VIII.

CONCLUSION: CO-CONSTRUCTING A SECURE BASE

PARTNERSHIP: MOTHER–CHILD INTERACTIONS,
COMMUNICATION, AND SCRIPT REPRESENTATIONS
Germ

an E. Posada and Harriet S.Waters

This article is part of the issue “The Mother–Child Attachment

Partnership in Early Childhood: Secure Base Behavioral and
Representational Processes,” Germ
an E. Posada and Harriet S.
Waters (Issue Editors). For a full listing of articles in this issue, see:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15405834/2018/83/4.

ABSTRACT Using the secure base construct, the evidence presented indicates that
interactional experience continues to be a central factor in the organization of mother–child
attachment relationships. The parent–child codetermination process that establishes their
relationship in infancy expands during the preschool years. Furthermore, with the increasingly
relevant role of language, parent–child verbal communication during this time plays an important
part in structuring children’s attachment behavior and knowledge. Parents help their children
construe attachment-related information, control and regulate emotional experience, and guide
behavior during attachment-related experiences. That is, during early childhood, parent and
child continue the process of constructing a secure base partnership through their gradually more
complex interactions that take advantage of children’s behavioral, emotional, representational,
and language advances. Although the studies are interrelated and contribute to a coherent
understanding of attachment relationships during this time period, they represent small-scale
studies. Further, some of the effect sizes presented are small. Thus, future research should include
tests of replication as well as explorations of links to early and later development and parallel
findings in more diverse samples.

One of the key tasks faced by attachment researchers is that of

describing and explaining the transformation and continuity of

Corresponding author: Germ
an E. Posada, Ph.D., Department of Human Development and

Family Studies, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, Tel.: (765)494-1029; email:
gposada@purdue.edu; and Harriet S. Waters, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, SUNY at Stony
Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, Tel.: (631)632-7844; email: harriet.waters@stonybrook.edu
DOI: 10.1111/mono.12395
# 2018 Society for Research in Child Development

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parent–child attachment relationships during early childhood, when
children become increasingly adept in the use of language and mental
representations to navigate their world. As indicated by the evidence
presented in this monograph, and similar to the case of infancy, interactional
experiences continue to be a central factor in the organization of secure base
relationships at the level of both behavior and representation. The parent–
child codetermination process that initially establishes their relationship in
infancy extends and expands during the preschool years. Furthermore, with
the increasingly relevant role of language, parent–child verbal communica-
tion during this time plays an important part in structuring children’s
attachment behavior and knowledge. Parents help their children both
intentionally and incidentally interpret attachment-related information,
control and regulate emotional experience, and guide behavior when
dealing with attachment relationship experiences. That is, parent and child
continue the process of constructing a secure base partnership (among other
developmental tasks) through their gradually more complex interactions that
take advantage of children’s behavioral, emotional, representational, and
language advances.
Our aim in this monograph was to study the co-construction process of
mother–child attachment relationships during early childhood by testing the
notion that dyadic behavioral and verbal exchanges remain central to the
organization of child secure base behavior and representation. Also, in doing
that, we aimed at testing a secure base conceptual framework to understand
maternal contributions to verbal communications with their young children
when talking about attachment-relevant topics, as well as extending that
framework to the study of attachment narratives produced by preschoolers
and their mothers. Finally, we aimed at investigating how secure base scripted
knowledge colors mothers’ expectations and judgments of mother–child
interactions.

