In my post of August 24th, 2010, I mentioned a LiveScience.com article profiling the work of Doug Teti. The LiveScience article states that the study profiled (by Dr. Teti) was “the first to use multiple video cameras in the infants’ and parents’ bedrooms to capture parent-infant interactions at night.” In my August post I pointed out that this simply was not true. In fact, a Canadian group engaged in this type of research on a small scale and put the results into a video entitled When the Bough Breaks. Bough Breaks, which came out back in the mid-1990s and ran as a Frontline piece in the US, is still one of (if not) the best videos on Bowlby’s attachment theory. I contacted Dr. Teti and asked if he had seen Bough Breaks. Surprisingly, he had not. Our Foundation sent Dr. Teti’s research team a copy of Bough Breaks with the proviso that they provide us with a one or two paragraph reaction. Actually, this is the requirement all groups must agree to who receive a copy of Bough Breaks. Click on this link to read other reactions over at our main web site. Our Foundation recently received the reaction from Dr. Teti’s research team. With their permission, here’s what they had to say:
Dear Rick,
My research group and I did watch the video last week. Bough Breaks is a very polished studio production that features case histories of a small number of children, highlighting links between problems in parenting and child sleep, feeding, and behavior problems. The video is a nice illustration of how problematic parenting, both in terms of faulty parental cognitions about the meaning of specific child behaviors, can shape insecure child-parent attachments and behavior problems, and what can be done to intervene to improve the quality of the parent-child relationship and, in turn, child functioning. It has a clear clinical and instructional focus, and demonstrates how attachment theory informs our understanding of the development of behavior problems in children.
Our study, Project SIESTA, is a large-scale longitudinal study of 150 families looking at parenting, infant sleep, and infant-parent outcomes across the 1st two years of life. It is not an instructional studio production focusing on children pre-selected because of behavior problems, although it does use video to try to capture infant-parent interactions at various points across the first two years. It targets a normative population of parents and infants, some of whom will likely have behavior problems but most of whom will not, which will enable us to look at how parenting and child constitutional factors (e.g., temperament) interact to produce different child outcomes. It is also not an intervention study, but a basic research study. Like all large research projects, our study follows specific research protocols in all phases of data collection, and it will rely on complex data analyses to uncover significant trends among the data as we explore how parenting influences infant sleep and infant functioning (cognitive and socio-emotional) during the 1st two years of life. Bough Breaks and Project SIESTA are similar in their focus on linkages between parenting interactions and quality of infant-mother attachment and on socio-emotional functioning. The difference is that SIESTA is doing this with many more families and begins doing so very early in life (1 month of age).
Thank you for sending us the video and providing us the opportunity to see it.
