This course taster is taken from the Open University’s ‘Child Development’ course (ED209). It is an extract from one of the four course text books (Oates, J., Lewis, C. and Lamb, M. E. (2005) ‘Parenting and attachment’, in Ding, S. and Littleton, K. S. (eds) Children’s Personal and Social Development, Oxford, Blackwell.) © Open University 2005
Something special can happen early in an individual’s development whereby certain specific objects come to have an exceptional significance. Close contact with these objects is used as an important source of comfort and support at times of stress and the absence of these attachment objects at such times can lead to distress and anxiety.
Objects of attachment
The word ‘object’ is being used here in a broad sense to include human beings as well as other sorts of comfort objects. While not all children do so, many make use of objects like favourite feeding bottles or a comfort blanket to which they develop a strong attachment. Winnicott (1953) described such attachments as involving ‘transitional objects’. He argued that such attachments represent a developmental stage whereby the infant makes use of an object over which they have control to deal with and move on from their early attachment to the mother, who is less under the infant’s control. In both cases, attachment to mother and attachment to transitional object, the significant point is that they are attachments to specific, single objects.
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