen, ask questions, and give feedback. That is how we grow.

Social context includes both the general motivation for connection built into our species, as well as processes that develop in the early months that lead to specific attachments. Beyond revealing the role of engagement and the integrated nature of meaning, studies of joy and fear in infancy reveal the incredible power of the social context in determining what events mean. Consider the following example: Someone puts on a colorful human-looking mask and slowly approaches within a few feet of a 10-month-old infant. What will the reaction be? Remarkably, the reaction can be anything from stark fear to joyous laughter. It completely depends on how this is done. If the infant gets to watch his or her parent put on the mask, and this takes place in the child’s home, smiling and laughter are by far the most common reaction. If an unfamiliar person dons the mask in an unfamiliar environment, wariness and fear are predominant and virtually certain if an attachment figure is not present.

It is even more complex than this. If the parent puts on the mask first, the infant is subsequently less wary when the stranger does it (and even may smile in the home). In contrast, if the stranger does it first, then parent, the child is less positive toward the parent (and even likely to be wary in the laboratory). Infants are less wary of the masked stranger if they are sitting on the parent’s lap, rather than when he or she is in plain view but a few feet away. Clearly, the meaning of this event is not in the mask but is a product of the infant’s context-based evaluation of the event. This is a potent situation, involving transformation of familiar and unfamiliar faces. It will engage all infants at this age. But the masked face has different meaning depending on who puts it on, where they put it on, and who puts it on first. When the infant feels secure, this level of arousal is pleasurable; when not feeling secure, it is distressing. Meaning does not lie simply in the objective qualities of an external stimulus or event, or even the amount of excitation it arouses, but in how it is appraised by the infant. This evaluation is largely a product of the social context.

This sensitivity to such aspects of context is itself a developmental outcome. Five-month-olds show none of this range of reactions. Regardless of who puts on the mask, or where it is done, they generally just look at it attentively; then they try to reach and grab it. It is pretty much like they no longer know (or care) who is behind the mask. But well before the end of the first year, all infants show this sensitivity to social context. Likewise, infants in the first few months of life rarely show wariness regarding strangers, but many do at some point in the second half-year. A 5-month-old may, after scrutinizing an unfamiliar face for some time, pucker and begin to cry. In contrast, if a stranger approaches a 10-month old in the laboratory, many are rather quickly wary. Moreover, if the stranger leaves and comes in a second time, these older babies immediately have a negative reaction, even before the approach. The situation has changed from not-knowing-if-I-like-this, to I-know-what-this-is-and-I-don’t-like-it. The situation has quite specific meaning.

These observations have profound implications. By the end of the first year, the emotional experiences of infants – the meanings of events encountered – are heavily influenced by the surrounding environment, especially social relationships. In many ways, infants are more dependent on external supports than we are as adults. This is because they have less cumulative experience, fewer cognitive capacities, and very limited capacities to fend for themselves. Whether something is threatening, benign, or delightful depends on how comfortable the infant feels in the situation. And it is clear that the dominant source of this comfort is the presence and behavior of caregivers.

The critical role of caregivers in meaning making was amply demonstrated in past studies of what was referred to as “social referencing.” In the second year of life, toddlers often look to parents for cues about how to interpret situations. The caregiver’s facial expression and voice tone can be used as a guide as to whether something is dangerous or benign, especially in situations that are ambiguous. In one telling study, 15-month-olds were presented with toys that were pleasant, frightening, or ambiguous while in the presence of their mothers (Gunnar & Stone, Reference Gunnar and Stone1984). The mothers were instructed to present a smiling face or a neutral expression in each case. It turned out that this expression did not matter in the case of the pleasant toy or the frightening toy. The toddlers readily grasp the meaning of these, without recourse to maternal cues. They engaged the cuddly toy and shrank back from the frightening toy. It was in the ambiguous situation that they looked to the mother. Those whose mothers were smiling and nodding much more readily engaged and played with the ambiguous toy. This toy meant something different to them than it did to the toddlers whose mothers showed a neutral expression. It remained ambiguous. Other studies showed that a frightened face on the mother inhibited toddler behavior.

Social context, of course, also includes the infant’s history, both recent and distant. Infants recently receiving shots at a doctor’s office may be more wary in a research lab, even before any procedure. Beyond such particular experiences, the cumulative history of interaction with caregivers plays a critical role. When caregivers are reliable and responsive to infant signals, infants learn over time to have confidence in caregiver availability. They are more readily reassured by the caregiver’s presence. When some threat arises, often a look and reassuring nod by the caregiver is all that is needed to change the meaning of the event. More extreme threat, of course, requires physical contact, but such contact is readily reassuring if there is a history of responsive care. What is perceived as threatening, and the degree of threat experienced are in a substantial way influenced by the interactive history between infants and caregivers.

For many infants, by the end of the first year, the presence of the attachment figure means that most situations are safe. Moreover, infants who have experienced reliable responsiveness to their signals of need – those we refer to as secure in their attachment – have a different sense of themselves and their relationship. They know that, if threatened, they can effectively take action and that they can count on the attachment figure to respond (see Chapter 4). This is the core of the network of interpersonal relational meanings that will develop in the following years. To draw upon an idea proposed by Iris Murdoch (Reference Murdoch1978), we in fact learn to love by being loved.

Acknowledging Culture

This book is focused on the development of individual meaning systems in relationships, primarily within Western, industrialized culture. The impact of culture is outside of its purview. Still, it must be noted that culture has a huge impact on the meaning systems of human groups. Culture, including variations in religion, has a major impact on how humans prioritize activities and events, how they perceive problems and formulate solutions. Culture at all levels, from family to society, is the basis for shared, abstract meanings.

Culture is part of individual inheritance. In modern evolutionary views of the development of the person, it is now well known that information in genes that is passed from parents to children is only one part of the story. It is indeed complicated. Even the impact of genes is impacted by epigenetic factors, including the way in which experience influences gene expression. Beyond all of this, however, more than the human organism has evolved. As explained by David Sloan Wilson (Reference Wilson2019), evolution works at multiple levels, from individuals to groups to human culture itself. There is intergenerational transmission of genetic material and intergenerational transmission of cultural practices. In particular, Wilson states that “meaning systems” are the carriers of culture from one generation to the next.

A classic book by Michael Cole and colleagues (Reference Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp1971), titled The Cultural Context of Learning and Thinking, illustrates the huge impact of culture on meaning, as well as providing a warning against making value judgments regarding unfamiliar cultures. When young children and adults (Ivy League college students) in the United States were compared in their manner of classifying objects, it was noted that the college students grouped the objects categorically (for example, all of the foods in one category, all the utensils in another), whereas the young children grouped them “functionally”; that is, put a spoon, a bowl, and a fruit together, because you would eat the fruit with the spoon. Because tribal members in a non-industrialized community sorted the way the children did, some had argued that their thinking was therefore “primitive.” However, Cole and colleagues did something brilliant – they asked the tribal members why they grouped objects the way they did. The tribal members responded, “because that is the way a wise man would do it.” OK, so how then would a foolish man do it? They would group the objects by category. Of course they had the same cognitive equipment as the American college students. Their culture simply led them to prioritize some ways of approaching problems. Psychologists and anthropologists have provided many such examples.

