Joint custody? Overnights away from home affect children's attachments

Babies have an innate biological need to be attached to caregivers. Attachments during that critical first year serve as the basis for healthy attachments and relationships later in life. 

Credit: © Konstantin Yuganov / Fotolia

But what happens when babies spend a night or more per week away from a primary caregiver, as increasingly happens in cases where the parents share custody, but do not live together?

In a new national study, University of Virginia researchers found that infants who spent at least one night per week away from their mothers had more insecure attachments to the mother compared to babies who had fewer overnights or saw their fathers only during the day.

The finding is reported in the August edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Attachments are defined as an enduring, deep, emotional connection between an infant and caregiver that develops within the child's first year of life, according to Samantha Tornello, the study's lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in psychology in U.Va.'s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Samantha Tornello

Attachments during that critical first year serve as the basis for healthy attachments and relationships later in life, including adulthood, Tornello said.

She notes that growing numbers of parents are living apart due to non-marital childbirth, the breakup of co-habitating parents, separation and divorce.

Parents increasingly are choosing to share child rearing in some form of joint custody, and often the legal system must determine custody arrangements for the children of parents who do not live together.

"Judges often find themselves making decisions regarding custody without knowing what actually may be in the best interest of the child, based on psychology research," Tornello said.

"Our study raises the question, 'Would babies be better off spending their overnights with a single caregiver, or at least less frequently in another home?'"

Tornello pointed out that either the mother or father could be the primary caregiver, but the point would be that the child ideally would be in the care each night of a loving and attentive caregiver and that there may be something disruptive about an infant spending nights in different homes.

"We would want a child to be attached to both parents, but in the case of separation a child should have at least one good secure attachment," she said. "It's about having constant caregivers that's important."

Tornello and her co-authors at U.Va. and the American Institutes for Research, including U.Va. psychology professor Robert Emery, analyzed data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a national longitudinal study of about 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities from 1998 to 2000.

Robert Emery

The data was collected by researchers at Princeton University and Columbia University and consisted of interviews with both parents at the time of the child's birth, and at ages 1 and 3.

Additional in-home assessments of the children were conducted when they were 1 and 3.

Of parents who were not cohabiting at the time of the study, 6.9 percent of babies under the age of 1 and who lived primarily with their mother spent at least one overnight a week away with their father.

Among toddlers ages 1 to 3, 5.3 percent spent between 1 percent and 35 percent of overnights away with their fathers. Another 6.8 percent spent 35 percent to 70 percent of overnights with their fathers.

Infants who spent at least one overnight a week away from their mothers were discovered to have more insecure attachments to them compared to babies who had fewer overnights or stayed with their father only during the day.

Forty-three percent of babies with weekly overnights were insecurely attached to their mothers, compared to 16 percent with less frequent overnights.

In the case of toddlers the findings were less dramatic; greater attachment insecurity was linked to more frequent overnights, but the findings there were not statistically reliable, Tornello said.

"I would like infants and toddlers to be securely attached to two parents, but I am more worried about them being securely attached to zero parents," said Emery, Tornello's research adviser.

He advocates parenting plans that evolve, where day contact with fathers occurs frequently and regularly, and overnights away from the primary caregiver are minimized in the early years, then are gradually increased to perhaps become equal in the preschool years.

"If mothers and fathers can be patient, cooperate and take a long view of child development, such evolving plans can work for both children and parents," he said.

Journal Reference: Samantha L. Tornello, Robert Emery, Jenna Rowen, Daniel Potter, Bailey Ocker and Yishan Xu. Overnight Custody Arrangements, Attachment, and Adjustment Among Very Young Children. Journal of Marriage and Family, 1 JUL 2013; Volume 75, Issue 4, August 2013, Pages: 871%u2013885 DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12045

Dyslexia, Autism and the Cerebellum: Frontal Lobes not the home of Intelligence

Given that Dyslexia and Autism are disorders of the Cerebellum, human intelligence cannot be explained by the size of the brain's frontal lobes, say researchers. 

Research into the comparative size of the frontal lobes in humans and other species has determined that they are not -- as previously thought -- disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to the most accurate and conclusive study of this area of the brain.

It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes cannot solely account for humans' superior cognitive abilities.

The study by Durham and Reading universities suggests that supposedly more 'primitive' areas, such as the cerebellum, were equally important in the expansion of the human brain.

These areas may therefore play unexpectedly important roles in human cognition and its disorders, such as autism and dyslexia, say the researchers.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today.

The frontal lobes are an area in the brain of mammals located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere, and are thought to be critical for advanced intelligence.

Lead author Professor Robert Barton from the Department of Anthropology at Durham University, said: "Probably the most widespread assumption about how the human brain evolved is that size increase was concentrated in the frontal lobes."

"It has been thought that frontal lobe expansion was particularly crucial to the development of modern human behaviour, thought and language, and that it is our bulging frontal lobes that truly make us human. "

"We show that this is untrue: human frontal lobes are exactly the size expected for a non-human brain scaled up to human size."

"This means that areas traditionally considered to be more primitive were just as important during our evolution. "

"These other areas should now get more attention. In fact there is already some evidence that damage to the cerebellum, for example, is a factor in disorders such as autism and dyslexia."

The scientists argue that many of our high-level abilities are carried out by more extensive brain networks linking many different areas of the brain.

They suggest it may be the structure of these extended networks more than the size of any isolated brain region that is critical for cognitive functioning.

Previously, various studies have been conducted to try and establish whether humans' frontal lobes are disproportionately enlarged compared to their size in other primates such as apes and monkeys.

They have resulted in a confused picture with use of different methods and measurements leading to inconsistent findings.

Journal Reference:

1. Robert A. Barton and Chris Venditti. Human frontal lobes are not relatively large. PNAS, May 13, 2013 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1215723110

Pixar Video: It gets better - Acceptance of Homosexuality

Home, preschool and school coordination boosts achievement

Researchers evaluated children's homes and child care/preschool settings when the children were 4-1/2 years old, studied their first grade classrooms, and evaluated reading and math test scores through fifth grade.

In doing so, they gauged whether the links between various combinations of cognitive stimulation and children's achievement were simply due to the socioeconomic circumstances of the children's families, or whether children from different socioeconomic backgrounds got more or less, academically, from each combination.

"The ultimate payoff of attempts to improve one context of early childhood depends in part on whether related contexts are improved, too," according to Crosnoe.

Moreover, even though children from advantaged families are more likely to experience this convergence of support for learning across the contexts of their lives, the study found that low-income children may benefit more from it.

"Helping children, especially those from poor families, get off to a good start in elementary school has become a major focus of education policy," Crosnoe adds. "These policy interventions typically target one setting -- the home, preschool, or elementary school -- but rarely the intersection of all three."

This study suggests that increasing coordination among the three main contexts involved in the transition to formal school is critical. "To do so, policymakers must put renewed focus on the home-preschool partnerships often advocated by early intervention programs and the family-school partnerships advocated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act," according to Crosnoe.

Journal Reference:

1.Robert Crosnoe, Tama Leventhal, R. J. Wirth, Kim M. Pierce, Robert C. Pianta. Family Socioeconomic Status and Consistent Environmental Stimulation in Early Childhood. Child Development, May 13 2010 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01446.x