MATERNAL SECURE BASE SUPPORT AND CHILD SECURE BASE BEHAVIOR

AND SCRIPTS

When proposing an attachment behavioral control system, Bowlby

(1969/1982) argued that different behaviors are organized around the goal
of achieving proximity to an attachment figure. Further, he suggested that a
central element of that control system was a cognitive component that
assembles information about caregiver and child behavior and state, context,
and previous interaction experience to guide a child’s attachment behavior in
achieving its goal. Bowlby (1969/1982, 1988) argued that relational
experiences with caregivers play a critical role in the organization of a child’s
attachment behavioral control system. After describing the developmental

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beginnings of attachment behavior and representations during the first

3 years (Bowlby, 1969/1982), Bowlby’s perspective, however, is less clear
about parent–child relationships and the development of attachment beyond
this time frame.
We tested Bowlby’s hypotheses about the importance of caregiver–child
interaction experiences in the configuration of attachment behavior, and the
relation between structural features of attachment behavior and representa-
tions during early childhood. Although children’s patterns of secure base
behavior with mother have clearly been tied to their interaction experiences
during the first year (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Walls, 1978/2015;
Atkinson et al., 2000; De Wolff & van IJzendoorn, 1997; Verhage et al., 2016),
this cannot be taken to mean that the developmental course of attachment
relationships is completed in infancy. As with most developmental
phenomena, it takes further experience and time for it to be organized
and consolidated. The work presented by Posada, Trumbell, Lu, and
Kaloustian (Chapter III) on quality of maternal care and child attachment
behavior during the early childhood years illustrates the relevance of studying
caregiver–child interaction experiences during this developmental period.
Much as Ainsworth (Ainsworth, 1977; Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1971;
Ainsworth et al., 1978/2015) found for infant–mother attachment relation-
ships, the dyadic exchanges observed indicate that maternal contributions to,
and participation in, smooth and cooperative mother–child interactions are a
key factor in 3.5 to 5.5-year-olds’ security. Mothers who facilitate the dyad’s
transactions and sensitively contribute to children’s exploration of their
surroundings have securely attached children. Overall, our findings support
the notion that concurrent maternal secure base support through the
preschool years continues to play an important role in the organization of
child secure base behavior; this was so, even when we controlled for
information gathered on the same constructs 2 years before. Lending support
to the notion that behavioral patterns of interaction for mother and child
tend to be stable as the child grows older (Bowlby, 1969/1982), we also found
that both maternal sensitivity and patterns of child secure base behavior are
significantly and moderately stable from 3.5 to 5 years in the middle-class
sample studied. Furthermore, the data are consistent with the idea that the
stability of child security depends on the stability of maternal sensitivity.
Patterns of child secure base use, from which attachment security is inferred,
were stable during those years as long as the quality of maternal secure base
support, from which sensitivity is inferred, remained stable. The evidence
gathered also indicated that changes in the quality of the mother–child
relationship occur for some dyads. When the quality of maternal secure base
support changed, corresponding changes in the organization of children’s
secure base behavior were found. This information is important for several
reasons. First, it indicates that the mother–child relationship during early

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childhood is an open system that is still being pieced together. Second, the
evidence provides information about sensitivity as a key factor when
explaining continuity and change in child attachment security. Furthermore,
these findings underscore the significance, and we would argue, the necessity,
of employing an interpersonal (Bretherton & Munholland, 2008) lens in the
study of attachment relationships and child security after infancy. We further
maintain that such a lens is essential to study the interface of attachment
behavior and representations.

Preschoolers’ Secure Base Scripted Knowledge

Bowlby (1969/1982, 1973) suggested that individuals form complemen-
tary representational models of their attachment figures and themselves.
Such models, he proposed, are based on mother–child relationship
experiences. Elsewhere, it has been shown that young children construct
script-like representations, a type of generalized event representation, of their
everyday experiences (Nelson, 1986a). Scripts refer to a particular knowledge
structure that includes an ordered, temporal-causal arrangement of actions
organized around a goal. Bretherton (1990) suggested that attachment scripts
are the building blocks of how children begin to represent their experiences
in attachment relationships. Further specifying the content and organization
of attachment representations, H. Waters (Waters, Rodrigues, & Ridgeway,
1998) proposed the secure base script concept, as one type of attachment
representation that individuals assemble (Waters & Waters, 2006). It details
what is represented (i.e., secure base use and support) and how that
representation is organized (i.e., script-like structure). Because the organiza-
tion of scripts originates in and is influenced by experience (e.g., Fivush &
Slackman, 1986) and, in turn, influences behavior and the production itself of
narratives, a child’s budding secure base-scripted knowledge is likely to reflect
her or his secure base experiences as expressed in the organization of secure
base behavior. Although modest, evidence presented in this monograph
(Chapter III, Study 2) is in line with that hypothesis. While it is not possible to
ascertain the direction of effects, in all likelihood both secure base behavior
and knowledge (and its role in interpreting relevant information, generating
expectations, and guiding behavior) have a transactional relationship and
feed off each other.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF SECURE BASE SCRIPTS

