Parental synchrony and nurturance as targets in an attachment based intervention: building upon Mary Ainsworth’s insights about mother–infant interaction

Abstract

As an astute observer of parent–infant interaction, Mary Ainsworth described and assessed facets of maternal sensitivity, including responsiveness to conditions of infant distress and non-distress. This paper considers the importance of distinguishing between parental sensitivity to children’s distress cues (which we refer to as nurturance) and parental sensitivity to children’s non-distress cues (which we refer to as synchrony). Observations of parents in our intervention, Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), have led us to believe that distress and non-distress represent distinct contexts in which parents can be differentially sensitive or insensitive in responding. Thus, we have conceptualized nurturance and synchrony as distinct targets of the ABC intervention and, in deciding how to assess parental sensitivity, we have chosen measures that distinguish between nurturance and synchrony. This paper describes the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches we have taken to assess parental sensitivity, including diary methodology that we developed for assessing parental nurturance and global measures that we have used for assessing parental synchrony. Finally, a frequency-based coding system is described that we developed for assessing parental nurturance and synchrony from videotaped intervention sessions.

Keywords:

• sensitivity
• intervention
• nurturance
• synchrony
• attachment

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 MH052135, R01 MH074374, and R01 MH084135 to the third author (MD). We thank the children and families who participated in the research.