Challenging Attachment Theory: Ethnocentrism, Science, and Child Development
Autor Heidi Kelleren Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 oct 2026
Keller presents compelling ethnographic evidence from diverse cultural communities, revealing multiple valid pathways to forming secure relationships that attachment theory fails to recognise. She shows how feeding practices, cultural learning, and community-based caregiving create strong bonds that don't fit the Western dyadic mother-child model. Beyond theoretical critique, she examines the real-world consequences of attachment theory's dominance in parenting interventions across the Global South, family court custody decisions, and early childhood education programs, demonstrating how these applications, presented as evidence-based, often pathologise non-WEIRD parenting practices and impose inappropriate standards on diverse families.
This groundbreaking work calls for nothing less than the decolonisation of developmental science, advocating for culturally conscious research that respects local knowledge, embraces methodological diversity, and abandons the search for universal developmental pathways. Keller provides concrete steps toward achieving truly inclusive and ethical research practices that honour the full spectrum of human development. Essential reading for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in child development, education, social work, and international development—a transformative analysis that will fundamentally reshape your understanding of child development and culture.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781041138983
ISBN-10: 1041138989
Pagini: 166
Ilustrații: 18
Dimensiuni: 156 x 234 mm
Ediția:1
Editura: Taylor & Francis
Colecția Routledge
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom
ISBN-10: 1041138989
Pagini: 166
Ilustrații: 18
Dimensiuni: 156 x 234 mm
Ediția:1
Editura: Taylor & Francis
Colecția Routledge
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom
Public țintă
Academic, Postgraduate, Professional Reference, and Undergraduate AdvancedCuprins
Part 1. Setting the Stage. Chapter 1. Who is Psychology About? Chapter 2. The Universality Assumption. Chapter 3. The Concept of Context. Chapter 4. The Conception of Culture. Chapter 5. Variability of Children's Learning Environments. 5.1 Interactional dynamics across cultural communities. 5.2 Similarities and Differences. Chapter 6. Implications for Culture Conscious Research. Part 2. Attachment Theory: Science and Reality. Chapter 7. History and Core Assumptions of Attachment Theory. The origins and history of attachment theory. What is attachment? The basic assumptions of attachment theory. 7.4 Critical evaluation of the core assumptions. Chapter 8. The Ethnocentric Bias of Attachment Theory. Chapter 9. Different Avenues to Develop Attachment Relationships. Chapter 10. Is attachment theory a scientific theory at all? Chapter 11. Concluding evaluation of attachment theory. Part 3. Attachment and the Applied Field: More Areas of Construction. Chapter 12. Parenting Interventions. Chapter 13. Family Court Decisions and Child Custody. Chapter 14. Early Pedagogics. Part 4. Problems of Change. Chapter 15. Ignorance and resistance. Chapter 16. The stairway to change. Chapter 17. Outlook. References.
Notă biografică
Heidi Keller is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and former Head of Department, Culture and Development, Faculty of Human Sciences, Osnabrueck University, Germany. Among many international awards, in 2019 she was the recipient of the SRCD Award for Distinguished Contributions to Understanding International, Cultural and Contextual Diversity in Child Development.
Recenzii
This book is a tour de force, wherein Keller shares her conceptual brilliance and knowledge in informative and entertaining ways. It is an essential aid in increasing inclusivity, and decreasing colonial practices in how we interact with children and families. Amid constructive criticism of current theory and practice in developmental psychology (rightly characterized as WEIRD, pertaining to mostly Western middle-income contexts), Keller brings illuminating descriptions of children developing within a wide variety of ecocultural contexts around the world. I can easily conceive of this book as becoming integral in the education of University students, of Ethics Review Boards, and of practitioners, from pediatricians to teachers, from those providing parenting advice to those providing early interventions. This book is an exemplary presentation of the need for and benefits of viewing childhood within eco-cultural context.
- Prof Dr Kim A. Bard, Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology, Affiliate Scientist, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
This is a book that begins with life and compels theory to respond. Emerging from a trajectory that moves from kitchens to communities, from observation to uneasy understanding, it unsettles the long-standing assumption that culture is a variable to be added to psychological models. Here, culture appears as the very ground of perception, the condition through which development becomes intelligible.
What gives this work its force is its engagement with diverse childhoods across contexts, and its methodological honesty. The recognition that not knowing language, misreading practices, and depending on others are not limitations to be overcome, but conditions that reshape what it means to know. In this sense, the book offers a rare account of how psychological knowledge is actually made through relationships, mistakes, and sustained encounters with difference.
Its return to attachment theory is particularly significant. Rather than accepting or dismissing it, the author approaches it as an ethical problem, one that must be confronted in light of the many childhoods that lie outside its assumptions. This is not critique for its own sake, but an insistence that widely accepted frameworks be made answerable to the worlds they claim to describe.
Situated within ongoing efforts to decolonize psychology, this book does something more demanding: it does not simply call for change, but demonstrates how such change emerges from a lifetime of engagement with people, practices, and places that resist easy translation. It will be of interest not only to developmental psychologists, but to anyone concerned with how knowledge travels, transforms, and sometimes fails.
-Prof Dr. Nandita Chaudhary, Professor to the Department of Cultural Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador da Bahia
- Prof Dr Kim A. Bard, Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology, Affiliate Scientist, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
This is a book that begins with life and compels theory to respond. Emerging from a trajectory that moves from kitchens to communities, from observation to uneasy understanding, it unsettles the long-standing assumption that culture is a variable to be added to psychological models. Here, culture appears as the very ground of perception, the condition through which development becomes intelligible.
What gives this work its force is its engagement with diverse childhoods across contexts, and its methodological honesty. The recognition that not knowing language, misreading practices, and depending on others are not limitations to be overcome, but conditions that reshape what it means to know. In this sense, the book offers a rare account of how psychological knowledge is actually made through relationships, mistakes, and sustained encounters with difference.
Its return to attachment theory is particularly significant. Rather than accepting or dismissing it, the author approaches it as an ethical problem, one that must be confronted in light of the many childhoods that lie outside its assumptions. This is not critique for its own sake, but an insistence that widely accepted frameworks be made answerable to the worlds they claim to describe.
Situated within ongoing efforts to decolonize psychology, this book does something more demanding: it does not simply call for change, but demonstrates how such change emerges from a lifetime of engagement with people, practices, and places that resist easy translation. It will be of interest not only to developmental psychologists, but to anyone concerned with how knowledge travels, transforms, and sometimes fails.
-Prof Dr. Nandita Chaudhary, Professor to the Department of Cultural Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador da Bahia
Descriere
Drawing on decades of cross-cultural research, Heidi Keller reveals how attachment theory is rooted in WEIRD societies representing less than 10% of humanity, despite claims to universality. Through rigorous analysis, she systematically deconstructs core assumptions.