Helping attachment
| Attachment | |
|---|---|
| Helping children to attach to parents | Closeness |
| Offering closeness when tired, hurt, ill, and after tantrums, even if not sought | |
| Discouraging closeness with others than immediate family | |
| Opportunities to communicate—shared one-to-one activities | |
| Teaching “language” (verbal and non-verbal) of closeness | |
| Safety (emotional and physical) | |
| Reducing the likelihood of failure | |
| Reducing competition for attention—allowing one-to-one time | |
| Preparation, explanation, routine, etc to reduce anxiety | |
| Avoiding circumstances likely to result in difficult behaviour | |
| Behaviour management: establishing control; clear boundaries; allowing success | |
| Calming strategies—touch, massage, music, etc; anxiety management techniques | |
| Helping parents to attach to children | Attunement |
| Helping parents to “see through the child’s eyes” and understand behaviour | |
| Reducing fear/stress/fatigue | |
| Ensuring that expectations for attachment are realistic | |
| Normality of adoptive parents attaching at different rates | |
| Normality of attaching more rapidly to one child than another | |
| Ensuring adequate support in the early stages of placement | |
| Acknowledgement of the difficulty of parenting without attachment | |
| Addressing guilt, fear, self-doubt; identifying signs of progress | |
| Support for post-placement depression | |
| Respite—informal or formal; encouraging self-care | |
| Secondary consequences/vicious circles | Understanding body signals—talking re body sensations—hunger, satiety, etc |
| Understanding emotions | |
| Parental attunement to the child’s feelings and mood, not behaviour | |
| Clear/exaggerated verbal and non-verbal responses to the child’s feelings—through touch, facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, etc | |
| Teaching words for feelings; discussion of feelings; use of role play, etc | |
| Teaching reading of body language, behaviour, facial expression, etc | |
| Peer relationships—active support of friendships; teaching cooperation, social skills, etc | |
| Stranger safety—education through discussion, books, play, etc | |
| Self-esteem | |
| Identification and development of strengths; ensuring success; focusing on positives | |
| Life story work to reduce guilt, shame, sense of responsibility for circumstances, etc | |
| Temper control problems—multiprofessional approach addressing causes and symptoms | |
| ADHD—low threshold for treatment, especially if interfering with mutual attachment | |
| Development/education | |
| Detailed assessment | |
| Low threshold for intervention because of risk of vicious circles | |
| Ensuring teachers’ understanding of the implications of attachment problems | |
| Specialised psychological services | Task definition—purpose, choice of resource, mode of delivery and timing of services focused on the priority of securing attachment |
| Service structure—allowing rapidity of response, to address crises | |
| Specific mental health problems | |
| Identification and treatment of depression, obsessional-compulsive disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc | |
| “Attachment therapy”—e.g. for avoidance of or ambivalence to closeness, difficulties with trust and control, etc, when simple strategies are insufficiently effective |