Attaching Through Love, Hugs and Play: Simple Strategies to Help Build Connections with Your Child

by Deborah D. Gray

Capturing the warmth and fun of forming close relationships with children, this book offers simple advice to parents of children who find it difficult to attach and bond - whether following adoption, divorce or other difficult experiences. Attachment therapist Deborah D. Gray describes how to use the latest thinking on attachment in your daily parenting. She reveals sensory techniques which have proven to help children bond - straightforward activities like keeping close eye contact or stroking a child's feet or cheeks - and explains why routines like mealtimes and play time are so important in helping children to attach. The book offers positive ideas for responding to immediate crises like difficult behaviour and meltdowns, but importantly also offers longer-term strategies to help children to develop the skills they need to cope as they grow up - the ability to plan, concentrate and be in control of their emotions. Offering fascinating insights into how children who struggle to attach can be helped, this book is full of easy-to-use ideas which will help you to enjoy the many pleasures of bonding and attaching with your child.

Genres: Adoption, Parenting, Nonfiction, Family

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Roozbeh Daneshvar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The target audience was foster and adoptive families, although the contents could apply to any family. This book was more hands on compared to her other two books on attachment and trauma. I found the contents engaging and applicable.

I am bringing a group of quotes from the book. I hope they are helpful, or give you a sense of what this book is about.

The neural firing patterns of parents are mimicked or echoed by infants and small children.

There is not a “critical window,” or a “use it or lose it” window within which children must make attachments. If you were delayed in beginning the attachment process with your child, it means that you will have to be more intentional in forming attachments. Children are wired to want to connect to parents, and to want to respond to sensitive and responsive parenting. But after adverse situations in life, children may have difficulty responding in the way that parents expect.

Even if you are the most chipper parent, you will feel like drawing back when you get a confusing or mixed response. But if you can stay the course, the research shows that you are likely to have the relationship that you long for in the majority of cases.

People with sensory sensitivities find the typical range of stimulation is overwhelming for them, or too little stimulation for them. They feel anxious and injured when overstimulated, or press into parents when seeking stimulation.

If sitting quietly and calmly is a requirement for snuggles with you, your child with attention deficit disorder may be quite limited in how long they are able to be with you. Instead, enjoy the child you have—wiggles, giggles, and all

The inside of our palms and the arches of our feet are areas of the body that alert people to attachment “cues.” These attachment “cues” are “signals” that cause people to respond with interest in a close relationship. When you are talking to children, and if you want to increase the positive signals for attachment, you can stroke the inside of your child’s palm

You can use a soothing touch by lightly stroking the side of your baby or child’s face, from the top of the head along the outside of the temples. You can use this type of touch when calming a little one who is overstimulated or resisting sleep.

As long as children have to remind parents about meals, children still maintain the responsibility of feeding themselves.

Our brains are particularly wired to respond to play that includes: •high excitement •movement •exaggerated expressions •creativity •body contact or close, shared physical space.

The games build excitement and allow you to share excitement and pleasure. The excitement, or “high arousal” followed by pleasurable experiences, is a cycle that builds attachment.

If you are a tired or worried parent, you may notice a tendency to select structured play, like puzzles. Puzzles are wonderful as a calming activity. But to stimulate children who are harder to connect with, physical play is a more successful activity. It allows the high excitement that fuses the connection between the two of you.

Play helps the following aspects of executive functioning: staying with a theme, understanding the point of view of another and adapting to that point of view, flexibility, and inhibiting impulses.

I do not recommend sneaking out of your children’s rooms as they are falling asleep. Over time, it simply makes them more reluctant to doze off. Children believe that they need to stay alert.

Anxious children do much better when they have steady routines with predictable schedules and ample nurturing from parents. Using affection, kind voices, timers, posted schedules (pictures or words) and routines will help them to reverse a cortisol pattern that keeps them up at night and sleepy in the morning.

While it is uncomfortable to see children fuss and protest, it is better than the quiet acceptance when they know that it does no good to protest.

When children learn to listen and respond to people, recognizing others’ interests and feelings, while still maintaining their own interests and feelings, they have achieved a milestone in emotional intelligence.

Secure attachments predict better recovery after trauma or grief.

