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Heredity proposes … development disposes.
In a given child the complex of behavioural systems mediating attachment comes into being because in the ordinary family environment in which the vast majority of children are raised these systems grow and develop in a certain comparatively stable way. What do we know of this growth and of the variables that affect it?
When he is born, an infant is far from being a tabula rasa. On the contrary, not only is he equipped with a number of behavioural systems ready to be activated, but each system is already biased so that it is activated by stimuli falling within one or more broad ranges, is terminated by stimuli falling within other broad ranges, and is strengthened or weakened by stimuli of yet other kinds. Amongst these systems there are already some that provide the building-bricks for the later development of attachment. Such, for example, are the primitive systems that mediate neonatal crying, sucking, clinging, and orientation. To these are added, only a few weeks later, smiling and babbling, and some months later still, crawling and walking.
When first exhibited each of these forms of behaviour is simply structured. Some of the motor patterns themselves are organised on lines little more elaborate than those of a fixed action pattern, and the stimuli that activate and terminate them are discriminated in only the roughest and readiest of ways. Even so, some discrimination is present from the start; and also from the start there is a marked bias to respond in special ways to several kinds of stimuli that commonly emanate from a human being—the auditory stimuli arising from a human voice, the visual stimuli arising from a human face, and the tactile and kinaesthetic stimuli arising from human arms and body. From these small beginnings spring all the highly