| Sir Richard Bowlby |
After a career in medical and scientific photography, Sir Richard retired in 1999 to spend his time studying the work of his father, John Bowlby, the pioneer researcher on the impact of early attachment relationships between parents and their young children.
Richard actively promotes a wider understanding of the rapidly growing body of attachment research. He travels around the world collaborating with attachment workers and their organisations and giving talks on attachment, drawing on personal insights into how his father assembled his research information. He freely distributes information and training videos on Attachment Theory.
Richard offers the following observation:
‘Disruptive children, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, depression and crime, are problems that usually share a common origin. It is the quality of the earliest attachment relationships formed between parents and their babies that tend to predispose the behaviour of the developing child and emerging adult. There is now overwhelming long-term scientific evidence that points to the first two years of a person’s life as the critical period for their personality traits to become established. These patterns of behaviour are wired up in the infant's developing brain, and when they later become parents they will frequently find themselves repeating the experiences of their own childhood with their child.’
Our vision is to create a world where every child is loved and cared for, and where every person is treated with respect. The focus of our work is to eliminate child abuse and violence.