Universality claim of attachment theory: Children's socioemotional development across cultures
Keller's paper is the sharpest published challenge to attachment theory's claim to universality. Her argument is that the theory describes one cultural strategy for raising children, in which the infant leads and the caregiver responds to the infant's expressed wishes and mental states, and that this is the practice of Western middle-class families rather than of most of the world. In many rural farming communities, caregiving is organised the other way round: adults and older children are the experts on what a baby needs, the bond is understood as a network of responsibilities rather than a negotiation between two individuals, and the standard of good care is different at the level of what a person is taken to be. Her second argument is ethical. Because attachment theory's claim to universality implies a judgment about good and bad parenting, large-scale interventions that promote Western parenting in these communities apply one system's standards to another and mistake that for scientific evidence.
Keller's paper is the sharpest published challenge to attachment theory's claim to universality. Her argument is that the theory describes one cultural strategy for raising children, in which the infant leads and the caregiver responds to the infant's expressed wishes and mental states, and that this is the practice of Western middle-class families rather than of most of the world. In many rural farming communities, caregiving is organised the other way round: adults and older children are the experts on what a baby needs, the bond is understood as a network of responsibilities rather than a negotiation between two individuals, and the standard of good care is different at the level of what a person is taken to be. Her second argument is ethical. Because attachment theory's claim to universality implies a judgment about good and bad parenting, large-scale interventions that promote Western parenting in these communities apply one system's standards to another and mistake that for scientific evidence.
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What our sources record
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Keller, H. (2018). 'Universality claim of attachment theory: children's socioemotional development across cultures.' PNAS, 115(45), 11414-11419. Sole author. The counter-position is Mesman, van IJzendoorn & Sagi-Schwartz (2016), in the Handbook of Attachment, 3rd edition, whose evidence from the Dogon of Mali and Efe foragers still finds security modal and sensitivity predictive.
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1720325115
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720325115