Adopting a child or becoming a foster parent can be an emotionally rewarding experience for parents.  However this experience can be marred with failed expectations and a lack of historical and in depth information around the child and birth parents.  This information is critical to helping parents understand the cognitive, emotional and physical needs of their children. And, what was to be a rewarding experience is now wrought with a search for answers on how to close the gap between parent and child.

Slowly, as parents enter into the journey of bonding with their children, they may begin to see the signs of a child exhibiting the signs of insecure attachment.  This can often be a frustrating process as the expectations of a child who is to be happy and grateful for a clean home with loving parents, just didn’t quite materialize in the way it was suppose to in the minds of many parents.  So the question becomes, how do new foster and adoptive parents create secure attachments with their children?

Enter attachment parenting of foster and adopted children.

What Is Attachment And Why Is It Important?

Building a secure attachment between parent and child is key to the pair developing a healthy and emotionally secure relationship.  Early attachment styles determine how children will relate to the world around them. Foster/adopted children often struggle with this as they have been removed from their primary caregivers at an early age.  In some cases, the primary care givers may have been present but the emotional bond needed to build a secure attachment was not.  According to Attachment Parenting, this often times results in a child who may exhibit the following attachment styles:

1) Secure- these infants actively explore, they get upset when their mother leaves, are happy upon reunion and seek physical contact with their mother. Mothers of secure babies are typically loving and responsive to their infant, quick to pick them up when they cried, hold them longer and “with more apparent pleasure.”

2) Insecure-ambivalent (anxious/resistant): these infants stays close to their mothers, there is limited exploration, they become very distressed upon separation and ambivalent toward their mother upon reunion but remain near her. Mothers of anxious babies were observed to be “more mean-spirited to merely cool, from chaotic to pleasantly incompetent. Though well meaning, these mothers have difficulty responding to their babies “in a loving, attuned, consistent way.”

3) Insecure-avoidant: these infants show little distress when separated, ignore their mother’s attempts to interact, are often sociable with strangers or may ignore them as they ignore their mother. These mothers often have an aversion to physical contact themselves and speak sarcastically to their babies.

4) Insecure-disorganized/disoriented: these infants are the most distressed upon separation and are considered the most insecure. They seem confused upon reunion and exhibit behaviors that appear to be a combination of resistant and avoidant.

Debra Wesselmann gives us the following ingredients for a secure attachment:

Physical

• Consistent touch and eye contact
• Cradling and cuddling an infant before bedtime
• Hugging a teenager periodically to increase the sense of a physical connection

Emotional

• Build an emotional connection by becoming attuned with your child’s feelings.  Children can sense their parents’ level of emotional attunement based on how they respond in different situations
• Empathize with feelings of disappointment or insecurity in order to build a secure emotional connection.  This reassures the child that they are loved and accepted in good and bad times.
• Execute discipline in a manner that is consistent and empathetic as this can increase the emotional connection between parent and child.

Consistent Environment

• Provide a safe, consistent and predictable environment
• Even during times when behaviors are out of control, children need to know that parents and/or guardians will be steady and calm
• This may include: a consistent schedule, consistent limits and consistent parental responses.

Without these ingredients, children build emotional walls which may prevent secure emotional attachments to parents and/or primary caregivers.  It is also important to also assess your own attachment style as a parent which can often give some insight into the attachment issues with a foster/adopted child.  Often, parents don’t realize that their own attachment styles are indicative of whether or not their children will in turn attach in a healthy manner.

Individual and/or family therapy is also an option which gives parent and child a chance to come together and face the issues they are experiencing with each other head on.  An astute family therapist with experience in dealing with attachment issues can bridge the chasm and help put these issues in perspective.