Blankets, Bears, and Bunnies: Studies of Children's Contacts with Treasured Objects

I'd kill myself if anything ever happened to that blanket.

The study described in this paper is an effort to apply a promising method to a little-researched and complex phenomenon in child development. Normal children under 4 often develop a tenacious attachment to a tattered blanket, a grimy piece of cloth, or a stuffed animal. Sometimes the child and his blanket1 are literally inseparable; more often the child will go to it at intervals during the day, stroke or cuddle with it for a while, and then—seemingly refreshed—return to other activities.

Because children so frequently become devoted to these objects, and because the objects may play a role in the development of attachment, separation-individuation, and understanding of the world of things, we became interested in exploring this subject further in a controlled but naturalistic research study. For this purpose, we decided to adapt the “symptom-context” method