Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/parent-child-caregiver-the-attachment-triangle/5016175/
One of the most consistently recurring themes in great literature is the love triangle �" Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Isolde and King Mark, and countless others. No one as yet has produced an immortal story about it; but a love triangle plays itself out day after day in the lives of parents, young children, and caregivers. Although we rarely conceptualize it in this way, parents and caregivers subtly compete for the love of the child. And the child, in the innocent way of all children, wants them both to love him �" and wants to control both of them!In one sense of the word, parents and the child care personnel they use are essentially shift-workers. Both work for the same company �" the broad field of human development and welfare �" at the same job �" helping to rear a particular child or group of children. The hours are different, and the job descriptions are not identical. But the roles and functions are so similar that we used to refer to child care as “substitute care,” implying that all that was involved was that the caregiver substituted for the parents while they were unavailable. Although the term “substitute ...