Attachment relationships in Early Head Start families

The remarkable papers in this Special Issue underscore the importance of applied research on families in poverty, the opportunities to developmental science of the Early Head Start National Research and Evaluation Project, and the mutual benefits from collaborations between research scientists and program practitioners. This commentary highlights the insights of these papers concerning the consequences of maternal attachment style and mother-child interaction, the challenges of assessing attachment in intervention research, and the program and policy implications of these findings.