Investigating Father-Son and Mother-Daughter Bonding

Investigating Father-Son and Mother-Daughter Bonding

INTRODUCTION

The study that I will be conducting for my Psychology coursework will

be on, parental bonding, specifically on mother/daughter and

father/son relationships. My question is “Do fathers bond better with

their sons rather than their daughters, and do mothers bond better

with their daughters rather than sons?”

John Bowlby was a psychoanalyst that worked from 1940 to 1080. He had

a theory that attachment is innate in both infants and mothers. This

means that it’s an inborn or natural occurrence. The formation of this

attachment is crucial for the development of the infant. It does not

matter about the sex of the child.

The key features of his theory was on the observation of young

animals, such as newly hatched ducklings, and noticed that they

followed their mother closely, everywhere she went. He proposed that a

human infant was also genetically programmed to form an attachment to

its mother. He also proposed that between the ages of 6 months and

three years, is the easiest time to form an attachment. Bowlby argued

that if an attachment has not formed during this time, it would

probably be too late. He also argued that the mother is biologically

programmed to care for her child and that the baby’s main attachment

is to the mother (or substitute mother). He proposed that the child’s

father had no direct emotional importance to the child.

Bowlby conducted his case study, by conduction interviews with a

number of emotionally disturbed juveniles. He researched the people

that he interviewed and looked at past school and medical records.

(Bowlby)

METHOD

My study will consist of two different methods of research. Firstly I

will conduct a survey of five students who live with both their

parents, and also on five adults who see their parents regularly. This

means I will need to write two different questionnaires, one for the

students (Appendix A) and one for the adults. (Appendix B)

For ethical reasons, before I started I asked the parents of the