Culture is unquestionably critical in shaping meaning systems of groups and subgroups of humans. A system of morality is created in culture. Consider the prioritizing of intent that arises in the moral judgments of elementary school children. Major developmental theories consider this a normative cognitive achievement. When, for example, middle class children in Western countries are asked whether it is worse to break one dish trying to retrieve a prohibited cookie from a shelf or six dishes trying to set a table as a nice surprise for your mother, they typically say the first is worse, because of the child’s intention. Children in a poor, rural Mexican village were found to say the latter is worse. This is not because of a limitation in cognitive development, but because of the meaning of these events in this cultural context. The loss of that many dishes in the context of poverty would mean great economic hardship. The premium on caring for these precious possessions is far greater.

Culturally based prioritization can also appear in cross-cultural studies of self-development. Individuals in all cultural groups of course have all of the same emotional capacities and the common abilities for self-awareness, reflections on the self, and what can be called self-esteem. But what is given priority in self-evaluations may vary, often in terms of a dimension of independence–interdependence. In some cultures individual achievement and success have greater priority, while in others service to others plays a greater role in self-esteem (Marcus & Kitayama, Reference Markus and Kitayama2010).

Things reported in this book would be at times expected to operate somewhat differently in different cultural contexts, and this needs to be acknowledged. At the same time, studies have shown that many of the findings are robust across cultural groups (Gojman-de-Millan et al., Reference Gojman-de-Millan, Herreman and Sroufe2017).

The Place of Meaning

The concept of meaning is absolutely critical for our understanding of individual development. A focus on meaning sheds light on why various emotions emerge when they do and why they are expressed when they are; how experiences at one age provide the foundation for the child’s adaptation at the next; how early primary relationships influence development as they do; why maladaptive behavior is perpetuated; and what happens to earlier experience following developmental change. Meaning allows researchers to define the essential core of child functioning at each age. Therefore, it guides assessment strategies and informs the construction of measures. Without the focus on meaning, the task of defining continuity in individual development floundered. With a focus on meaning, powerful demonstrations became possible, as will be documented in subsequent chapters.

Understanding the development of meaning and meaning making also helps us understand variations in adult functioning and sheds light on many important clinical phenomena. Thus, it is a key in explaining why some individuals struggle with the basic nature of reality, why others so chronically feel threatened in objectively safe circumstances, why early experience is so powerful in shaping personality, why therapeutic change can be so difficult, how change is nonetheless accomplished, and why some are more resilient than others.

These are all matters we will consider in this book. From cradle to grave, making meaning is a prime human motive. In the following pages we will share what is being discovered about the role of meaning in the developmental process, age by age. We begin in infancy.

The capacities to find and make meaning develop, just as do the human fetus, the brain, and everything else in nature. Because a core principle of development is that it is “cumulative,” building upon itself, there is a special place for the very earliest phases of life. Experiences in the early months and years of life are the cradle of meaning. To understand how the capacity to make meaning unfolds and how we each come to have the organizations of meaning we have, it is helpful to understand more about the nature of development itself.

René Spitz had a clear grasp of the nature of development, including the development of meaning. Spitz is best known for calling attention to the devastating effects of institutional rearing; in particular the lack of specific, consistently available, caregiving figures. This was in 1950, decades before the critical importance of specific attachment figures was rediscovered in the Romanian orphan studies at the turn of the century. Neither Spitz’s concern about institutionalized infants nor his insights concerning development were widely accepted in his day, but they are now, although rarely with an acknowledgment of his role.

The research of Spitz and his colleagues was focused on early development, most heavily on the first 3 months of life. It is in this period, he argued, that the first capacities for meaning making emerged, and they emerged from a period in which there was no true meaning. Before there was meaning, however, there were developmental precursors or “prototypes” which were the foundation for meaning making. A major premise of development is that you can’t get something from nothing. Positing that the capacity to find meaning is “simply there” at the beginning is no solution at all. Spitz’s idea of developmental prototypes is one path forward.

The development of the meaning-based smile in the early months provides an excellent example of how this works. Newborn infants smile. However, this is not a social behavior and it is not based on meaning. It is a reflex built into the physiology of the newborn. It happens only when they are asleep or drowsy. It is based on a fluctuation of arousal around some low set point. As the infant drifts off to sleep or moves from sleep toward wakefulness, the arousal level crosses a threshold and the smile reflex occurs. You can create these smiles by gently shaking a sleeping baby or by shaking a rattle while the baby sleeps. This brings them toward wakefulness and as they drift back down several of these smiles may occur. These smiles occur even in utero, because they are of brain stem origin. Premature infants exhibit more of these smiles than full-term infants, so it cannot mean the same thing as later smiles. It cannot be that premature babies find more meaning than full-term babies. As the cortex matures, these reflexive smiles steadily decline in all infants over the first 3 months, as do many other newborn reflexes. Because of all of this, it is clear that newborn smiles cannot be based on meaning. It is also worth noting that these smiles do not have all the features of later social smiles. They involve only the twisting up of the lips, not the mouth opening and crinkling of the eyes of full smiles.

What are called “social smiles” or “exogenous smiles” (that is, in response to the outside world) emerge in a fleeting way at 3 or 4 weeks of age and become increasingly prominent in the first 3 months. This increase is an exact mirror image of the decline in reflexive smiles, denoting a brain maturation process. These emerging smiles also then take the form of mature smiles involving mouth and eyes. Meaning is involved in these smiles. Recall the example of the infant smiling at the toy clown following several presentations that we discussed in Chapter 2. That was a smile based on meaning because if we switch objects there is no smile. The babies smile because, as they engage and study the clown repeatedly, it is their own efforts that lead to recognition and the smile. Eight to 10 weeks is the same age that infants rather universally smile at human faces. They do this because with some effort they can recognize the face as something familiar. It is indeed meaningful. For this reason it is called a “social smile,” although it is shown in many nonsocial situations.

The question now before us is where did this smile based on meaning come from? How did the infant get there? One might suggest that smiles were present all along – that the slight smiles of the newborn simply got “bigger” over time. But this cannot be true. By 10 weeks, infants no longer smile when they are asleep. The newborn smile disappears. Much research shows that newborn sleep smiles originate in the brain stem, whereas social smiles require involvement of the cortex. (Even the rare infants born without a cortex exhibit the newborn smile, but never the later social smile.) The social smile is not simply a big newborn smile; yet Spitz argued that it does derive from the newborn smile. The newborn smile is the developmental prototype – the precursor – for the social smile. It sets a basic physiological pattern from which, however qualitatively different, the social smile emerges. There is the same arousal fluctuation, though in the social smile it is created by the infant’s cognitive engagement and processing of an external event. It is a psycho-physiological response, not merely a physiological one. There is meaning and emotion as we define it; yet the basic earlier patterning is maintained.

There are many examples of such developmental prototypes in early development. As just one more, when young infants get excited, they do a kind of rhythmic frog kicking with their legs. Every parent has seen this. This is long before infants can walk, and it is another behavior that drops out over time. But careful study by Esther Thelen (Reference Thelen, Gunnar and Thelen1989) showed that such movements are actually preparation for later crawling and walking, because the exercising and coordination of muscles involved is the pattern that will be drawn upon later, even though such mobility is qualitatively different from early infant kicking.

