Types of Attachment Patterns
The behaviors that babies show when they are distressed reflect the quality of their attachments to parents. Among “typical” parents and infants (i.e., those not in the foster care system), children develop expectations based on a long history of interactions with parents. One can then “see” these expectations as children behave in characteristically different fashions when they are distressed. We first describe these patterns seen among typical parents and infants before describing what we have found among foster infants and their caregivers.
Secure attachment.
If children come to expect that their mothers will be there when needed, they tend to develop secure attachments. We can see this secure attachment in the child's going to the mother for comfort when scared, concerned, hungry, or sick, for example. What differentiates these children from children with insecure attachments is not how hard they cry when they are upset, or how long it takes them to settle down, but rather their ability to use their parent to help them settle down.
Mothers of children with secure attachments are usually coherent in the way they talk about their own attachment figures and attachment experiences (van Ijzendoorn, 1995). They are neither caught up in earlier conflicts, nor do they try to distance themselves from attachment issues. Rather, they are able to talk coherently about attachment issues. Mary Main and her colleagues have developed an interview in which parents are asked about their attachment experiences (George, Kaplan, & Main, 1984). Parents are classified as having "autonomous states of mind" when they are open and coherent in their description of attachment issues.
Avoidant attachment.
When children come to expect that their mothers will not be there when needed, they develop insecure attachments. Children whose mothers are rejecting of their bids for reassurance tend to develop avoidant attachments. There are a number of ways parents might be rejecting. Take, for example, a boy who falls off a chair and comes crying to his mother. Rather than hug the child, one mother says, "Look at the bird in the tree"; another mother says, "You're a big boy, you don't need to cry"; whereas still a third says, "I told you not to get up on that chair." In all three instances, the child has gotten the message that he will not be reassured when hurt. If this characterizes the mother's usual response to the child, the child will then develop the expectation that the mother will not be available when he is distressed. Such children tend to develop avoidant attachments. For example, they may first look to the parent and then turn abruptly away (seeming to remember that they should not look to the parent for reassurance), or may just appear indifferent to the parent's presence. This strategy makes sense, and can be seen as adaptive with this parent - the child is asking no more of the parent than the parent is willing to give.
Mothers of children with avoidant attachments are often dismissing or devaluing of their own attachment experiences (Main & Solomon, 1990). When asked to talk about attachment figures, they may describe them in idealized ways. For example, they may characterize parents as "wonderful and loving," but may not be able to instantiate the description with specific examples. Thus, there is a not quite "real" quality to their glowing characterizations. Also, these mothers are often limited in their recall of specific incidences of distress when they were young. In general, they are not comfortable thinking through challenging attachment issues or in considering the impact of attachment on current functioning. The discomfort these mothers experience may make it difficult for them to deal with their children's distress. These mothers are said to have "dismissing states of mind" with regard to attachment.
Resistant attachment.
When parents are inconsistent in responding to their children's distress, children are left not knowing whether their needs will be attended to or not.
These children often develop resistant attachments to their parents, behaving in fussy and inconsolable ways when upset. They appear to want contact with their parents, yet resist that contact. As with avoidant attachment, these behaviors can be seen as adaptive - the child asks for reassurance frequently from a parent who gives it only intermittently.
Mothers of children with resistant attachments are often caught up in their own attachment issues. During the attachment interview, they may angrily report events from the past as if they were current, or ramble from one topic to another without being able to focus clearly on the issue at hand. These mothers' preoccupation with their own attachment issues may interfere with their ability to respond consistently to their children's needs. These mothers are said to have "preoccupied states of mind" with regard to attachment.
Disorganized attachment.
When caregivers behave in frightening ways to children, children are most likely to show a breakdown in attachment strategy when they are distressed and in their parents' presence. According to Mary Main, these children seem to have an irreconcilable dilemma - they are frightened of the person to whom they look for reassurance (Main & Solomon, 1990). Parents may be frightening to children in a variety of ways - certainly one way is through actually harming or threatening to harm the child. But children can also be frightened of parents who threaten to leave them, who play in a too-threatening fashion, or who treat the child as if the child were frightening. Children with disorganized attachments can show a range of behaviors, such as entering trance-like states when distressed, moving away from the parent when distressed, or showing an odd combination of behaviors that do not serve a clear goal.
Parents of children with disorganized attachments often have a loss or abuse in their own past that they have not worked through fully. This previous trauma appears to lead the parent to act in ways that are either frightening (e.g., scaring the child) or frightened (e.g., treating child as if he or she could hurt the parent). These mothers are said to be "unresolved" with regard to attachment.
Although some attachment theorists and researchers may take issue with us, we suggest that it is disorganized attachment that confers the most significant risk for later psychopathology. Whereas it might be optimal that children develop secure attachments, children with avoidant and resistant attachments have strategies that are well suited to their caregivers. Such insecurely attached children are at somewhat increased risk for anxiety disorders (Warren, Huston, Egeland & Sroufe, 1997), and for somewhat less optimal outcomes with teachers and peers (e.g., Elicker, Englund & Sroufe, 1992). Nonetheless, we suggest that the risk for psychopathology associated with avoidant or resistant attachment is not especially high. On the other hand, disorganized attachment is associated with a range of later problems, including especially dissociative symptoms (e.g., child seeming to be "in a fog," "out of it," or detached) (Carlson, 1998), but also internalizing symptoms (e.g., depressive and anxiety) and externalizing symptoms (e.g., acting out) (Lyons-Ruth, 1996; Lyons-Ruth, Alpern, & Repacholi, 1993). Therefore, it is disorganized attachment that we want to work especially hard to remediate.
Foster children’s attachments.
There are several reasons why we might expect foster children to have difficulty forming secure attachments with their new foster parents. These children have often experienced compromised prenatal environments, they may have been abused or neglected, and they suffered a disruption in their primary relationships. In addition, our diary data indicate that these children often behave in ways that push caregivers away.
The quality of the child’s attachment to the caregiver was assessed using the Strange Situation after children had been in their foster homes at least 3 months. The Strange Situation is a standard procedure used for assessing attachment (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). Foster mothers were given the Adult Attachment Interview (George et al., 1984) to assess their state of mind with regard to attachment. We assessed the association between maternal state of mind and child attachment among 50 foster care dyads.
To our surprise, attachment state of mind predicted child attachment at nearly the same level as among birth parents and children (Dozier, Albus, Stovall & Bates, 2001). Most children (68%) placed with autonomous caregivers formed secure attachments with their caregivers, and most children (81%) placed with non-autonomous caregivers formed insecure attachments. This was seen regardless of when children were placed into care; even children placed as late as 20 months of age developed secure attachments with autonomous caregivers.
That children placed with autonomous caregivers were likely to form secure attachments was surely good news. However, our data also provided some bad news. When foster children were placed with non-autonomous caregivers, they were likely to form disorganized attachments at very high rates. Indeed, 72% of children placed with non- autonomous caregivers formed disorganized attachments. It did not matter whether children were placed with dismissing or unresolved caregivers; in either case they were very likely to form disorganized attachments. We suggest that foster children cannot develop organized attachment strategies unless they have nurturing (i.e., autonomous) caregivers. Thus, it is critical that foster parents are nurturing, or at least that they learn to respond to their foster children's bids for distress in nurturing ways.
The second component of our intervention program targets foster parent nurturance. Foster parents are encouraged to look at their own issues that might interfere with their providing sensitive, nurturing care. They are urged to consider how essential nurturance is for foster children - even if their own children could adapt to non-nurturing care, foster children require nurturance if they are to thrive.
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