Attachment In Young Adults

Attachment is extremely important to experience at a young age in order to understand how to bond with people and create healthy relationships as an adult. The ability to create and maintain healthy bonds with people is important, not only in personal relationships, but in professional relationships as well. Learning from infancy how to create these bonds is a critical way to start a child on a healthy, happy, and successful path rather than a path of emotional distance and, in many cases, crime. Families and caregivers are the basis for preventing criminality in a person’s life as well as creating a pathway towards a successful life. During infancy, we learn mostly from our parents and other people who care for us. We create an attachment
to these people, and as we get older we learn to care about their opinion of us. That being said, a child who knows that his or her parents love and care for them is less likely to commit crime because they would not want to disappoint the people they have created these attachments to. However, on the other hand, when a child realizes that their parents do not take much of an interest in their actions they are more likely to commit crime because the consequence of disappointment is not present. These thought processes are very likely to carry on into adulthood as well, which means that it can affect a person’s success later in life. A person who had strong bonds at a young age is more likely to succeed not only for the fact that they are more inclined to do well for themselves and the people they are attached to, but also because they have an understanding on how to bond with people and therefore understand how to create professional relationships. Whereas a person who did not learn this skill from their parents may find it hard to keep or even get a job. Overall, our bonds from infancy are extremely important in shaping the outcome of a person’s life. Having stated before how important attachment is from a young age, I do not believe that our current society in the US makes it easy enough to form these strong connections.
Having a child is extremely expensive and requires a massive amount of time, however, currently in the United States parents are only granted a three month, and most of the time unpaid, maternity leave. My first thought on this issue is that newborns require mass amounts of attention and I do not believe that three months is a long enough time span to give a newborn child all of the attention that they require. Secondly, most families cannot afford to take an entire three months without pay and therefore are forced to return to work much earlier than the three months that they are given for maternity leave. They are forced to leave their children either with a family member, a hired babysitter, or in day care rather than be there to form the intimacy that parents should have with their children. This creates the issue of delinquency because these children were not given the attention that they so desperately needed to form strong social bonds. Considering the fact that research has proven that children who have healthy attachments are more likely to succeed, it is my personal belief that if these families could receive help from the government during maternity leave crime in the US would lesson. Help from the government would allow these children; who would normally not receive the attention that is so vital to their development; would receive that attention allowing them to develop stable and strong relationships, giving them a much higher chance at having a successful life. All in all, I believe that the way things are in the US currently makes it difficult for many families to create the intimacy that parents should have with their children in order to set them on a path to a successful
life. Although I do believe that our government should have a responsibility to provide help to families in order to give children a chance to develop healthily, I also believe that the majority of the responsibility lies upon parents to apply crime preventative methods throughout the duration of childhood and teenage years, one is not more or less important than the other, they are both vital to a child’s social growth. One crime prevention method I believe is important is to make sure that children are put into situations where they learn how to create social bonds with people who are not their parents at a fairly early age. That being said, it is the parent’s responsibility to involve their children in activities such as sports or clubs to allow their children to learn how to interact with other people their age. Another crime prevention method that is important is for parents to give appropriate discipline when their child does something that society considers morally wrong. This discipline allows children to learn that their actions come with either consequences or rewards, making them more apt to consider the consequences and choose against committing crime. In all, I simply believe that there is a huge responsibility to begin teaching and shaping children as young as possible in order to prevent criminality. In summary, the bond between parents and children starting at birth may very well be the most important factor of determining the path that a child will take later in life. Making sure that parents are able to create this bond with their children should be a priority of our society currently in order to avoid crime growth in the future. However, parents are just as responsible as the rest of society for making sure that our children learn valuable life skills lessons that will ultimately prevent them from turning to crime later in life.