Progressive movement toward more complex organization and deeper meaning always characterizes development. There is a particular way that development unfolds, centered on qualitative change and reorganization. We are interested in the developmental prototype concept because we believe it applies equally to all social and emotional aspects of the developing person – to how each of us acquired the networks and organization of meaning we have. The nature of the meanings acquired in our earliest relationships provide the pattern for our organization of meaning in childhood, and all of this together shapes our world views in adulthood.

How Meaning Is Created

Meaning is an active process – a creation. The ability to make meaning is itself the outcome of development. Infants are not born making meaning; rather the capacity emerges in the early months of life, largely promoted by social relationships.

There are several reasons for saying that personal meaning does not exist in the newborn period. It is a few months before the frontal cortex and deeper emotional centers in the brain are interconnected (see Chapter 13). Such connections are central for experiences we would define in terms of meaning. Moreover, newborn capacities for memory are quite limited. A certain kind of memory, called procedural memory, develops quickly (that is, recognition and internalization of practiced routines) but memory for events begins to emerge in the second half year and is not well developed until much later.

In contrast to young infants, caregivers have an extensive network of established meanings, based on an entire history of experiences from their own earliest years up to the present. They bring this network of meanings to their interactions with infants, often without even being aware that they are doing so. At times this can lead to failures to understand the importance of the infant’s behavior or distortions in what a particular behavior means. Of course, it is also history that prepares many caregivers to respond effectively to infant signals. This “asymmetry” in meaning systems, with the infant network of meanings unformed, is why developmental psychologists see parenting and early experience as so important. It is the meaning system of the parents that structures the first meanings of infants and toddlers through their interactions. The baby learns that the world is predictable, or not.

Prototypes for Meaning

Attentive caregivers respond to the reflexes and other automatic behaviors of infants in the first weeks, treating them as “signals” of needs and desires long before the infant has intentional thought. Across the early weeks, these responses are honed and improved, as caregivers learn to “read” their particular infants. Thereby, they help the infants establish basic patterns of state and arousal regulation. These patterns are early prototypes for meaning making.

The prototypes for meaning making are greatly elaborated in the second half year. While orchestration is still in the hands of caregivers, they now can respond to the more deliberate signals of the infant; that is, to their intentional behavior. The sense that one’s purposeful intentions will be responded to positively is a core foundation for basic meanings regarding the emergent self. Across development what will pull for engagement and the nature of the connections that can be made by the child will change dramatically. Meaning making capacities and the network of meanings will greatly expand. But basic prototypes for meaning are often conserved and carried forward from infancy. They provide a core around which the subsequent networks of meaning may be constructed.

Development is very rapid in infancy and throughout the early years of life. And, in the early years especially, this development is scaffolded by the child’s primary social relationships. The child’s behavior, feelings, and perceptions are centered around these relationships. In addition to physiological maturation of the child, it is these relationships that prompt the rapid growth.

Experiences during this period don’t merely set the stage for later meaning making; very new kinds of experiences are now possible and are internalized in a new way. By the end of the first year, the child can recognize the parent as a haven of safety when they are frightened, and thereby acquire the meaning that they are safe, that social relationships are supportive, and that they are effective in coping with fear. Whether angry, afraid, or just generally distressed, they can begin to learn that re-establishing equilibrium is possible. Other infants, of course, can routinely have very different experiences that lead to different foundational beliefs, depending on the quality of the attachment relationship that is being formed. It is to these vital attachment relationships that we turn next.

Before the advent of attachment theory, developmental psychology had been in a rather sterile period. All behavior was thought to be the result of simple associative learning or else built up bit by bit through reinforcement of discrete actions. It had even been argued that there was no such thing as personality because people behaved in different ways in different situations (due to varying situational cues and reinforcement contingencies) – so no consistency, no personality. The child’s tie to the mother was explained as being due to her association with feeding. And individual “attachment” behaviors (smiling, vocalizing, proximity seeking) were viewed as simply gradually built up through reinforcement by parents. Emotions were explained similarly. If children are frequently angry, then this anger must have been rewarded. There was really no search for the coherent, feeling, thinking person. Such a search was deemed fruitless. Meaning had no place.

There is no need for us to consider extensively the illogic and many flaws in these historical positions. Of course people behave differently in different situations. To behave the same way in all situations would be incoherent. And because individuals are coherent there is individual patterning to these variations across situations, as Will Fleeson (Reference Fleeson2001) has shown. As we will discuss in later chapters, one of the key markers of emotional health is the ability to flexibly adjust behavior to the demands and opportunities presented by different situations.

Simple reinforcement is not an adequate account of behavior, though it is the way many specific actions are learned and how, once learned, many specific behaviors are maintained. Reinforcement is powerful, but it does not account for development. Harlow’s famous studies with surrogate-raised rhesus monkeys showed that these infants preferred a cloth “mother” they could hug rather than the wire “mother” that fed them. This preference is not well explained by reinforcement. Further, many studies showed that emotions emerge and are expressed without any major role for reinforcement. As presented in Chapter 2, young infants smiled at the toy clown simply after being exposed to it several times, and then stopped smiling after a few more exposures. This is impossible to explain by reinforcement. It is explained because this event acquired meaning through the infant’s effort to make sense of it.

Mid-twentieth century paradigms were inadequate for understanding how and why individuals develop the worldviews they do; how a personal network of meanings is formed. Developmental psychology needed a radically different approach. Attachment theory was just that. It was a developmental theory rooted in biology, in which meaning had a central place. Likewise, the methods and research carried out to implement this theory also had meaning at their core.

In this new perspective, attachment is a unique biological system, independent of feeding. As psychoanalyst and scholar John Bowlby pointed out when he formulated attachment theory, humans are born extraordinarily vulnerable and dependent, and they require a long period to mature. They cannot protect themselves. So, in addition to being fed, they urgently need to be protected. The attachment system evolved to solve this problem. Infants are disposed to attract caregiver attention, and later to seek proximity, especially when alarmed. At the same time caregivers are disposed to respond to and protect infants. Without such a system human infants could not survive. Parents do not need to reinforce proximity; this tendency is built into the infant, just as attraction to infants is built into parents. If someone is there to be with the infant in an ongoing way, the infant will become attached to that person, even if they are physically mistreated. It is very difficult to explain the attachments of abused children using reinforcement theory. But it is no problem from within the framework of attachment theory. It is a biological imperative. Infants have no choice but to be attached to the individuals who care for them.

This is a powerful biological system. It is why even as adults we at times feel apprehensive when alone. We are more at ease when connected with others. For infants and young children, separation from attachment figures is inherently anxiety provoking, especially in unfamiliar surroundings. These are “natural cues for danger.” This is why separating young immigrant children from their parents at the United States–Mexico border, as was done in 2018, was so egregious and immoral. The situation of these children could not have been more unfamiliar. Such separations were certain to be traumatic, with lasting impacts quite possible.

Attachment as a Relationship Concept

In addition to being a concept rooted in biology, attachment is also inherently a relationship concept. It is about a specific emotional connection between the infant and a particular caregiver. In fact, Bowlby defined attachment as the emotional bond between infant and caregiver. In contrast to the earlier concept of dependency, attachment is not a trait of the infant. Attachments with different parents may be qualitatively distinctive, each being based on the nature of the interactive history. The infant may in some cases even be securely attached with one but anxiously attached to the other. And, of course, primary attachments may be with adoptive parents, grandparents, or others who rear the child. In any case it is based on the building of a relationship over time.

