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How Attachment Theory is not universally valid John Bowlby was a psychologist who studied attachment theory. He became interested in the link between children's separation anxiety and their families (Cherry, 2019). The concept of attachment theory is related to the bonds between people, including those between a parent and child and between romantic partners, these are often long-term relationships (Cherry, 2019). I believe that these claims that Bowlby and Ainsworth made about mothers, children, and child-rearing are not universally valid and that it cannot always be applied to all cultures around the world. Attachment theory failed to recognize the influences of social class, gender, ethnicity, and culture on personality development. Attachment theory varies from culture to culture and having only one system to measure this, is not ethical. Attachment theory represents the Western middle-class perspective, ignoring the caregiving values and practices in the majority of the world (Keller , 2018). There is a lack of evidence from other cultures that supports that it’s detrimental for one universal method of a mother and child relationship for a healthy development of the child (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 12). This leads to the failure of recognizing that certain social classes have different methods of what the healthy development of a child means to them (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 15). For example, in the Western world that lives in a higher social class, psychological autonomy works for people with a high formal education, safe economical foundation, late first parenthood and with only a few children, but this is only about 5% of world's population (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 18). In comparison to the book called, Child Care and Culture Lessons from Africa , in Kenya, Gusii mothers have about 10 children, they live in a lower social class compared to people in the western world, and they’re main focus is on teaching them

survival and compliance (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 20). This goes to show that Bowlby did not consider the diversity of child-rearing practices around the world when it comes to what social class you are in. Gender is also an example of how one method of healthy child development, attachment theory, is not universally valid. Men can also be caregivers to children and that has been proven throughout history. Attachment theory was developed after World War 2 and the fear of family disintegration as women went into work outside the home started to become an issue (Attachment Lecture, Part 1, Slide 9). Men were fighting in the war, and women were needed to fill in jobs that men previously occupied, and after the war, many expected that society would return to what it originally was with women as caregivers and men as breadwinners (Attachment Lecture, Part 1, Slide 9). However, many women enjoyed having jobs for social, economic and independence related reasons. This caused men to step in as caregivers and to take on some more “feminine” roles. Ethnicity and culture also plays a role in how Bowlby and Ainsworth Attachment theory is not universally valid because it has failed to recognize that in many societies children were raised by many different people, and that sort of communal child-rearing did not damage the emotional development of the children (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 24). Bowlby had argued that separation from the mother or mother surrogate was always damaging to the child and led to irreversible damage but Margaret Mead pointed out that that is not always the case (Attachment Lecture, Part 2, Slide 8). Margaret Mead, an American cultural anthropologist, criticized the methodological approach of Bowlby by claiming that he only focused on experiments, tests and studies carried out in his own cultural settings and not eliminated the approach that many different communities around the world take to raising children (Attachment

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