RebelDad

Forget ‘Attachment.’ It’s All About ‘Activation’

Posted on 15. Apr, 2010 by Brian Reid in research

I’ve never been an huge believer in the whole “attachment parenting” thing, where ensuring your kid’s security (and making sure your kid knows it) is the central point in parenting. It seemed suffocating, the exact opposite of the kind of freedom that kids needed to taste to be engaged in the world. But I didn’t have any evidence that my viewpoint was at all valid.

Enter validation: last week, Daniel Paquette, a professor at the Université de Montréal School of Psychoeducation, published a study that suggested that “activation theory” might be as important as “attachment theory.” Activation theory is the idea that encouraging kids to do out and explore is vital developmentally. (There is a yin and a yang here: ideally, kids should feel secure *and* able to engage in the world.)

The paper focuses on kids 12 to 18 months, and the test of activation includes, among other things, watching what happens when unsteady toddlers head for the stairs. In a nutshell, if you want activated kids, being just about an arm’s length away seems to be best. (Closer, and your kids won’t explore enough. Too far, and they learn recklessness.)

The press release is here, and it makes for interesting reading. And — naturally — there is a dad twist: dads are more likely to give the kids the space they need to explore, since dads, in general, are less protective and that is linked to “activation.” I also pulled the paper, which noted that while there was a difference favoring dads over mom, that number wasn’t significant (though the authors had plenty of suggestion for why it was still probably true). What *was* significant was that boys get activated — by moms and by dads — more than girls. So that’s disappointing but probably not surprising.

As with all early studies, it’s hard (and unwise) to shape a parenting strategy around a single piece of academic research. But it does make me happy to see this avenue of research, and I’m curious to see what happens next with activation theory.