The entire system is governed by an integration of emotion and cognition. Once an attachment relationship has formed, feelings of distress will prompt the infant to seek contact with the attachment figure. Absence of such reactions is an aberration in the developing system.

The attachment relationship is a deeply meaningful relationship. Consider a video of 12-month-old Tina in our observation room, as part of the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation. She is shown on the floor playing with an array of toys, while her mother sits in a chair across the room. Tina picks up several toys, examining them closely, one by one. She next picks up a toy elephant and looks at it intently. Then her eyes widen and a look of wonder and joy spreads across her face. Everyone viewing this video knows exactly what will happen next. She turns and shows the toy to her mother! This pattern of behavior makes visible the intangible – the emotional connection that is the attachment relationship. She remembers and knows full well that her mother is there, and she expects her mother to respond. Her mother nods and smiles back. It is remarkable how automatically the baby shares her joy. This reaction is based upon a history of emotional sharing. Later in this observational session, Tina is distressed following a brief separation. When her mother returns, Tina immediately crawls to her, reaches to be picked up, and plasters her body against her mother. She settles completely and then returns her attention to the room. She knows exactly where her security lies. It is obvious to all observers that this is a special, vital relationship.

Like all relationships, the attachment relationship develops over time. In the early months, both attention and smiles from infants can be elicited from a wide variety of persons. Then infants become more discriminating, with smiles readily elicited by familiar persons and more sober (and perhaps even wary) reactions to unfamiliar persons. Finally, in the second half-year there is an elaborated system of emotions, the concept of person permanence, and the capacity to organize behavior around specific persons. The specific attachment emerges. This is true for all cognitively typical infants in all cultures. Variations in the quality of this relationship depend on the interactive history with the particular caregiver, but all infants become attached to persons who care for them through this process.

Learning is important in this position. But the learning that is emphasized is not the piecemeal learning of specific behaviors; rather, it is learning to organize a diverse array of possible behaviors around the caregiver so as to promote the infant’s wellbeing. It is an experiential, procedural learning about relationships. When young infants are picked up and given care when they cry, they do not learn to cry more. They learn that their signals will receive a response. By the end of the first year, when they have other ways to signal needs, they in fact may cry less than infants whose early cries were not answered. They have not learned to be “crybabies”; they have learned that their caregivers will respond, that they are potent, and that relationships have a reciprocating nature.

Most infants are “secure” in their attachments. This does not mean that they are tightly attached. All infants raised by someone have durable attachments. It means that these infants are secure in the sense that they are confident in the reliability and responsiveness of the caregiver. They know their caregiver is there for them, a consistent source of reassurance and comforting. It also means that the relationship is effective. One can see all of this readily in the infant’s behavior. In play, the infant may reach a toy back over the shoulder without even turning to look that the parent will take it. When distressed, the infant immediately seeks out the parent. The infant’s confidence allows it to explore away from the caregiver in circumstances of low stress and to be quickly settled and reassured when distressed (so they can return again to exploration). Such a balance between attachment and exploration promotes the development of competence in the world.

Some infants have “anxious” attachments with their caregivers. This means that these infants are not confident regarding the parent’s responsiveness to their signals. If parents have been inconsistent or haphazard in care provided, the infant becomes uncertain that the parent will respond should a need arise. The infant must then hover near them and seek reassurance at the slightest provocation. They may well have difficulty truly settling. They often struggle against contact even when they want it. This is referred to as the “resistant” pattern of attachment, and it rather obviously compromises exploration.

Alternatively, the parent may have been chronically emotionally cold, or chronically rebuffed the infant’s bids for close contact, so that the infant learns to stifle attachment needs whenever possible. Beyond being doubtful about parent response, these infants in fact expect that they will not respond, especially when tender needs are aroused. Thus, they may fail to go to the parent when stressed. This is the “avoidant” pattern of attachment and compromises exploration in a different way, because the infant has difficulty using the parent as a resource when distressed.

Finally, as described by Mary Main and Erik Hesse, some parents pose an even greater challenge to their infants, because they enter into dissociative states and/or are otherwise directly frightening to their infants. This creates an irresolvable paradox. All human infants are motivated to flee from the source of fear, but, in addition, they are motivated to flee to the attachment figure for protection. It is impossible for infants to flee from the source of fear and to the parent when they are one and the same. This leads to what is called “disorganized” attachment, a pattern that will be discussed fully in later chapters.

Given this perspective on the formation of attachment, there are two central claims made by attachment theory: (1) That patterns of interaction between infant and caregiver become internalized and organized into various patterns of attachment; and (2) these variations in attachment provide the foundation for later personality; that is, the organized meaning system of the individual. Both of these claims have been amply supported by research. As will be discussed next, the concept of meaning is central to the entire process, from defining crucial features of infant–parent interaction, to defining features of attachment and assessing them, and to selecting later outcomes for confirmation of the theory.

The Reality and Power of Relationships

A major discovery in the physical world was that the behavior of molecules is not simply determined by the constituent atoms, but rather by the relationships among the atoms as manifest in their particular geometry. Two molecules with the same atoms could have different qualities. Such findings moved physics beyond a purely atomistic view of the world toward a view emphasizing process. In the same way, it is not particular behaviors of the caregiver that lead to a secure attachment but the way the behavior is fitted to the needs, mood, and behavior of the infant. And it is not the set of behaviors manifest by infants that reveals the quality of the attachment, but the way the infant behavior is organized around the caregiver. It is the relationships we are studying, not merely the individuals.

The power of this relationship perspective can be shown by demonstrating the stability of attachment relationships between 12 and 18 months (Waters, Reference Waters1978). This stability in the quality of the relationship occurred despite the fact that the behavioral repertoire of infants changes dramatically during this period and behavior is expressed quite differently. It is the core meanings of the relationship that are preserved. Infants that were confident in the relationship remain confident though they show this in different ways. The relationship and the meanings can change, of course. Our work showed that, when family stress declined, parents became more responsive and infants became more confident when they had anxious attachments before (Vaughn et al., Reference Vaughn, Waters, Egeland and Sroufe1979). (This is one reason we will point out the inadvisability of blaming parents for child problems at various places in this book. The context of parenting must be taken into account.)

As we will discuss more fully in subsequent chapters, it is also the quality of the relationship that predicts later child behavior, not specific behaviors of infants independent of context and meaning. Beyond the behavioral expressions of infant and parent, it is the organization and interplay of their joint behaviors that is most significant. Close relationships show a coherence that at times is even beyond the coherence of the participating individuals. From infant attachment assessments, which focus on how infants organize their behavior around caregivers, one can predict later parent behavior, as well as child behavior, and even behavior of parents with subsequent children and behavior of siblings. This is all because the relationship is being captured.

The main point is this: Before there is an organized personality, there is an organized caregiving network around the infant, with attachment figures as the center. It is this organization that is the prototype for what will become the self. This is despite the fact that these early relationship experiences lie outside of consciousness. None of us are able to consciously remember what we experienced in the first 2 years of our lives. It is not just that we are unable to report on our memories. They simply are not there in verbal or symbolic form, but only in the form of emotionally salient procedural memories.

It is not possible to recall any specific instances when you were an infant or young toddler of turning to your parent with apprehension and receiving a smile and nod of reassurance (or not); or of being frightened and seeking and finding contact and comforting or being turned away. It’s not possible to remember specific times when joy was shared or you encountered a blank face or even a disdainful look. But the repeating pattern of such events is internalized as a sequence of behavioral and emotional experiences, as a “script” for the self in relationships. This is the power of procedural memory even prior to well-developed, long-term event memory.