Although the beginnings of internal working models are grounded

in infancy as individual differences in secure base interactions appear
(Ainsworth et al., 1978/2015), the emergence of secure base scripts are

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associated with early childhood. The child both acquires a greater breadth of
experiences and increasing cognitive skills to abstract temporal-causal event
structures. That is not to say, that infants are not predisposed to notice
regularities in different event orders (e.g., Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson,
2002). Evidence of statistical learning and detecting predictable patterns,
including in language learning, is prevalent in the early learning literature.
Closer to home, Johnson et al. (2010) demonstrated that 1-year-olds who were
securely attached looked longer at abstract animations of caregiver–infant
interactions in which comfort was not provided, suggesting their expectations
of support had been violated. These findings serve as very early evidence of
attachment-related expectations about mother–child interactions.
Nonetheless, the current monograph is focused on preschool years and
the elaboration of secure base scripts within a co-construction partnership.
With young children increasingly using representations of their attachment
experiences with their principal caregivers as a means to navigate their social
exchanges, it is crucial to understand how those representations come to be.
Little is known, however, about the process through which such attachment
representations are pieced together. Certainly mother–child interactional
experiences play an important role here (i.e., secure base scripts reflect secure
base use, see Chapter III). However, we argue in this volume that those scripts
do not simply spring from experience alone, but are actively constructed by
children with support from their attachment figures (e.g., mother). Mother
and child both incidentally during their daily exchanges and intentionally
through their communications about attachment-related events (e.g.,
issues of proximity, conflict, separation, exploration, and/or supervision)
codetermine the structure of children’s secure base behavior and represen-
tations. If this indeed is so, then it is crucial to investigate both children’s
behaviors and representations in relation to their interaction and communi-
cation experiences with attachment figures.
Due to the lack of methodologies that specifically assess the dyadic
process involved in the construction of the secure base script, Waters, Steiner,
Zaman, Apetroia, and Crowell (Chapter IV) developed and validated (against
standard adult attachment measures in the field, the Attachment Script
Assessment [ASA] and the Adult Attachment Interview [AAI]) two tasks
designed to assess mothers’ co-construction skills when talking to their
children about attachment relevant scenarios and emotion-laden situations.
The co-construction skill scales were tailored to tap into the kind of cognitive
engagement that encourages the construction of script-like representations.
Specifically, the scales focus on a mother’s ability to recognize and encourage
her child’s bids for participation in verbal exchanges, the use of open-ended
questions that encourage children to elaborate on their responses, and on the
help mothers provide to build a causal/explanatory framework that allows the
child to link experience, intentions, and feelings into a coherent narrative.