No matter what children have lived through, or will live through, secure attachments help children to become more resilient adults.

When people are preoccupied or multitasking, even if they are physically present, they are not emotionally present. Their minds are elsewhere. Children will respond by being fussier or distant. Often they will do both.

Children, especially very young ones, are relying on a steady stream of cues or signals from parents to keep them on an even emotional keel. As parents become more distracted or harried, children become confused or irritable.

Parents will need to be strong in defending time with their children. The many good things to do in life can accumulate as the enemy of the best. Often we are trained to think of our worth as the sum of what we did or accomplished during the day.

I suggest that you think of the type of self-care that you would like your children to have someday. Give that to yourself, modeling respect for yourself.

Children are not consciously trying to reject their parents, but have an automatic response of trying to shield themselves from hurt.

Some parents “pretend” to be bright and cheery when they are experiencing loss. Because of the way that the brain works, this is not successful. Children simply feel disoriented when parents are grief-stricken, have the brain patterns to prove it, and then grin.

Being part of a family that does not circulate around the person’s anxiety actually helps the anxious person much more than a family member’s long, careful listening and multiple reassurances.

Of course, no one chooses to be a traumatized adult. But while it is not the parent’s fault, it is their responsibility to care for themselves so that they are able to provide good care for their children.

Dissociation allows people to experience a temporary distance from what is occurring in the present. It is a sign of extreme distress.)

The first step in teaching our children to calm is to provide our physical presence. Through our presence we teach children that they are not alone in their distress. They do not have to shriek or destroy things to get our attention.

Parents who move smoothly between play and work will provide a great model for their children. Those children will see a model for delaying gratification when needed, but still including pleasure in daily life.

Stopping to notice the pleasure of a completed task is an important part of changing feelings towards the job. Similarly, noting the pleasure that is part of a homework project is also helpful in changing patterns of stalling and avoiding the task.

Children need to see themselves as part of the family group, and as positive contributors. Children who have not been in a securely attached relationship in a home may have trouble seeing themselves as a healthy part of the family. They may either take on too much responsibility, wanting to run the family with their rules, or take on too little responsibility, seeing themselves as an island in the middle of the family. They may argue that they have a better, alternative view of family life, or, that the tasks of the family should have nothing to do with them.

Since executive functioning continues to develop until the age of 25 years, some people simply develop this later than others.

If children cannot see things in categories, as described above, it is much harder for them to remember things. When facts seem unrelated to other information, we do not tend to retain the information.

research shows that in stable situations, with secure attachments, children’s brains show the positive impacts of the home.

Low stress and secure attachments seem to provide a window of recovery for the brain.

One of the reasons that children need frequent rewards is that their brains are not making the long-term connections between staying on-task and a longer-term reward.

Children with executive dysfunction simply do not see all of the connections between details and a larger picture. That seems to be a reason for so much of their confusion and their lack of compliance. Parents who introduce information by putting it into a context will have much higher compliance.

Video and computer games stimulate the centers of our brains that are reward centers for social engagement. The problem is, our children have a sense of social reward, without any real social connection. They are not making friends or learning about each other.

For children who are trying to remember, parents can provide a friendly hint given with a positive, light touch. Try to give a hint instead of the entire answer.

I recommend that parents make a big deal when children do remember. Most children from high-stress backgrounds have brains that have been shaped to remember what is vivid or emotional. Making praise vivid and emotionally rewarding helps all of us to remember and repeat a positive event.

Just by having you sit close by, many children are able to stay on-task, focusing for longer. Their parent is a calming reminder. In addition, children are less prone to attempt a short-cut, taking off before a task is done.

If you are a parent attempting to break the child’s habit of wandering off, then I suggest that you stay next to your child while you set a new habit of following through. It ultimately will take less time than your tracking of a fast, stealthy child over the span of hours.

Certain things are known distractions/sinkholes (e.g. having computer games, handheld games, or television readily available). There is now some evidence that these activities not only are more tempting to children with attention deficit disorder (ADD), but worsen their attention problems.

I strongly suggest that parents of distractible children rent video systems for short-term rewards, rather than buying them. If you must buy them, then I suggest that you, the parents, own the system. That way you can kindly give time to your child as a reward. It is quite difficult to explain to children with executive dysfunction how the system is theirs, but that you are in control.

