20 minutes in an unfamiliar room
In the late 1960s, Mary Ainsworth created a lab scene that has since been repeated thousands of times. An unfamiliar room, toys on the floor, a child about a year old, Mom, and an unfamiliar adult. Over about 20 minutes, 8 short episodes unfold: the stranger enters, Mom leaves and returns twice. Once, the child is left completely alone in the room. Any separation is ended early if it becomes too hard for the child.
It may seem that the main thing is how loudly the child cries: the harder they sob, the worse things are. But crying when Mom leaves says more about temperament and how the morning went. One child gets worked up by any closed door, another almost never does - and both can fall into the same category.
The anxiety itself follows a predictable pattern. It rises when the door closes, peaks in the episode when no adult is left in the room, and falls when Mom returns.
Child alone
A child's anxiety: it peaks when alone and subsides when the parent returns
It falls - but you cannot see that from the outside in every child. In children who looked calm during separation and busily played with toys, heart rate during reunion stayed as high as in crying children, and in some studies their stress hormone level rose even more after the procedure. This does not happen in every study, but it recurs often enough: they are not calm. They have already learned not to show it.
The first seconds of reunion decide it all
That is why observers look not at the door, but at the return - the first minutes after the door opens again. Does the child go to Mom? Do they accept comfort? Do they return to the toys afterward? The 3 classic responses look like this.
What does a 1-year-old do when Mom returns?
These are average proportions from a large review of studies from the late 1980s; the proportions differ noticeably across countries. And it did not end with 3 types: a fourth, disorganized type, was described later - when a child goes to Mom and freezes halfway there, or approaches with their head turned away. Behavior with no strategy at all.
One important caveat: the procedure describes not the child's personality, but a particular pair. With Dad, the same child often falls into a different category, and a classification at age 1 is not a verdict: it changes when family circumstances change.
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Sources
- The Strange Situation procedure - Mary Ainsworth, 1969-1978. Type proportions - van IJzendoorn and Kroonenberg meta-analysis, 1988: 32 samples from 8 countries, about 2,000 children. Heart rate and cortisol in outwardly calm children - Sroufe and Waters, 1977
- Spangler and Grossmann, 1993