Psychology Today
Key points
Attachment research should guide parenting practice.
Everyday behaviors can be more significant than is initially apparent.
Parental laughing when children are distressed can have a serious negative impact.
As an intern at The Cambridge Hospital, I was assigned an international attachment expert, Karlen Lyons-Ruth, as a psychological testing supervisor. During lulls in the testing, we met and discussed her research on infant-parent attachment. In a stroke of enormous good fortune, she offered me the opportunity to work with her data, examining the nuances of problematic parent-child attachment (Lyons-Ruth, Bronfman, & Parsons, 1999; Bronfman, 1993). This was when I started to look at parental behavior, in molecular ways, as a means to understand the genesis of psychologica