The lack of conscious memory certainly does not mean that what we experienced is of no consequence or left no legacy. As we will show in Chapter 10, one can predict how parents will treat their own toddlers based on assessments made when they themselves were 2-years-old, when verbal memory was quite limited. The case can even be made that preverbal experience in ways has more power than later experience. Being unable to consciously remember these experiences means that they cannot be examined or directly modified.

Because development is “cumulative,” always building on what was previously there, early experience has a special place in the formation of our inner worldviews. As we will discuss thoroughly in Parts III and IV, changes in world views can happen at any age. For example, in the Minnesota study, we found that when parents reported increases in social support some children who had been anxiously attached as infants were thriving in kindergarten. Nonetheless, certain basic expectations and “attitudes” begin to be laid down in the early years, and these impact how later experiences are engaged, interpreted, and reacted to. Moreover, early experiences exercise a “tuning” effect on the central nervous system itself, conditioning stress reactivity and basic capacities for regulation of arousal.

According to Bowlby, two of the major meanings that come out of infancy concern expectations regarding caregivers and expectations regarding self – two sides of the same coin. If my caregivers have been consistently responsive, I come to expect that they will be responsive. Since this is a core of my interpersonal experience, by generalization I will expect responsiveness from others. At the same time, since my caregivers have been responsive to my actions, I come to expect that my actions will be effective. This is the very foundation for a more general sense of efficacy or competence, a core meaning that begins to be established even in the first year of life. Since knowledge of caregiver responsiveness grants confidence to explore the environment, emerging competence is also reinforced by experiences of mastery in the object world.

We would add to Bowlby’s account that, in learning about self and other, the infant is also evolving a basic understanding about how relationships work. When one is in need the other responds, or, in contrast, when one is in need the other rejects or exploits vulnerability. Again, this is not at first a conscious knowing but a deep emotional knowing. The emotional knowing is the developmental prototype for the later cognitive/emotional knowing. It was this premise that allowed us to predict individual differences in empathy in later years. Through responsiveness to need, one does not learn only the role of the needy one but a pattern of relating.

Thus, among the early core meanings that infants in supportive relationships acquire are that there is predictability in the world, that others can be counted on, that I am able to draw upon others, and that relationships are valuable. When significant others respond accurately to the meanings of the infant’s intentions and behaviors, this affirms their sense of reality. It is nothing less than the foundation for a solid grasp of reality in later life.

For some infants, of course, experience teaches that the world is unpredictable or predictably rejecting; that others are inconsistently available or perhaps especially unavailable when my needs for tender care are acute; that my efforts to reach out will be frustrated; that I am unworthy of care; or that relationships are fraught with difficulty or even beyond me.

Moreover, for those who have experienced a chronically emotionally unavailable caregiver or who have been repeatedly rebuffed when seeking tender care, there is a tendency to cut themselves off from certain feelings or states, to not attend to them when they arise, and ultimately to even avoid things reminiscent of those states and circumstances that may arouse them. On the other hand, for those who experienced markedly inconsistent, haphazard care, they may be able to attend to states of anxiety, threat, and distress but be unable to reconcile or resolve them so that maturation is compromised. All of this is the legacy of early relationships.

The major developmental task for every child is to discover how the world works and how they are to interact with it; in other words, to develop their own personal sense of reality. In infancy, this centers on learning to trust in caregiver responsiveness and, reciprocally, to establish a core sense that they are worthy of care. In the toddler period this learning takes a notable leap forward, due to the toddler’s increased ability to author his or her own actions, their greater understanding of the intentions of others, and an awareness of conflict of others’ intentions with their own. To negotiate this period of expanding autonomy, the child is highly dependent on emotional support, limits, and guidance from parents to ensure continued feelings of safety.

There is no doubt that the toddler in the scenario above knew that his mother did not want him to go up the stairs. He tested out what would happen if he did it anyway. This common, everyday situation illustrates each of our four themes regarding meaning. First of all, no one has to train a 2-year-old to explore what will happen if they do something contrary. It is part of the inherent motive to seek meaning, though now at a level far beyond that of an infant. Likewise, seeking meaning remains an active process, but in a new way. After all, we call them “toddlers” because of their greater mobility. They don’t wait for experiences to come to them; they go and seek them.

Further, the transactional nature of development – the interplay between meaning and experience – is well revealed by the limit-seeking of the toddler. Depending on how consistent and reliable the caregiver has been historically, the toddler more or less quickly comes to believe that he or she will hold the line now; that is, what the limits provided by the caregiver mean depends on the history of meanings between the two of them. At the same time, caregivers that are clear and firm with toddlers (without being harsh) will actually deepen the trust that the child has in the relationship, either reinforcing or altering past meanings. Likewise, caregivers that are notably haphazard or inconsistent in setting limits may erode credibility that was already established, shaking the child’s confidence in the relationship. Such changes in experience can even alter the basic view of reality; that is how things are and my place in that. So past experience shapes what these current experiences mean to the child, while the current experiences mutually impact the developing network of meanings.

Finally, the most important meanings during this and every period are social in nature. The interactions between toddler and caregivers provide the arenas where the most salient meanings occur. The child in our scenario is seeking and incorporating meanings of profound importance.

The toddler period is a critical developmental transition, and this is one reason it is so important for the growth of personal meaning. This is the age when clear signs of self-awareness are apparent. For example, when shown their image in a mirror after someone has surreptitiously rubbed rouge on their nose, 10-month-old infants will simply look, or they might reach for the image in the mirror; toddlers will reach for the nose on their face! They know that it is “me” in the mirror. Such nascent self-awareness opens the door to the first meanings of what it means to be you. Can I actively engage the world while still feeling safe? Can I stay regulated or regain regulation following disruption? Can I count on support?

In addition, 2- and 3-year-olds also have a much greater understanding of intent. They know when they want something. They can also understand what you want. If an experimenter pretends to be reaching for something just out of reach, the toddler will push it toward them if they can. This is a virtually automatic reaction, so deeply ingrained is the human motivation for connection. This understanding of one’s own intentions and the intentions of others profoundly changes relationships. As in our opening example, the toddler understands that his or her own goals may be counter to those of the parent. Thus, they can deliberately test out the consequences of contrary behavior.

This is a vulnerable period for the emerging self because the child has limited capacities for distinguishing parental responses to inappropriate behavior from general parental disapproval. This is the critical distinction between shame and guilt. With guilt, entailing a recognition of behavior that is violating a standard, there is a redress, including atoning for and changing the behavior. Guilt offers a way back. Four-year-old children can understand this, but toddlers cannot. When it is not the behavior but you that are bad, there is no way back; the situation is hopeless. When limits are capricious or harsh, the child can feel shameful and unworthy. This is the only conclusion the young child can reach. When expressions of feelings themselves are punished, the child can learn that feelings are bad and that to have them is to be bad.

