Parent-Child Attachment as One of the Fundamental Forms of Social Relations and its Natural Prerequisites

The relevance of the study is due to the violation of harmony in family relationships and the crisis of social relations in general. Based on the generalization of natural science data, a socio-philosophical analysis of child attachment, maternal attachment and paternal attachment is made; the specificity of each in the system of child-parent attachment is shown. The methodological basis of the study is the author’s concept of two types of development and the related concept of the relationship between the social and the external natural and internal natural. A comparison of the phenomena of animal imprinting and human attachment is carried out. It is established that they have a common strategy of biological survival – the closeness of children to their parents. Imprinting, being a natural prerequisite for child attachment, develops motor activity in animal cubs, and child attachment is qualitatively different from it in that it improves social ties. An idea is put forward that parental attachment also has its prerequisites in natural evolution – the emergence of a “practice” of helping newborns cling to in primates. Both child and parental attachment are socially approved natural mechanisms, two components of child-parent attachment. The application of the concept of two types of development as a methodology has showed that the child’s attachment to the mother or to another person performing the function of caring for him indicates that he, both as an organism and as a developing personality, is not yet an independent system, developing on the basis of external prerequisites on which the possibility of his biological survival depends. It is specified that a born child has already passed the first stage of formation on the basis of external prerequisites – development in the mother’s body, when he received from her blood all (or almost all) the necessary elements for the formation of his organism. Three stimuli of parental attachment are identified: paedomorphic features of the child, his proto-talk and the hormone oxytocin. The evolution of the mother’s role is revealed – from an external natural prerequisite for the child’s development to the role of an exclusively social prerequisite for his development as a person. It is established that the father, unlike the mother, always plays the role of an external social prerequisite. Thus, parent-child attachment is one of the key forms of social relations in ontogenesis and phylogenesis

Attachment theory · Cognitive science · Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Geography · Social relation · Sociology · Philosophy · Psychology · Regional Socio-Economic Development Trends · Social Psychology · Sociopolitical Dynamics in Russia