Perceived Security and extension of the child's rearing context: A parent-report approach.

It is argued here that Bowlby's monotropy thesis is theoretically and empirically untenable, and should be replaced by our “extension hypothesis”, which states that an optimal child-rearing context is formed by a network of more or less stable attachment relationships between the child and its caregivers. The “Perceived Security” scale is then introduced, a parent-report measure purporting to assess one aspect of the multi-dimensional attachment construct, that is, the degree to which the child feels secure in the more or less strange, potentially threatening situations it is likely to encounter in everyday life. After describing two validational studies with this Perceived Security scale (relating its score to Strange Situation classification results and data on the children's Temperament, respectively), two studies relating the children's Perceived Security to a number of operationalized aspects of the “extension hypothesis” are discussed. Both studies support this hypothesis in that their results suggest that an extension of the children's rearing context (both quantitatively and qualitatively) is associated with a higher degree of Perceived Security.