James Coan

Well, if you all the time respond.

So it's very important, the first three to four months, in every country in the world, the babies start off, then they cry a little bit more by five, six weeks, and then the crying reduces to about four months.

It's about two and a half hours by four to five weeks, and then it goes down to 70 minutes.

And during the early time, you can do whatever you want.

You want to respond and you should respond immediately, but you still will have about 30% of the crying that you won't be able to console.

And the babies have no intention to wind you up because they just don't have the cognitive ability.

It's biological.

But when they're in the second half of the first year,

They might, for example, cry in the evening to go to bed because they want to keep you for attention or wake up a lot at night and cry to signal to you because they get attention.

So you then differentially in those situations withdraw that you react immediately and see whether the baby can learn to self-regulate.

That's their first self-concept.

I can actually stop crying by myself.

I can settle myself back.

It is very interesting that about some things like in parenting without empirical evidence that you get one group and this is called attachment parenting.

There's one study which was done with 26 white middle-class stay-at-home mothers.

which looked at whether if you intervene immediately and from that study base they have said if you don't immediately respond then your child will not bond properly to it and three studies including one which we conducted one in Canada and one in the Netherlands did exactly this and found no if you don't respond immediately it makes no difference to attachment

In a way, it's very important that we take away this pressure parents often have that they influence their child.

Rather, we say you can do different things and it really doesn't make much of a difference for the child's attachment development as long as you're sensitive towards the child.

I think it is because we have got fewer children today than we had 100 years ago.

And it is in particular where the attachment parent is the older parent.