125
Waters and coworkers showed that co-construction skills are linked to
maternal secure base script knowledge. Mothers with higher secure base
script scores on the ASA were better able to guide their children during the
co-construction of attachment-related stories and help their children make
sense of emotion-laden scenarios.
Are maternal co-constructive skills related to maternal secure base
support and, if so, how do they relate to children’s secure base behavior and
secure base representations? First of all, maternal secure base support during
child–mother interactions at home and playgrounds, as well as mothers’
co-construction skills when helping her child tell stories that involved
mother–child scenarios, were related to each other and associated with
children’s secure base behavior organization concurrently at 3.5 years of age
(see Chapter V). More specifically, maternal co-construction skills indepen-
dently contributed to the prediction of child secure base behavior beyond
contributions from everyday maternal secure base support, that is, mother
sensitivity. Further, co-construction skills significantly predicted secure base
behavior organization 2 years later when children were 5.5 years old. This
suggests that mother–child communication about attachment relationships
plays a unique role in the mother–child secure base partnership during the
early childhood years, building on the effects of mother sensitivity that are
first established in infancy.
Secondly, Apetroaia and Waters (Chapter VI) found that mothers’
communicative support during conversations about affect-laden situations
provides a foundation for children to understand elements central to secure
base relationships, contributing to the child’s own secure base scripts.
Moreover, although mothers’ own knowledge of the secure base script was
related to child secure base script knowledge, maternal co-construction skills
contributed above and beyond maternal script knowledge in predicting child
secure base scripts. These findings are similar to those of Lu and coworkers
(Chapter V), reaffirming the conclusion that mother–child communication
plays a unique role in the attachment partnership in early childhood, in this
case vis-a-vis children’s secure base scripts rather than secure base behavior
organization.
Finally, in order to account for some of the pathways linking script
knowledge to maternal behavior during interactions with their children, we
examined whether the secure base script, by the nature of its organization,
facilitates an understanding of secure base support and helps an individual
have “an eye” for mother–child exchanges that are characterized by a dynamic
back and forth between secure base support and use (H. Waters, Corcoran,
and T. Waters, Chapter VII) showed that secure base script knowledge can
color a mother’s view about how mother–child interactions should transpire
and what constitutes effective maternal secure base support. Because
scripts structure knowledge about events, influence memory, and bring up

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expectations about what is to happen (Nelson, 1986b), it is likely that they

influence what mothers perceive in a particular situation. In turn, such
perceptions are likely to influence/guide behavior. However, this was not
explicitly examined in Chapter VII study and should be a challenge for future
research.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

This monograph has explored the interplay between secure base

behavior, attachment representations, and co-construction processes during
early childhood, and has presented a conceptual and methodological
framework centered around the “secure base construct” (Waters &
Cummings, 2000) that can be used for future investigations. Although the
studies are interrelated and help build a coherent understanding of
attachment during this time period, they represent relatively small-scale
studies. Further, some of the effect sizes presented (the association between
children’s secure base behavior and secure base scripts—Study 2, Chapter
III—and the association between script scores and ratings for the high-scoring
co-construction video clips—Chapter VII) are small, or smaller than
expected. Future research will certainly need to be focused on tests of
replication as well as investigations that could extend findings to more diverse
samples. In addition, although the monograph’s focus on a specific age range
enabled our researchers to explore important facets of the interplay between
attachment behavior and representation at this time, that focus precluded the
exploration of links to earlier development (infancy) or later development
(middle childhood). Nor were we able to investigate links to the expanding
social world of the preschooler (peer relations).

Developmental Precursors and Consequences

We argue there is a link between the co-determination processes in
mother engaging her infant, elegantly described by Mary Ainsworth
(Ainsworth et al., 1978/2015), and subsequent maternal co-construction
skills, but we provide no developmental support for that link. Future research
will have to explore the longitudinal association between maternal/caregiver
sensitivity during infancy and co-construction skills during the preschool
years. Additionally, we need to study maternal/caregiver verbal communica-
tion during infancy, as the roots of co-construction skills may be expressed at
that time. Research work by Posada, Carbonell, Alzate, and Plata (2004)
indicates significant maternal differences in the use of language during
interactions between mothers of infants who are skillful in the use of their
mother as a secure base and mothers of less skillful infants. Also, we contend

