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Babies in Groups emerges in a moment when the conceptual edifice of attachment theory—built largely on John Bowlby's post-war formulations—faces renewed scrutiny. The book's context is both scientific and cultural: an age of interdisciplinary re-examination of early development through neurobiology, ethnography, and participatory research. Bradley, Selby, and Stapleton situate their work against what they call “the entrenchment of conventions … which idealize a one-to-one ‘attachment’ between baby and mother” (p. vii). In doing so, they seek to challenge the dyadic myth that has long defined Western developmental psychology. Their intellectual lineage traces back to Darwin's social evolutionism, Denise Riley's feminist philosophy of biology, and Colwyn Trevarthen's theory of innate intersubjectivity. The authors' research—conducted across British and Australian contexts, including collaborations with the Tavistock and Anna Freud Centres—occupies a borderland between psychoanalytic observation and empirical developmental science. Their stance is explicitly constructivist and relational, foregrounding the infant not as an isolated organism but as a participant in complex group dynamics. This perspective positions Babies in Groups as part of what Trevarthen (1979) called “primary intersubjectivity”—the innate orientation of infants toward social exchange—while extending it into what the authors term supra-dyadic intersubjectivity: the ability to co-regulate, communicate, and co-create meaning with multiple others simultaneously.
Bradley, Selby, and Stapleton's' thesis belongs to a rich lineage of attempts to pluralise attachment theory. Bowlby's Attachment and Loss (1969) established the foundational idea that proximity to a caregiver ensures survival; however, its focus on the individual dyad—mother and infant—implicitly naturalised a particular social model of caregiving. Later work by Ainsworth and colleagues (1979) systematised this model through the Strange Situati