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Education


            In each person's life much of the joy and sorrow revolves around attachments or affectionate relationships -- making them, breaking them, preparing for them, and adjusting to their loss by death. Among all of these bonds is a special one -- the type a mother or father form with his or her newborn infant. Bonding does not refer to mutual affection between a baby and an adult, but to the phenomenon whereby adults become committed by a one-way flow of concern and affection to children whom they have cared for during the first months and years of life. According to J. Robertson in his book A Baby in the Family: Loving and Being Loved, individuals may have from three hundred to four hundred acquaintances in there lifetimes, but at any one time there are only a small number of people to whom they are closely attached. He explains that much of the richness and beauty of life is derived from these close relationships which each person has with a small number of individuals -- mother, !.
             father, brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter, and a small cadre of close friends (Robertson 1). A mother's love is a crude offering, and according to Kennell and Klaus in their book Parent-Infant Bonding, there is a possessiveness and an appetite in it. .
             Some argue that attachment is one qualitative feature of the emotional tie to the partner. The operationalization of the construct (attachment) to determine the presence or absence has to be done by some measure of the interaction between partners. Joe Mercer's Mothers' Responses to Their Infants with Defects says, "The mother either responds to her infant's cries with affectionate behaviors and evokes the infants interactions to suggest the infant is a central part of her life, or she does not. The infant either shows preferential responses to the mother, responds to her verbal and tactile stimulation, or does not." (Mercer 17). He further goes on to explain that it is easier to say the infant's tie to the mother is absent, but the psychological complexity of adults make it far more difficult to say a mother has no bond to her infant (Mercer 19).


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