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Attachment theory provides a theoretical framework that offers the systemic therapist a description of the infancy period and insight about the qualities of caregiver-child relationships. Attachment theory emphasizes the importance of the period of infancy and childhood. .

Attachment theory is about the love that grows between a baby and the people who take care of the baby. It is also about how that love changes the way the baby acts as it grows bigger and meets new people. Attachment theory is even about how teen-agers and adults may treat each other. Most of the time, the people who take care of a baby are the baby's mother and father. If the mother or the father comes when the baby cries and treats the baby with tenderness, the baby learns that the parents will take care of it. If the mother or the father smile at the baby, talk to the baby, sing to the baby, and hold the baby even when it is not crying, the baby learns that the parents love it. When a baby has learned that it is loved and that it will be taken care of if it cries, it usually grows up to be a person who expects other people to be nice. When a child feels loved and cared for and thinks other people will be nice, that child is said to be securely attached. Two people were important in thinking about and writing about attachment theory, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby wrote that the care and love a baby gets from its parents cause it to form an important idea.[1] He called this idea the internal working model. The internal working model is how the baby or child thinks about itself, its parents, and other people. When parents have taken loving care of a baby and child, it grows up with a positive internal working model. This child will think that it is lovable, because it was loved. It will think that the parents are good, because they were caring. And the child will not be afraid to try to make friends with new people, because it will expect people to be nice. Children who have a positive internal working model are also likely to be kind to other people. Bowlby believed that a positive internal working model would help people make friends. Bowlby wrote that the attachment process in people was like the closeness that exists between mother and baby gorillas, chimpanzees and monkeys. In people, Bowlby believed that attachment developed gradually, in four steps.

Mary Ainsworth saw how mothers treated their babies in different cities and countries. She saw that many ways mothers and babies acted were the same, even when families lives were very different.[2] Ainsworth made a way to test how the attachment relationship between a mother and her young child. She called it "The Strange Situation."[3]