Marriage and Family

Attachment is the deep and enduring connection established between a child and caregiver in the first several years of life. It profoundly influences every component of the human condition - mind, body, emotions, relationships and values. Attachment is not something that parents do to their children; rather, it is something that children and parents create together, in an ongoing reciprocal relationship. Attachment to a protective and loving caregiver who provides guidance and support is a basic human need, rooted in millions of years of evolution. There is an instinct to attach: babies instinctively reach out for the safety and security of the "secure base" with caregivers; parents instinctively protect and nurture their offspring. Attachment is a physiological, emotional, cognitive and social phenomenon. Instinctual attachment behaviors in the baby are activated by cues or signals from the caregiver (social releasers). Thus, the attachment process is defined as a "mutual regulatory system" - the baby and the caregiver influencing one another over time.

Beyond the basic function of secure attachment - providing safety and protection for the vulnerable young via closeness to a caregiver - there are several other important functions for children:

Children who begin their lives with the essential foundation of secure attachment fare better in all aspects of functioning as development unfolds. Numerous longitudinal studies have demonstrated that securely attached infants and toddlers do better over time in the following areas:

CORE BELIEFS

Early experiences with caregivers shape a child's core beliefs about self, others, and life in general. Experiences of the baby and young child are encoded in the brain. Emotional experiences of nurturance and protection are encoded in the brain's limbic area, the emotional center. Over time, repeated encoded experiences become internal working models - core beliefs about self, self in relation to others, and the world in general. These core beliefs become the lens through which children (and later adults) view themselves and others, especially authority and attachment figures. Core beliefs serve to interpret the present and anticipate the future.

The core beliefs of children who have experienced secure and compromised attachments in the early years are as follows:

Secure Attachment:

The goal of Corrective Attachment Parenting is not merely to change childrens' behavior, but rather to change their negative core beliefs. This is quite challenging, because core beliefs are rigid, automatic, and associated with self-protection and survival. Your relationship with your child becomes the pathway to change and healing. Without change, negative core beliefs formed early in life remain fixed into adulthood, with severe social and emotional consequences.

More and more children are failing to develop secure attachments to loving, protective caregivers. These children are left without the most important foundation for healthy development. They are flooding our child welfare system with an overwhelming array of problems - emotional, behavioral, social, cognitive, developmental, physical and moral - and growing up to perpetuate the cycle with their own children. Research has shown that up to 80% of high risk families (abuse and neglect, poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence, history of maltreatment in parents' childhood, depression and other psychological disorders in parents) create severe attachment disorder tendencies in their children. Since there are one million substantiated cases of serious abuse and neglect in the U.S. each year, the statistics indicate that there are 800,000 children with severe attachment disorder tendencies coming to the attention of the child welfare system each year. This does not include thousands of children with attachment disorder tendencies adopted from other countries.

Disrupted and anxious attachment not only leads to emotional and social problems, but also results in biochemical consequences in the developing brain. Infants raised without loving touch and security have abnormally high levels of stress hormones, which can impair the growth and development of their brains and bodies. The neurobiological consequences of emotional neglect can leave children behaviorally disordered, depressed, apathetic, slow to learn, and prone to chronic illness. Compared to securely attached children, attachment disordered children are significantly more likely to be aggressive, disruptive and antisocial. Teenage boys, for example, who have experienced attachment difficulties early in life, are three times more likely to commit violent crimes. Disruption of attachment during the crucial first three years can lead to what has been called "affectionless psychopathy", the inability to form meaningful emotional relationships, coupled with chronic anger, poor impulse control, and a lack of remorse.

An attachment disorder tendency is transmitted intergenerationally. Children lacking secure attachments with caregivers commonly grow up to be parents who are incapable of establishing this crucial foundation with their own children. Instead of following the instinct to protect, nurture and love their children, they abuse, neglect and abandon. The situation is out of control. Consider the following:

Children who begin their lives with compromised and disrupted attachment are at risk for serious problems as development unfolds:

Attachment disorder tendencies affect all aspect of a child's functioning. A child may display some combination of the following primary characteristics:

Listed below are situations and experiences that place children at high-risk for developing attachment disorder tendencies: