Parent and Teacher Guideline for
Gender Dysphoric Youth
The Working Model –
Nurturing and Protective Factors
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Infants develop a working model of attachment from about age 0 to about age 7 (secure, anxious, disorganized, and non-attached) based on how parents respond to them; they use this working model to predict the world around them. In other words, the early years set the tone for an individual’s “life script.”
The man who formulated Attachment Theory was Edward John Mostyn Bowlby (1907 -1990).[52] Bowlby said that infants form internal working models of attachment. The relevant behavior is based on early attachment. The Working Model is based on decisions children make about themselves and others. Trust vs. mistrust, for example, is the first development stage, where children learn how parents respond to them. A study showed that parenting behaviours had stable traits of warm or hostile reactions to their children called “love versus hostility" and “autonomy versus control” dimensions.[53] In a study done on maltreated preschool children, it was shown that the best treatment for attachment disorders is psychotherapy for the parent.[54] When a parent is organized, the child naturally improves. The development of an autonomous sense of self is an early stage-salient task and is unequivocally linked to attachment. Secure attachment leads to healthy psychosocial development, the protective factor guarding against the development of antisocial behavior. Numerous studies also show that about one-third of the children in middle-class families are insecurely and anxiously attached, and this number may be increasing in Canada.[55]
Table 4: Continuum of Attachment[56]
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A 40-year longitudinal study showed that three types of protective factors were identified for resilience: 1) temperament, 2) attachment to family and primary care-givers, and 3) external support, i.e. church and school.[57]
Figure 2. Protective Factors[58]
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People make a map of responses to their feelings by what they learn in church, the media, at home and at school. Fight, flight or freeze reactions become mitigated through socialization. I can’t change my working script overnight because I was built on it, I made my script very early in life. The script is determined by about age-5. But people mature and change their script over time.
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What psychologists have learned over the years about early mother-child interaction; motor and social development; defense mechanisms; moral development; and adult life transitions all serve to provide a background of information to assist in determining the state of development at which emotions, behaviours, or interactions, have become fixated. To be fixated is to be stuck in fantasy/script. Another way of describing this fixated impasse is as a state of interrupted contact (contact interruption), or a developmental delay resulting from an attachment disorder.[59]
Insecure attachments result from un-met needs. On one hand the child is still looking to have their needs met, on the other hand, when needs are met, the new pattern contradicts the working model of negative expectations that makes up the life script. As Bowlby points out, the term ‘secure,’ in its original meaning, ‘applies to the world as reflected in the feeling and not the world as it is.[60] There is much fantasy overlap in our behaviour, what we perceive, and how we interpret what we perceive, and this is often out of sync with reality, it may not represent the truth, or it may only represent part of the truth. A child with a secure attachment will still have to grapple with problems, from a different perspective.
Children have different temperaments, separate from socialization. When it is said that a child has a biological predisposition to something this means that how a child perceives the security of their environment is also influenced by temperament. Children with difficult temperaments may have behavioural problems, however, “children with difficult temperaments can fare well when parents are warm, supportive, and respect their children’s autonomy.”[61] A working model of attachment–relevant behaviours is associated with an infants’ own behaviour. What we believe shapes further beliefs about the world and ourselves.
Attachment theory is the study of parent child relationships. Adults also have internal working models of attachment relationships with their own parents, and these working models guide interactions with their own infants. A large study classified people into one of three groups: 1) secure adults who objectively describe childhood experiences, and value their parents; 2) dismissive adults, who sometimes deny the value of childhood experiences and may be unable to recall early childhood experiences while simultaneously idealizing parents; and 3) preoccupied adults, who describe childhood experiences as emotionally charged and often express anger or confusion regarding relationships with parents.[62] The social/biological link in development is the study of epigenetics.