127
that important acquisitions in language and representational skills occur
during childhood, yet, we did not track the transformations of secure base
scripts vis-a-vis changes in secure base support and use during this time
period. That kind of work is important to understand the developmental
course of secure base scripts. A good example of this type of work is the
research of Bosmans, Van de Walle, Heylen, De Winter, and Bijttebier (2017)
on the development of attachment script knowledge from middle childhood
into adolescence.
In addition, the monograph stays focused on mother–child interac-
tion, but the preschoolers’ world is expanding into a broader social world
that includes the peer group and adults other than parents. There is much
literature on the links between child security and peer competence.
Numerous studies have found that individual differences in infant security
significantly predict social competence when interacting with peers and
nonparental adults (e.g., Berlin, Cassidy, & Appleyard, 2008; Groh et al.,
2014; Pallini, Baiocco, Schneider, Madigan, & Atkinson, 2014; Schenider,
Atkinson, & Tardiff, 2001; Thompson, 2016). One of the mechanisms
hypothesized to account for this association is concerned with the
knowledge about relationships acquired in the child’s transactions with
attachment figures. It would be interesting to explore the relations
between children’s secure base script knowledge and their social
competence, and the role child attachment scripts may play (e.g.,
mediator, moderator) in the frequently reported relations between child
security and social competence. Similarly, future studies may consider the
study of caregiver/mothers’ ability to discuss with their children peer-
related scenarios that contain emotion-laden content (i.e., co-construc-
tion of peer relations). A set of studies (Noblega et al., 2017; Shin, 2017;
Vaughn, Posada, & Verissimo, 2017; Verissimo et al., 2017) investigating
the associations between preschoolers’ secure base script knowledge and
social competence in preschool settings is a good illustration of the kind
of research suggested.

Implications for Attachment Intervention

The findings on maternal co-construction suggest that focusing on how
mothers communicate with their children should be incorporated into the
general attachment intervention tool box, particularly when children enter
the preschool years and can engage in more elaborate verbal as well as
behavioral exchanges. Many intervention programs are designed to
improve mother sensitivity (Berlin, Zeanah, & Lieberman, 2016; Bakermans-
Kranenburg, van IJzendoorn, & Juffer, 2003), but researchers have also noted
that sensitive parenting shifts from physical behavior to include more verbal
exchanges with age (e.g., Valentino, 2017).

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There has in fact been some progress in this direction, with Valentino’s
work on training emotion-rich reminiscing skills with maltreating parents
and their preschool-aged children (Valentino, Comas, Nuttall, & Thomas,
2013), although the focus was on improving emotion-rich reminiscing talk
in the parent–child pairs rather than attachment status. The current
findings suggest that similar interventions with at-risk parent–preschooler
dyads could be directed toward impacting attachment outcomes (child
security and script knowledge), particularly by recasting them within a
co-construction framework. Indeed Valentino (2017) makes the same point
when she states “parents’ abilities to co-construct elaborative and
emotionally supportive narratives about children’s emotional experiences
become critical in shaping children’s representational models of self and
others” (p. 364) in discussing relational interventions appropriate beyond
infancy and toddlerhood.
But of course, much more research is needed in order to go beyond
the more traditional focus on mother sensitivity in behavioral exchanges
from infancy to early childhood that are incorporated in many
intervention programs. Critical to that effort, at least in terms of how
we have framed the idea of co-construction, is to embed that effort within
a conceptual and methodological secure base script framework. Step one
would certainly be to test the extension of the current findings to more
diverse, at-risk samples. Some efforts on that score have already
occurred. Zakir, Huth-Bocks, and Waters (2015) showed that maternal
script knowledge predicted child security (Attachment Q-Set [AQS]
scores), using an at-risk sample. Not surprisingly there were lower levels
of secure base script knowledge among these mothers, and some links to
education suggesting verbal tasks like the ASA may be more challenging
in some groups of mothers. Even more recent findings by Ruiz, Waters,
and Yates (2017) showed that secure base script knowledge in an at-risk
group of children (age 6—story stem completion task) serves as a
mediator between early life stress and later maladaptation (behavior
problems at age 8).
These studies represent the beginnings of in-depth investigations of
secure base scripts and their developmental implications with more diverse,
at-risk populations. At the same time, the current findings, specifically the
study described in Chapter VII, also argue for using script knowledge in a
more diagnostic manner as well. Those findings suggested that mothers
with secure base script knowledge are more amenable to interventions that
guide their attention to important features of secure base support in
mother–child interactions. We look forward to future research that builds
on this work and further explore how secure base script knowledge may
guide comprehension and retention of parenting-skills training within
intervention programs.

