ABSTRACT
The claim that protest-despair-detachment is the typical pattern of young children’s responses to major separations appears to have attained the status of a truism, being still firmly believed by many clinicians and featuring in many psychology textbooks. Yet, premised on a conceptualization of children as considerably more socially inept than they actually are, it does not appear to fit well with the facts as a general description of children’s separation responses. In this chapter I argue that, even during its inception in the period from the 1940s to the 1980s, empirical evidence did not support this interpretation and that there is a need to reconceptualize separation responses. Taking into account the possibility that the initial stages of separation are characterized by a far greater range of individual differences than was previously recognized, I propose that the protest-despair-detachment framework be replaced by an account more capable of accommodating the evidence.
