Young children seek and find support, trust and security from parents and carers. This process is called bonding. When a child asks for comfort, nourishment and protection from a parent / caregiver, it displays behavior that provokes that parent / caregiver to be around. Attachment provides for both emotional and relational development of a child. The attachment relationship allows for healthy exploration of the environment and further development.
Attachment disorders
In order to be able to detect attachment disorders, criteria have been drawn up for the infant age or early childhood:
Behaviour
Disturbed social ties that do not fit with the development before the fifth year.
- Children cannot initiate or respond to most age-appropriate social interactions. They show great inhibition, contradictory reactions and too much vigilance. They don’t want to be comforted and hesitate when they approach or distance themselves when they don’t have to.
- Children show superficial attachment. For example, they are overly friendly with a stranger or cannot choose who their attachment figures are.
Care
- Parents / carers persistently neglect a child’s basic emotional needs. They do not provide comfort, love, and encouragement.
- Parents / carers persistently neglect a child’s basic physical needs.
- The care of a child by a permanent caregiver is changed too often.
Ainsworth
Ainsworth devised a test to determine a young child’s attachment level, the Strange situation procedure.
Four things are measured:
- Can the child explore in a strange environment, alone or in the presence of others?
- The child’s reaction to others leaving.
- The child’s response to the reunion with those others.
- A child’s response to the presence of a stranger and how it interacts.
A child is placed in four categories of attachment after this test.
Securely attached children
These children show a good balance between exploring their environment and attachment behavior.
Insecurely avoiding attached children
These children explore the environment intensively and uninhibitedly. They ask too little support from their parents, even if necessary.
Insecurely ambivalent or hostile children
These children either cling to the parent / caregiver or repel the parent / caregiver and are difficult to comfort. They hardly examine their environment.
Disoriented and disorganized children
These children don’t seem to know clearly what they want. When a person leaves, they cry, when they are reunited they do not go to the person. They seem to be afraid of it.
Insecurely attached children may later develop other disorders such as sleep disorders, eating disorders, behavioral, mood and anxiety disorders. Insecure attachments and trauma significantly increase the chance of later psychological problems.
Risk factors
With the child
- unwanted child
- premature child
- physical disabilities of the child
- prolonged hospitalization
- congenital disorders
- difficult temperament
With parents and family
- attachment of the parents
- unprocessed grief of parents
- divorce / death of parents
- psychological problems of parents
- neglect, abuse
- trauma during pregnancy or shortly afterwards
- teenage mothers
- many changing regular educators
Surroundings
- no support for family or mother from outside
- poor housing or neighborhood
- low social status
- poverty, unemployment
- flee from the motherland
Treatment under the ACAAP (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry)
- good historical research on pregnancy and early childhood
- observation of the parent-child relationship
- investigate developmental delay, language and speech deficits
- in the absence, offering an attachment figure
- examining the feelings of parents / carers
- positive interaction between parents / guardians and child
- additional treatment for aggressive and opposing behavior
No Soil Syndrome (van Egmond)
Characteristics:
- No affective bonds in the first years of life
- No line in life, unstructuredness, no sense of time and space, learning difficulties arise
- no conscience development
- No presence of the I, no trust in adults. Inability and fear to form relationships
- Making superficial contacts
- The child wants to control the world, observes and manipulates. Learning achievements are weak.
- Emotional ties within the family are seen as threatening. The child feels lonely.
- The earliest experiences of being “unwanted,” “rejected,” destroy the child. The pain is directed against itself (self-mutilation) or against the mother. Physical violence is used, obsessive neuroses arise (stealing, destroying, provoking). There is a great hunger for attention.
- The child acts in favor of himself, with hardly any inhibitions.