Attachment Parenting

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.

Many adopted and foster children have had very difficult and painful histories with their first parents. These children have experienced chronic early maltreatment within a caregiving relationship. Such a history can lead to the development of Complex Trauma (Cook et. al., 2003; Cook et. al., 2005), disorders of attachment, and Reactive Attachment Disorder. Children with histories of maltreatment, such as physical and psychological neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse, are at risk of developing severe psychiatric problems (Gauthier, Stollak, Messe, & Arnoff, 1996; Malinosky-Rummell & Hansen, 1993). These children are likely to develop Reactive Attachment Disorder (Greenberg, 1999; Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999).

Approximately 2% of the population is adopted, and between 50% and 80% of such children have attachment disorder symptoms (Carlson, Cicchetti, Barnett, & Braunwald, 1995; Cicchetti, Cummings, Greenberg, & Marvin, 1990). Many of these children are violent (Robins, 1978) and aggressive (Prino & Peyrot, 1994) and as adults are at risk of developing a variety of psychological problems (Schreiber & Lyddon, 1998) and personality disorders, including antisocial personality disorder (Finzi, Cohen, Sapir, & Weizman, 2000), narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and psychopathic personality disorder (Dozier, Stovall, & Albus, 1999). Therapeutic Parenting is often necessary to help these children heal (Becker-Weidman, A., & Shell, D., 2005/2008). This approach to parenting is often not familiar to most parents and requires a significant amount of work and preparation.

Attachment facilitating parenting is grounded in attachment theory and is based on a set of principles that include:

• Sensitivity
• Responsiveness
• Following the child’s lead
• The sharing of congruent intersubjective experiences
• Creating a sense of safety and security

The effective implementation of these principles requires parents who:
• Are strongly committed to the child.
• Have well developed reflective abilities
• Have good insightfulness
• Have a relatively secure state of mind with respect to attachment

This type of parenting is consistent with Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, which is an evidence-based and effective treatment for children with trauma and attachment disorders (Becker-Weidman & Hughes, 2008). Many foster and adoptive parents find their children’s behaviors strange, frightening, disturbing, and upsetting. They often don’t understand why their child behaves as the child does; “after all, my child is now safe, doesn’t he get it?” It can be difficult to appreciate the depth and pervasiveness of the damage caused by earlier maltreatment.

Therapeutic parenting based on Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy relies of helping parents understand what is causing the child’s behaviors. Looking deeper in order to understand what is motivating the child. All behavior is adaptive and functional; however sometimes the behaviors that were adaptive in one environment are ill-suited for the new home. If your first parents were neglectful, unreliable, and inconsistent so that you were often hungry and left alone for long periods of time, hoarding food, gorging, and going to “anyone” for help is adaptive. When that child is placed in a foster or adoptive home with caring, responsive, sensitive parents, that same behavior is no longer adaptive. By understanding what is driving the behavior and appreciating the child’s fear, anxieties, shame, and anger, the new parent will be better able to respond to the emotions driving the behavior rather than the surface behavior or symptoms. Unless the underlying emotions are addressed with sensitivity and within a safe, unconditionally loving, and supportive home, the behavior or symptoms are not likely to stop…they may change into other problems, but if the underlying cause remains, then the problems will surface again and again.

Let’s discuss the principles required. These principles are more fully elaborated elsewhere (Becker-Weidman & Shell, 2005; Becker-Weidman, 2007)

SENSITIVITY. Because children with trauma and attachment disorders are often unable to describe their internal states, emotions, or thoughts, it becomes the job of the parent to do this with and for the child so that the child learns to do this. Of course, this is precisely what one does with a newborn, toddler, and child. We often help children manage their internal states by doing that with them. When a baby cries, we pick up the baby, comfort the child, and by so doing, regulate the child’s level of arousal. Over time the infant becomes increasingly proficient at doing this independently. The parent of a foster or adopted child must be sensitive to the internal states of their child so that the parent can respond to the underlying emotions driving behavior.

RESPONSIVENESS. Once the underlying emotion is identified, the parent must respond to this need or emotion, with sensitivity. By meeting the child’s need (to feel safe, loved, cared about, for food, drink, joy, etc) the child will internalize new and healthier models of relationships and parents.

