Challenging Attachment Theory

This book is a tour de force, wherein Keller shares her conceptual brilliance and knowledge in informative and entertaining ways. It is an essential aid in increasing inclusivity, and decreasing colonial practices in how we interact with children and families. Amid constructive criticism of current theory and practice in developmental psychology (rightly characterized as WEIRD, pertaining to mostly Western middle-income contexts), Keller brings illuminating descriptions of children developing within a wide variety of ecocultural contexts around the world. I can easily conceive of this book as becoming integral in the education of University students, of Ethics Review Boards, and of practitioners, from pediatricians to teachers, from those providing parenting advice to those providing early interventions. This book is an exemplary presentation of the need for and benefits of viewing childhood within eco-cultural context.

-Prof Dr Kim A. Bard, Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology,Affiliate Scientist, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

This is a book that begins with life and compels theory to respond. Emerging from a trajectory that moves from kitchens to communities, from observation to uneasy understanding, it unsettles the long-standing assumption that culture is a variable to be added to psychological models. Here, culture appears as the very ground of perception, the condition through which development becomes intelligible.

What gives this work its force is its engagement with diverse childhoods across contexts, and its methodological honesty. The recognition that not knowing language, misreading practices, and depending on others are not limitations to be overcome, but conditions that reshape what it means to know. In this sense, the book offers a rare account of how psychological knowledge is actually made through relationships, mistakes, and sustained encounters with difference.

Its return to attachment theory is particularly significant. Rather than accepting or dismissing it, the author approaches it as an ethical problem, one that must be confronted in light of the many childhoods that lie outside its assumptions. This is not critique for its own sake, but an insistence that widely accepted frameworks be made answerable to the worlds they claim to describe.

Situated within ongoing efforts to decolonize psychology, this book does something more demanding: it does not simply call for change, but demonstrates how such change emerges from a lifetime of engagement with people, practices, and places that resist easy translation. It will be of interest not only to developmental psychologists, but to anyone concerned with how knowledge travels, transforms, and sometimes fails.

-Prof Dr. Nandita Chaudhary, Professor to the Department of Cultural Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador da Bahia

This book is a tour de force, wherein Keller shares her conceptual brilliance and knowledge in informative and entertaining ways. It is an essential aid in increasing inclusivity, and decreasing colonial practices in how we interact with children and families. Amid constructive criticism of current theory and practice in developmental psychology (rightly characterized as WEIRD, pertaining to mostly Western middle-income contexts), Keller brings illuminating descriptions of children developing within a wide variety of ecocultural contexts around the world. I can easily conceive of this book as becoming integral in the education of University students, of Ethics Review Boards, and of practitioners, from pediatricians to teachers, from those providing parenting advice to those providing early interventions. This book is an exemplary presentation of the need for and benefits of viewing childhood within eco-cultural context.

-Prof Dr Kim A. Bard, Professor of Comparative Developmental Psychology,Affiliate Scientist, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

This is a book that begins with life and compels theory to respond. Emerging from a trajectory that moves from kitchens to communities, from observation to uneasy understanding, it unsettles the long-standing assumption that culture is a variable to be added to psychological models. Here, culture appears as the very ground of perception, the condition through which development becomes intelligible.

What gives this work its force is its engagement with diverse childhoods across contexts, and its methodological honesty. The recognition that not knowing language, misreading practices, and depending on others are not limitations to be overcome, but conditions that reshape what it means to know. In this sense, the book offers a rare account of how psychological knowledge is actually made through relationships, mistakes, and sustained encounters with difference.

Its return to attachment theory is particularly significant. Rather than accepting or dismissing it, the author approaches it as an ethical problem, one that must be confronted in light of the many childhoods that lie outside its assumptions. This is not critique for its own sake, but an insistence that widely accepted frameworks be made answerable to the worlds they claim to describe.

Situated within ongoing efforts to decolonize psychology, this book does something more demanding: it does not simply call for change, but demonstrates how such change emerges from a lifetime of engagement with people, practices, and places that resist easy translation. It will be of interest not only to developmental psychologists, but to anyone concerned with how knowledge travels, transforms, and sometimes fails.

-Prof Dr. Nandita Chaudhary, Professor to the Department of Cultural Psychology, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador da Bahia