Parents everywhere seek a close emotional bond with their babies. They also strive to develop a parenting style that works with their values. Some parenting models favor treating children as little adults to be reasoned with. Others take an approach that stresses rule-following. They all aim to create self-reliant adults who can maintain healthy relationships and have families of their own.
With so much advice on different styles of parenting, how do you know what works? Sometimes trial and error work best. Every parent tests different approaches to see what ultimately works for the parent and the children.
Attachment parenting focuses on the nurturing connection that parents can develop with their children. That nurturing connection is viewed as the ideal way to raise secure, independent, and empathetic children.
Raising and trying to heal a child with a disorder of attachment or serious attachment disturbance is clearly a daunting challenge. Typically, parents struggle alone with the overwhelming sense that something is terribly wrong but not knowing what it is or how to fix it. Often, children with severe attachment problems manage to divide the adults in their lives, pitting the outside world against the family. This is usually a defensive strategy that helps them prevent closeness with their parents -- the thing that they most fear! Sadly, the outside world often misunderstands this, and the parents are blamed for the problems.
Without a way to understand what is happening, it is too easy for parents to blame themselves. And sometimes, when parents are at the end of their ropes, it is too easy to blame the child. When a vulnerable family most needs help, support, and understanding, too often, the result is to become more isolated and estranged from supportive resources.
Parents are then left alone in their own struggles to reach, manage, and help their clearly wounded child. For many parents, when they first learn of the terms "attachment disorder" or "Reactive Attachment Disorder," it is literally like someone threw them a lifeline when they were drowning in a storm at sea. Suddenly, there is a name for this problem that has overwhelmed their family, robbed them of even essential connection with their child, and, perhaps, even caused them to profoundly doubt their ability to be a parent. Sadly, for many, this momentary sense of hope is often then shattered by stories of devastating outcomes for these children. The purpose of this book is to try to help parents understand this severe challenge to their children's development and functioning while offering practical help.
Attachment does not exist in the child alone; instead, it is how that child learns to connect with and relate to significant others -- especially parents and primary caregivers.
What is important to remember is that the child's behaviors are symptoms of distorted thinking and feeling that came from early experiences with primary caregivers. We cannot talk children out of these ways of being. We cannot punish children out of these ways of being (indeed, doing so may only worsen!). Instead, we need to help children experience their way out of these habits of relating by offering them healthy relationships that provide the nurturing experiences they required when they were younger. The kind of experience they most need experiences with new or recovered parents who can really feel what it is to be them; help them make sense of what has happened to them in a way that does not mean they are unlovable and unworthy; and, learn new ways of relating that allows emotional connection and trust to grow. That can be a challenge when the child actively pushes against the parent's attempts to love and care for the child.