Appropriate limits and guidelines, on the other hand, are reassuring to the child. Likewise, when 3-year-olds purposefully perturb the relationship and subsequently get it back in harmony, either through their own or parent initiative, such a process helps children establish what Louis Sander (Reference Sander and Anthony1975) called “relationship constancy”; that is, the understanding that relationships are durable and can withstand conflict and disruption. This is a critical meaning to take forward. Children’s experiences regarding such disruption and repair are, of course, quite variable (see, for example, Gianino & Tronick, Reference Gianino, Tronick, Field, McCabe and Schneiderman1988).

Guided Self-regulation

One of the most crucial tasks for toddlers is to acquire some sense of control over feelings and actions. Without this they would simply be buffeted about by their increasingly active engagements and connections with the surround. While they cannot in fact generate all the actual control needed, they can have the sense of control when properly supported by caregivers. Such a sense of control will be severely compromised when parents themselves are out of control or tease, punish, or otherwise stimulate a child on the edge of losing control.

The toddler period is a bridge between rather complete parental regulation and later self-regulation. During the early months of infancy, regulation is largely in the hands of the caregivers. Young infants have important reflexes (for example, crying when aroused and recoiling from intense stimuli). But they cannot deliberately, explicitly signal their needs. Therefore, parents must interpret behaviors accurately (does that cry mean hunger or a need to be held? Does that turn to the side mean he needs a break?). By responding sensitively and effectively, a degree of emotion regulation can be achieved. As we saw in Chapter 3, in the second 6 months infants have more capacity to intentionally signal their needs (reaching to be picked up, pushing unwanted food away). Still, while regulation is at that point cooperative, parents continue to play the major role, granting meaning to the infant’s gestures by responding to them.

It is in the toddler period that children show the first signs of self-regulation. They have a greater capacity to stay organized in the face of challenge and to persist despite difficulties. Even so, this goes forward best with active support and guidance from caregivers. So crucial is this “scaffolding” role of the parent that this period can be referred to as the period of “guided self-regulation.” The paradox is that only within a supportive framework can the toddler be self-regulated. Yet this guided regulation is the crucial training – the prototype – that allows more genuine self-regulation to unfold. Some children emerge from this period believing they can regulate themselves, while others do not, even though in reality none do it alone. Future challenges, stressful experiences, and difficulties will mean something very different to children with different experiences as toddlers. A different reality is being created.

We know all of this from our longitudinal studies of parents and children. We have investigated both the origins of guided self-regulation and its later consequences. In two of our studies we viewed toddlers and their parents in a toy clean-up situation, to be discussed subsequently, and in tool problem situations of increasing challenge. The first tool problem was easy. There was a toy in a slot between two boards. It was a simple matter to poke out the toy with a stick that was provided. Most 2-year-olds solved it easily without help. Two problems were of intermediate difficulty. Both of these also involving getting toys with sticks, one for example requiring that two sticks be put together end-to-end to make a stick sufficiently long to reach a toy that was inside a tube. The final problem was quite difficult and beyond the ability of any 2-year-old to solve without help. Candy was in the bottom of a large, enclosed Plexiglas box in a cup attached to the end of a long board. There was a hole in the top of the box but the child’s arm was too short to reach the candy. To solve the problem the child had to push down on the end of the board to make the candy come up through the hole. Alas, the end of this board was too far away for the child to reach the candy from there. The solution was to weight down the board with a wooden block, found on top of the box, and then go get the candy. This problem has too many steps, and the solution is too far removed from the goal to be understood by the toddler.

At some point in the series of problems, and certainly by this last problem, frustration is certain to build. The candy is tantalizingly just out of reach, and effort after effort will fail. But the child’s parent is right there, directed to let the child try first “then give any help she (or he) needs.” There is great variety in how this unfolds. Some children, of course, eagerly approach the problem and do try hard to solve it. It turns out that such enthusiasm and persistence are predicted by a history of responsive care. In responding to signals of the infant, infants are given the expectation that their efforts will bear fruit. Thus, they are persistent as toddlers. At the same time, sensitive parents see when the child is becoming too taxed or discouraged, and they take action. They perhaps draw closer (physically and emotionally) and provide a clue that settles and re-engages the child. For example, they may first direct the child to the end of the board that must be pushed down. Later they may say, “Maybe this block can help you.” The key is to give just the clues and support needed to keep the child reasonably settled and on task without undercutting the child’s own efforts. This maximizes the child’s feelings of mastery. Also, responsive parents anticipate serious frustration, stepping in before the child’s organization breaks down, because after that point it is very difficult for toddlers to take direction. Thus, sensitive parents take direct action when more subtle help isn’t enough. When well-orchestrated, children not only deepen confidence in the parent’s availability, they have an experience of solving the problem and of regulating themselves.

Time and again we observed toddlers working hard on the problems, trying one thing, then another, starting to be discouraged or frustrated, receiving help to stay with the task, and renewing their efforts. When they finally retrieved the candy they exclaimed with exuberance, “I take it out!” or “I did it.” And truly in their inner experience they did do it. This is what dealing with this challenge meant to them. This is how they see themselves acting in the world. When occurring time and again, what a boost such experiences give to the child’s belief that they are effective and that they can maintain control of themselves, all the while, as Kierkegaard said, not really knowing how dependent they had been on parental help. They now have a foundation for finding positive meaning in challenges in the future. It is not surprising that in our study such parental support predicted academic success far into the future and did so better than did parent or child IQ (Sroufe et al., Reference Sroufe, Egeland, Carlson and Collins2005).

Variations in Toddler Experience

Parents by no means need to give perfect assistance. As Erikson (Reference Erikson1963) said, children don’t become neurotic because of frustration but from a lack of meaning to the frustration. So children can struggle, and parents can sometimes fail to do the right thing. They may be a bit late or early with their input, or their cues may be a bit unclear. But if the support is good enough the child has a positive experience. On the other hand, if support and guidance fall too short of the mark, the child’s experience is compromised. Simply taking the easy way out and solving the problem for the child robs them of the opportunity to develop their own sense of agency. Withholding or delaying help too long dooms the child to failure. These are difficult, potentially frustrating tasks. The child cannot solve the most difficult problems alone. When parents fail to help, the child’s belief in support and belief in him- or herself is eroded.

At times, it can be even worse. Some parents not only fail to offer help, they may deride the child’s efforts or demean the child as a person. This deals a strong blow to the child’s self-confidence. In other cases parents become frustrated, angry, and completely unregulated themselves. Since children learn not just from interactions but also from the models they see around them, such an experience curtails even the belief that self-regulation is possible. (It should be noted that our research revealed both historical and contemporary reasons for these lapses in parenting. In general, their own histories were troubled and/or they lacked adequate current supports for parenting.)

In our 2-year assessments we also saw examples of parent–child role reversal and even seductive behavior by parents. By this we mean either that the parent abdicated the parental role or – with some frequency in cases of mothers and boys – the parent actually was physically inappropriate or used sensuality as a means of controlling and manipulating the child. This was best seen in the toy clean-up task that preceded the tool problems. Toddlers of course generally do not want to stop playing with attractive toys and put them away on a shelf. We created this situation purposefully, and we viewed this task as taxing for the parents. But many stayed calm, clear, and firm, perhaps drawing physically nearer to the child to offer a further degree of emotional support. They were encouraging and positive. “That’s right. Good job. Now put the barn up there.” There frequently were hitches, starts and stops, but the job got done. Such clear, firm limits and support deepen the child’s sense of trust.

In contrast, some parents were hapless, perhaps even giving up entirely. “I just can’t make him do anything.” Such abandonment is a breeding ground for anxiety, because the child is being left with a task that is too big for him- or herself.

