Still face experiments demonstrate the importance of babies’ attachment to their parents. The video below portrays the natural human process of attachment between a baby and mother, and then the effects of non-responsiveness on the part of the mother.
At the mere suggestion that you are about to watch a mother being unresponsive to a child you feel revulsion even before you click “play.”
Then as you watch it and delight in the wonderful interaction between mother and baby, neurons are firing in the same parts of your brain as in the mother’s (your mirror neurons at work), and oxytocin is coursing through your body. We are wired this way. Empathy, relationships, responsiveness, interaction…we call it love, and it is. Then, when the mother becomes still-faced, you immediately feel the pain of both the child and the mother.
But is this about attachment or something else?
One of the beauties of the scientific process is that experimenters sometimes set out looking for one thing and uncover another. I think this is one of those times.
While the video shows the importance of mother-child attachment, it also reveals something else of vital importance to parents and all other educators. Watch it again. Is the baby experiencing a loss of attachment or a loss of agency?
When the experimenter says that the baby “uses all of her abilities to try to get the mother back,” that is poetic rather than scientifically precise language. The mother is still there. Perhaps the child’s distress is the frustration of no longer having an effect on the mother rather than her “loss.” Smiling, beguiling faces, pointing, reaching, clapping, whining, even screeching…all her tried-and-true methods no longer work. She had power; then she lost it. Do we detect the baby trying to think up something new to do to get the mother to react? Maybe the baby is experiencing powerlessness.
Attachment experiments going all the way back to Harry Harlow’s rhesus monkeys show that babies attach—they even attach to abusive surrogate parents, so great is the need for contact. Parental love is good, AND the form that love takes matters. I would suggest that the greatest loss, when the mother goes still-faced, is the child’s sense of efficacy.
The need to know that you can get what you want, that you can create, that you are not powerless in the world—let’s call it the “need for agency”—this is a big need. The truth of this doesn’t even require research or a video. Each of us begins to discover where our power lies and where it doesn’t early in life; then we spend the rest of our lives learning how to use it and grow it. Toddlers are powered from within and communicate, “Self do it!” with their whole complicated selves. My three-year-old grandson’s favorite line is, “I like to work.” Helping someone else is one of his great loves, and this inclination is basic to three-year-olds.
The reason this is worth mentioning is that it seems to be forgotten when it’s time for school. In general school is not understood as a place for you to continue to practice your agency: making things, making friends, making books, solving problems, making a difference. All too often school is waiting patiently—in silence–for the adults to do things to you so you can make them feel efficacious. (And if you don’t make them feel efficacious, it’s your fault and they start diagnosing you.) When kids drop out, maybe they are on to something: “Sorry guys. I am off to seek my fortune.”
Look at the video again. Look at the pain on that one-year-old’s face when she tries to communicate and fails. Let’s imagine this baby four years later. She is about to walk into her first kindergarten on her own. By now she has been experiencing herself as an agent in the world for about 20,000 waking hours. How will she reply when her mother asks her, “How was your first week of kindergarten, Pumpkin?” Will it be “Boy, I love school. I get to do so many cool things!” Or will she say, as Emily did last September, “Kindergarten is a waste of time. I can’t write; I can’t read; and they won’t let me talk.”
Most teachers do not “still-face” a child, but all too many schools create the conditions in which the child gets still-faced.