Divorce Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Infants, parental separation, custody, and overnight care: a vexed combination of issues and needs that has long perplexed the family law field. Carol George and Judith Solomon have conducted the only published observational study of infant attachment in light of postseparation overnight care arrangements. Here they revisit that study and bring more than three decades of experience to bear on questions concerning very young children implicated in family law disputes. Currently a professor of psychology at Mills College, California, George is an author and coauthor of several notable attachment measures and has over 50 research publications in the area of attachment. Judith Solomon is both a clinical psychologist and a researcher in the attachment field, specializing in the study of early attachment relationships and representations, most recently in the Department of Pediatrics, Bridgeport Hospital. George and Solomon are associate editors of the journal, Attachment and Human Development , reviewers on multiple developmental journals, and both consult and teach internationally. McIntosh: I began work on this Special Edition by surveying the AFCC membership to identify key questions they would ask if they had the opportunity to talk with attachment researchers and specialists. That survey produced 12 major themes about attachment, and of interest, 60 percent of the content focused on one single issue: infants and overnight care. Specifically respondents wanted to know " When is an infant ready for shared overnights? " Judith Solomon and Carol George, you have published one of the very few studies on infant attachment in the context of overnight care (Solomon & George, 1999), a study which you probably know became a little controversial in the family law arena. George: Quite controversial! Our study is used in a variety of different ways, including some ways that I do not agree with, or that the data do not support. Solomon: I do not know many other things that evoke such strong feelings in people than the combination of divorce, custody, and babies. Parents, attorneys, judges, and everyone around the baby can be very stirred up. There is little hard information to go by, so that the situation of infants in overnight care is like a Rorschach inkblot. People project their views very strongly onto it and feel completely invested in those views. It is difficult to open that up and bring information and research into an already fixed view. Our study itself was intriguing, but the aftermath, I found really quite exhausting. The people for whom the conclusions were congenial liked the study, and people for whom the results looked uncongenial disliked the study. And, in places it was used to fuel the gender war we so often see in the divorce arena. George: I have seen the Solomon and George paper used to justify many things I do not necessarily agree with. For example, some have used our findings to support withholding contact from the father because the mother is breastfeeding the baby. We know that nursing is important, but in isolation, whether or not the baby is breastfed does not seem to actually determine the security of attachment to mother (or father!) at 12 months, so, with an older infant, I would avoid using breastfeeding as the reason why a baby shouldn't have an overnight visit. Other factors are much more important to consider. Conversely, I object to people using our findings specifically, or attachment theory in general, to justify switching babies back and forth all the time between parents, because of some-body's idea of what is necessary to establish or maintain the attachment relationship to mother or