Others got embroiled in battles and in the end the pair wound up squabbling like two children. Then there were those that used seduction as a technique. Often this would occur in the midst of a flurry of tactics – bribes, threats, pleas – in the absence of follow through. Then, in the midst of the child’s continuing or escalating noncompliance, the mother might say, “Johnnnnnnny, come give momma a kiss,” in a very syrupy voice. Then after sensually kissing the child she would coyly plea, “Now put that away for mommy.” We also observed lots of inappropriate touching.

There was a striking parallel in these occurrences to the examples we saw of verbal abuse or physical punishment. One would see the tension building in the parent, gradually leaking out more and more through signs of frustration (disdainful sighs, tightened lips, less calm voice) and then the abusive or inappropriate behavior would spill out. It is noteworthy that independent ratings of the mothers exhibiting seductive behavior revealed that they were low on expressed warmth toward the child. Hugging a child who seeks you out when frustrated is simply being supportive. But interrupting a child who is working on a problem in an effort to get him to be affectionate with you, promising him a kiss if he will do what you want, or even grabbing him by the genitals, is seductive, not warm.

These sessions were video recorded with the mother’s full knowledge. It is unlikely therefore that they saw anything inappropriate in their behavior. They at times said it was the only way to get the child to behave or simply blamed the child’s misbehavior. In the case of seductive behavior, in particular, we often had the impression that they were unaware of what they were doing and would not even know how they had behaved. We believe that this is because such tendencies in the parents have origins from very early in their lives. They are carrying forward systems of meaning that lie outside of their awareness. We will discuss this further in Chapter 10.

These varied experiences for the toddler have notable implications for their emerging networks of meaning and the emerging sense of reality. Children experiencing boundary violations in any form can take forward the belief that it is the child’s job to take care of the parents, rather than expecting care themselves. They may also learn that sensuality and sexual expression are tools for manipulating others and that sexuality and disparagement or aggression are connected. Moreover, many forms of boundary violation seriously disrupt regulation, due both to the inherently stimulating quality of many of these behaviors and the timing of their expression. Often the parental behavior occurs precisely at those times when the child is already at the limit of his or her capacities and beginning to lose control. This is when a child especially needs a steady, firm, and calm parental input. Instead, provocative stimulation – teasing, flirting, yelling at, disparaging – shoves them over the edge. It provides a “clinic” for regulation problems. Time and again these children experience that, when arousal is high, they will surely become disorganized, in contrast to those with sensitive parenting who come to believe that they can manage even such situations. So challenge, high arousal, and emotionality come to mean very different things to different children. It was predictable then that boundary violation on the part of parents was shown to be related to symptoms of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in subsequent years (Jacobvitz & Sroufe, Reference Jacobvitz and Sroufe1987).

From Past Meaning to New Meaning

Developmental change is dramatic in the early years. Two-year-olds are qualitatively different than 1 year-olds, given their greatly increased motor skills, emerging language abilities, and sense of self. What is preserved from prior development is not so much ways of behaving but the meaning of past experiences. A child we will call Rafael at age 8 months would always reach both arms up with an exuberant smile when his mother approached. This was an almost automatic response but certainly conveyed an established expectation that his mother would respond. Then, at age 12 months, in the Strange Situation, we saw him manifest a similar meaning in two more advanced ways. First, while playing on the floor by his mother’s feet, he picked up a toy and reached it back over his shoulder to his mother without even looking back. He simply knew she was there and would be attentive. Later, when distressed by the separation, he crawled to her at lightning speed and clambered up when she entered the room. These behaviors show a greater sense of purpose and agency but still the same expectation of responsiveness. Then, at age 2 years, the following was observed: Rafael was very good at climbing stairs but not so good at descending. We watched him ably ascend three steps onto a deck and walk rapidly across it. When he approached the other side, he glanced back toward his mother who was watching and said, “help.” Rafael then turned his attention back to the steps and approached them, simply knowing his mother would assist.

Just as he automatically shared play or pleasure as a 1-year-old, and just as he trusted that contact with his mother would relieve his distress, now he just knew his mother was coming to help. He did not have to fuss or cry out or physically approach his mother. His newly acquired language behavior allowed him to signal his need in a new, advanced way. This is a dramatic development. What is preserved, however, is the meaning of a challenge. As earlier, he believes help is available, that his mother will respond, and that his actions to achieve assistance will be successful. Thus, it is the same relationship as a year before, in terms of meaning, but completely transformed in terms of behavior.

Two-year-olds, in general, respond to our laboratory problem situations in terms of previous meanings. Encountering a problem to be solved has different meaning for different toddlers and getting stuck when solving a problem has different meaning. Children who formed secure attachments in infancy, based on responsive care in the first year, enthusiastically engage the tool problems and more readily and effectively draw upon their parents as toddlers. Already by 2 years of age, challenging problems have begun to mean interesting opportunities for some children. They try to solve the problems on their own but, when they do get stuck, they turn to their parents for help. They follow their suggestions, obviously believing in this resource, as Mary Main also found (Main & Weston, Reference Main and Weston1981).

Of course all 2-year-olds are at times non-compliant, but this should not be the case when parent and child share the same goal. Our child on the stairs in the vignette at the beginning of this chapter may well have a secure history. One cannot know this from a singular example. It may have simply been a normal part of discovering what the rules are. Only if non-compliance is entrenched and supersedes other goals of the child would it suggest a problematic history.

Some children have already acquired doubts about their own capacity and about the helpfulness of parents. Those infants with histories of anxious/resistant attachment are more likely to quickly give up or become frustrated when working on the problems at 2 years of age. They have little belief in their own effectiveness. Likewise, only children who developed the avoidant attachment pattern in infancy (related to parental emotional unavailability and rejection) were ever observed to give up on the parent and seek help with the tool problems from the experimenter sitting across the room. For some toddlers, someone they don’t know is a more likely source of help than are their parents.

Parent frustration and withdrawing of support from the child are also predictable from infancy. By assessing the workings of the relationship between infant and parent, one is able to predict the behavior of both partners in the toddler period.

Lest one be too critical of the parents who are struggling, it is important to know that those in our study who engaged in harsh treatment more often had histories of abuse themselves (as well as limited current support), while those mothers who engaged in seductive behavior with their sons had more often experienced sexual exploitation by significant men when they were children. So they took forward their own sense of reality and the meanings from their own childhoods that help was not to be expected, that adults can meet their emotional needs with children and, often, that this is done on a gender basis. These mothers did not use exactly the same behavior with their sons that they had experienced, but they carried forward the pattern of relating.

Further evidence that early-acquired meaning systems are carried forward comes from our follow-up studies of these children across childhood and youth and into adulthood. At age 3½ we saw the children in a series of parent–child teaching tasks and in another problem-solving situation. In the teaching tasks we found similar variation in patterns of care and a degree of consistency with the 2-year measures. Moreover, by studying a large number of siblings we saw how mothers who behaved seductively with sons treated daughters. We proposed a hypothesis that followed directly from family systems theorizing but was explicitly counter to explanations based on fixed traits. Again supported by clinical work, we predicted that mothers who behaved seductively toward sons would explicitly not behave seductively toward daughters; rather, they would behave in a hostile, derogating, or derisive way.