129
Cross-Cultural Challenges and Implications for Future Work
A limitation of the studies presented is that all but one were conducted
with middle-class samples in the United States. Thus, questions come up
about their relevance and applicability to samples from different back-
grounds. The logic of attachment theory, however, accommodates context-
related differences in mother–child relationships, in addition to its universal
implications as a species characteristic phenomenon. Research about the
relevance of maternal secure base support throughout the early childhood
years, factors that impact its stability and change in diverse life conditions, and
cultural practices remain to be studied. Studies have shown that everyday
circumstances (e.g., stressful events) impact mother–child relationships (e.g.,
Bar-Haim, Sutton, & Fox, 2000; Levendosky, Bogat, Huth-Bocks, Rosenblum,
& von Eye, 2011; Moss, Cyr, Bureau, Tarabulsy, & Dubois-Comtois, 2005;
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2001; Posada et al., 1999).
Moreover, questions about how maternal secure base support is manifested,
as well as common and unique characteristics in those manifestations in
different contexts continue to be unanswered. These issues are ever more
pressing as language and mental representation become increasingly
sophisticated and relevant in children’s interactions, and presumably,
important tools that attachment figures use when communicating with their
child. Related research indicates that although some commonalities may
exist, cultural variability may also be expected (Coppola, Ponzetti, & Vaughn,
2014; Wang, 2016).
The study with a Romanian sample (Chapter VI) is an example of the
kind of work needed. Studies with different social and cultural groups should
pose an exciting challenge (e.g., Bosmans et al., 2017; Vaughn et al., 2006;
Wong et al., 2011). Beyond testing for replication and the generalizability of
findings, they need to address specific contextual/cultural processes (e.g.,
practices impacting mother–child interactions and communication) that may
influence the organization of the attachment system during early childhood.
For example, we have limited knowledge about how culturally guided
mother–child conversation practices (e.g., how mothers and children talk
about emotions) could impact differently the acquisition of the secure base
script. Wang (2001) has provided evidence about cultural differences in
mother–child conversations about emotions from volume, to explanations,
cognitive style, and narrative social context of those conversations between
Chinese and U.S. samples. We know little about the intersection between
secure base scripts, co-construction processes and culture, but there is no
reason to doubt that those interactions exist, as they do for other basic
psychological processes such as emotion knowledge (Wang, 2016). We look
forward to research work that builds on the findings presented here and
further explores how a secure base framework may contribute to our

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increasing understanding of parent–child attachment relationships in

different contexts.

CONCLUSIONS

The work presented studied co-construction processes of mother–child

attachment relationships during early childhood, by testing the notion that
dyadic behavioral and verbal exchanges remain central to the organization of
child secure base behavior and knowledge. In doing that, we used a secure
base conceptual framework to understand maternal contributions to
behavioral exchanges and verbally guided communications with their young
children. We further extended that framework to the study of children and
mothers’ secure base script knowledge, and explored how that knowledge
influences maternal expectations and judgments of mother–child
interactions.
We hope that the evidence presented motivates investigators to expand
on the study of caregiver–child co-constructive processes implicated in the
organization of young children’s attachment control system, at a point in time
when language and information processing skills gain in relevance. The
developmental antecedents and consequences of the processes explored
need to be investigated, as well as the elaboration of child attachment
narratives, secure base behavior organization, and caregiver’s co-construction
skills as the child ages. Future research will need to address the
generalizability of findings to samples from different sociocultural contexts
and explore potential applications to attachment intervention programs. We
look ahead to further work on interpersonal developmental processes that
increase our understanding of caregiver–child attachment relationships
across age.

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