FOLLOWING THE CHILD’S LEAD. By this I mean that the parent will need to respond to the child and follow the child’s lead in the sense of providing what the child is needing (comfort, affection, support, structure, etc) and at the child’s pace. It is very important to move at the child’s pace to create the necessary sense of safety and security that these children need.

THE SHARING OF CONGRUENT INTERSUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES. Intersubjectivity refers to shared emotion (also called attunement), share attention, and share intention. You can understand this if you think of playing a board game with your child. When you are playing some game together and enjoying the experience, you are sharing emotions (joy and a sense of competence), sharing attention (focusing on the game), and sharing intention (playing by the rules, both trying to win, having fun, etc.). Or another example, when talking about the death of the child’s loved grandparent, you both may share the same emotions (grief), both are recalling memories of the grandparent (shared intention and attention). It is the sharing of congruent intersubjective experiences, experiences in which all three elements are the shared, that helps the child heal and learn about intimacy and relationships.

CREATING A SENSE OF SAFETY AND SECURITY. Safety comes first. Unless the child is physically, emotionally, and psychologically safe, healing cannot occur. So, it is the job of the parent to create safety and security for the child. This then allows for the exploration of underlying feelings, thoughts, and memories. Without an alliance there can be no secure base. Without a secure base there can be no exploration. Without exploration there can be no integration. Without integration there can be no healing.
Unless the child feels safe, exploration is not possible.

So, what sort of parent is needed? We know form extensive research, that one of the best predictors of placement stability is the parent’s commitment to the child (Dozier, Grasso, Lindhiem, & Lewis, 2007). Therefore, building or rebuilding parental commitment is an important first step. Unless there is strong commitment, the child cannot feel safe and, as discussed above, safety is the most important first step in helping a hurt child heal.

Reflective capacity is also vital to placement stability and to the healing of adopted and foster children. The parent must be able to reflect on the child’s underlying emotions, how the past may be re-enacted in the present, and what in the parent’s own past is being triggered by the child. A well developed reflective function is necessary if the parent is to respond to the child in a healthy and healing manner. We all have buttons. The job of the therapeutic parent is to understand one’s buttons so that these can be disconnected so that when pushed, nothing happens.

Insightfulness (Koren-Karie, Oppenheim, Dolev, Sher, & Etzion-Carasso, 2002; Oppenheim, Koren-Karie, & Sagi, 2001; Oppenheim, & Koren-Karie, 2002; Oppenheim, Goldsmith, & Koren-Karie, 2005) is related to reflective capacity.

A parent’s state of mind with respect to attachment is the best predictor of the child’s. (Main, & Cassidy, 1988; Main, & Hesse, 1990). If the parent has a Secure state of mind with respect to attachment, then the adopted or foster child is more likely to develop a healthy and secure pattern of attachment and heal (Steele, Hodges, Kaniuk, Steele, Hillman, & Asquith, 2008). We know that when young children are placed in a foster home, the child will begin to develop a pattern of attachment that is the same as the foster parent’s state of mind with respect to attachment (Dozier, Stovall, Albus, & Bates, 2001). Obviously, in older children, this is a more difficult task. In the general population, about 60% of the adults have a secure state of mind with respect to attachment. For parents who have an insecure state of mind with respect to attachment, they can still learn to parent effectively with help (Becker-Weidman, A., & Shell, D., 2005/2008; Bick & Dozier, 2008).

Arthur Becker-Weidman, Ph.D.
Center For Family Development
Reposted from: International Adoption Articles Directory

USEFUL RESOURCES FOR PARENTS
1. Becker-Weidman, A., (2007). Principles of Attachment Parenting. 3-set DVD. Williamsville, NY: Center for Family Development.
2. Becker-Weidman, A., & Shell, D., (Eds.) (2005/2008) Creating Capacity for Attachment, Oklahoma City, OK: Wood N Barnes/ Williamsville, NY: Center For Family Development.
3. Golding, K., (2008). Nurturing Attachments. London: Jessica Kingsley.
4. Hughes, D. (2006) Building the Bonds of Attachment, 2nd edition, Jason Aronson, Lanham, MD. .
5. Siegel, D., & Hartzell, M., (2003). Parenting from the Inside out. Tarcher.