The argument was that, since families are coherent, whole systems, when daughters have been sexually or emotionally exploited by father figures, this has implications for other relationships they have experienced (Sroufe & Fleeson, Reference Fleeson1988). In particular, it is likely that the father and mother were not meeting each other’s needs and that the mother was distant and/or hostile with the daughter (otherwise, the exploitation would not have been accepted or permitted). In the next generation, then, the daughter will not know how to meet her needs with an adult partner, as her own mother did not. She may well be seductive with her son and hostile or derisive toward her own daughter. “In deprecating their daughters they are deprecating themselves, and they are reconstructing a relationship pattern that they know” (Sroufe et al., Reference Sroufe, Jacobvitz, Mangelsdorf, deAngelo and Ward1985, p. 319). Our empirical data supported all of these claims.

Age 3½ was also the first time we saw the children face a task without a parent present. This “Barrier Box” task, developed by Jeanne and Jack Block at UC Berkeley, strongly challenged the children. A large Plexiglas box is filled with very attractive toys. The box is locked with strong latches at the bottom of the back side. It is difficult for a 3-year-old to understand a box opening in this odd way and, besides, the latches were very difficult to open. In short, the child really can’t get at these wonderful toys and only a few unattractive toys are available outside of the box. For a while, the experimenter claims to be too busy to help them. So we watched what they did as a window to their developing inner beliefs. Some children indeed worked hard and long to try to open the box. They tried one thing; then they tried another. They exerted strong effort, pushing up with their hands on the top of the box. Some even managed their mounting frustration by playing briefly with the available toys, then went back to work. In contrast, others hardly tried at all or gave up quickly after making weak efforts to open the box. (After 10 minutes the experimenter did open the box and allow all the children a play period, with their mothers joining them.)

One informative measure about the developing inner world of the child that we used here was a rating of “agency,” which referred to the child’s sense of effectiveness or personal power. This reflected the strength and persistence of the child’s efforts. It informed us about the child’s belief that, if they tried hard, they would succeed. People making these ratings knew nothing about the child’s history or current circumstances. Still, this measure was related to the child’s history of secure attachment and guided support in the toddler period. Those with positive histories already by age 3 years have a different sense of themselves than those with histories where needs for support have not been adequately met. Problems mean a challenge to them, not a defeat in advance. They believe their actions have power.

It is noteworthy that such differences in the sense of agency, or in the many measures of self-esteem we are to obtain in the following years, may be predicted from experiences when memory capacities are still meager and even before infants have consolidated their attachments to parents. The strongest measure we found from the first 6 months was Ainsworth’s measure of parental sensitivity. When principal caregivers are attuned and responsive to the child’s behavioral signals, this both helps the infant be emotionally regulated and lays the foundation for a deep belief that one’s actions are meaningful, that one can have an impact on the environment, and that one can be effective.

Taking Meaning Forward

We were able to follow more than 100 of the children we had studied since birth into adulthood and see them with their own 2-year-old children in the same toy cleanup and tool problem situations used before. By doing this we didn’t have to rely on retrospective accounts of childhood. How these new parents had been treated as toddlers was directly observed. And now different investigators rated how they treated their own children. There was an impressive degree of predictability (Kovan et al., Reference Kovan, Levy-Chung and Sroufe2009). The general degree of support received as a child predicted support given. In addition, more specific features of parenting were also carried forward, features such as hostility and boundary violations. As expected, it was not specific behaviors like the amount of talking that were carried forward, but it was the pattern – the meaning – of the early experience that was consistent over time. There are many ways to express hostility or seductive behavior, and boys later seen with their sons or even daughters, don’t do exactly the same things that were done to them, but when they had been treated with hostility or treated seductively and so forth, they in some way were viewed as treating their children in a similar way. Again, we emphasize that those doing the rating had no knowledge of the earlier measures.

It is not possible to remember in a literal, conscious way how one was treated as a toddler. That is one reason we selected this age for study. No one can from memory describe their treatment when they were 2 years old. Yet somehow the meanings of such early experiences are internalized and carried forward without consciousness. In our study we were able to show that the continuity observed was not due to similarities in intelligence, social class, parenting experiences in later childhood, or other possible explanations. Still, there it is. Our interpretation is that having one’s own child facing the issues of toddlerhood reactivated these non-conscious emotional memories, leading to recreation of the original pattern of care – all without awareness. This is the power of meaning. We will elaborate on these themes in Chapter 10 when we discuss how meaning is carried across generations.

How parents react to toddlers’ expressions of contrariness, defiance, and negativity is certainly important for the emerging sense of self and the child’s evolving world view. Parental restraint and control are crucial for helping the toddler establish personal and interpersonal boundaries and finding the balance between self-expression and self-control. A belief that self-control is possible is essential for actually establishing self-control in subsequent years. Paradoxically, such self-control also makes possible spontaneity and self-expression.

Moments of great meaning also derive from reactions to a toddler’s expressions of exuberance. Two- and 3-year-olds can be completely delighted with their discoveries and creations. For example, one 3-year-old set out to draw a person on a piece of paper. Drawing skills are generally quite limited at this age, and his were too. He essentially drew an ill-defined shape with two vertical, parallel lines and two somewhat large triangles attached to each side. He looked at this and suddenly exclaimed, “It’s a bee!” He was both delighted and proud. His parent’s spontaneous response was, “That’s a great bee!” and his delight was shared. More than a century ago philosopher and psychologist James Mark Baldwin pointed out that such sharing of excitement over a child’s creations are a bedrock for positive self-esteem. Many since have talked about “mirroring,” “attunement,” and “responsiveness” as crucial for the development of a healthy self. Equally, it would be a serious blow to the child had the parent responded, “That’s no bee, and you were supposed to be drawing a person.”

The Way Development Works

The meaning that each individual seeks and finds – their world view – is partly conditioned by their prior experiences. Many toddlers accept and utilize parental guidance because it has already been established that the parent is dependable and trustworthy. The child now actively seeks to maintain the collaborative relationship. Others have negative expectations and therefore are less prone to comply.

These expectations of course are open to change. World views are consolidated across all of childhood and youth and into adulthood. Bowlby’s (Reference Bowlby1973) attachment theory never suggested unchangeability. It did suggest, however, that change becomes more difficult the longer a pathway has been followed. Supportive caregiving during the toddler period, including clear guidance, firm limits, and emotional nourishing, can promote positive expectations regarding the availability of others and self-efficacy. Clear and firm limits are another way in which the sense of reality is affirmed, beyond the boost given by earlier responding to the infant’s intentions. Such limits say that there is a reality. There is reality out here. It can be understood. You can grasp it. This can happen even when care was not supportive in the first year, although it may be more difficult. Such change has been documented and is quite common in the early years. Some parents, most often because of changes in their own lives, are better able to support toddlers than was the case with their infants. They may now be able to provide a more stable framework for the child to begin discovering what things mean and what it means to be them.

However, it often does not work this way. Toddlers who bring to the table negative expectations about self and about caregivers do so because caregivers have had difficulty being reliable and consistent. Such toddlers can behave in very trying ways and would be more difficult for any parent to handle. Now they need even more than usual consistency and reliability; yet this appears to be precisely what has been difficult for their parents. A deepening of negative expectations may well result, and these too will be taken forward. We begin to see a process where children are becoming more powerful forces in their own development. This will only increase in subsequent years.