Difficult children are less likely to receive sensitive care. Attachment is the strong affectional tie that humans feel toward special epople in their lives. Infant attachment behaviors include seeking closeness to the mother, following her about, and crying and calling in her absence. Freud first suggested that the infant's emtional tie with the mother is the foundation for all later relationships. Psychoanalytic theory regards feeding as the primary context in which caregivers and babies build a close emotional bond.
Behaviorists believe that infants' attachment behaviors are learned responses.
As the mother satisfies the baby's hunger, infants learn to prefer her. Human infants can become attached to people who do not feed them as well as to soft, cuddly objects. Today, ethological theory is the most widely accepted view of attachment. Bowlby's ethological theory of attachment views the infant's emotional tie to the mother as an evolved response that promotes survival. The human infant is endowed with a set of built-in behaviors that keep the parent nearby, which increases the chances that the infant will be protected from danger.