ABSTRACT
As noted in the introductory chapter to this volume, it was only a decade or so ago that students of infancy and early childhood were taught that individual differences in child development could not be predicted on the basis of information obtained during the first year of life. Yet today, on the basis of just 10 years’ worth of theoretically informed empirical inquiry into the developmental “consequences” of attachment security (and insecurity), such a conclusion is regarded by most as patently false. In point of fact, critics as well as proponents of the Strange Situation procedure (used for measuring security of infant-parent attachment) acknowledge the predictive power of 12 to 18 month attachment classifications (Bretherton, in press; Lamb, Thompson, Gardner, Charnov, & Estes, 1984), even if they are in disagreement as to why such prediction from infancy to early childhood is successful.