Parents cannot succeed in working on many aspects of children’s behavior at a time. Instead, picking one or two target behaviors over a two-week period seems to be best. New behavior patterns take effort. Sometimes, as parents, we start correcting everything that passes our radar. This is simply too much correction for most children.

When children are in a squabble, parents can have the rule that the first person who quits, wins.

Using “rock, paper, scissors” or a coin toss can be helpful when one person is going to be first, the other second. I strongly suggest that parents generally resist trying to keep score over who was first before, and who before that. It is wearying.

When children have behavioral issues, I like to ask them how they wish they had acted. Sometimes the consequence for children is a “re-do,” doing what they wished that they had done. Children are much more likely to learn from doing the right thing, rather than hearing parents tell them what they should not have done. (Children with ADD or types of prenatal exposure will learn much better by doing the correct thing.)

A lie separates people from us.

When children persist in lying, or in the “story,” I suggest that parents react with an air of boredom. Pointing out to children the problems with their “story line” will only cause them to be more skillful liars as time goes on.

Tantrums or “meltdowns” are common symptoms of distress in children. They are trying to signal that there is something terribly wrong. You want to be certain of your child’s well-being before you began to assign consequences for their tantrums.

Such plans help children to develop a sense of timing. Because the plans are written down, they are “set,” so reduce the pressure on parents. Children think differently from adults. To a child, the written plan seems harder to change than a parent’s mind.

When we spend some time thinking of painful events, or talking about them with friends or a professional, we “process” or “figure out and put away” these memories. They are not so vivid or disorienting. We are able to parent better. We are not overly upset or unsettled because of our memories as we deal with children.

If children have a world view that is one of themselves as people of courage and passion, trying hard things, then challenges will be met with a mix of acceptance, strength, and perseverance. They will expect struggles and victories.

If our children see themselves as powerless victims, then they will shape events to fit with that view. They will also be reluctant to try hard. Their view is that, after all, it probably will not work out anyway. Helping children who have had some early difficulties to find a “then and now” explanation will allow them to change their world view.

Some people are main characters in a dramatic heroic tale. Others are martyrs in a painful slog towards the finish line. We tend to include or shape memories to fit the story line.

Our responsibility as parents is to help our children to have a healthy world view, and a life story that makes sense. After grief and trauma, people will need to alter their life stories into ones that include these realities. Intentionally including support for processing these feelings and the meaning of the events will provide a healthier world view—which includes optimism, healthy boundaries, and support.

Teens are prone to feelings of loneliness and isolation as they separate their identities from their parents. Parents can help the process by making comments such as: “You’re a unique person, different from me. I’m so enjoying watching you develop!” Teens, being teens, might respond with an “Ahhh” moment, or may just say: “That’s nice. Have you seen my sweatshirt anywhere?”

Rather than taking the teen debates personally, parents can acknowledge that teens are using their new reasoning power. The glitch in the system is that most teens do not develop long-term perspective until their early- to mid-20s.

Parents are in a great position to teach these skills by describing their own emotions and thoughts. We do not ask our teens to take care of us, but do explain things that we would not discuss earlier in development. Most teens love a good adult drama, practicing their increasing insight. Family stories are great for teaching the lessons of emotional intelligence.

Parents with secure attachments to their teens are both safety nets and coaches for the high-wire act of teen years. Sometimes they are on the wire with their teens.

We want teens to have some problems. That way they will have real-life experiences in learning how to cope with problems before they leave our care. Most teens are not particularly skillful in dealing with problems at first. There is a learning curve. Wise parents allow teens to make decisions, and to have and solve problems, getting better at decision-making or problem-solving in the process.

We parents feel the urge to use our greater experience to prevent problems from occurring. It is better parenting to allow teens to fall into a few “holes” so that they learn the process of extricating themselves from a difficulty. We can ask them if they need a few ideas, or, we can actually intervene temporarily if the problem is too serious and outside their ability levels.

Tough love, applied to a depressed teen, can be catastrophic.

But while we want to make ourselves available, we also want to give our teens the chance to solve some relationship problems themselves.

When you do not seem to understand changes in your teen, a prudent course is to contine to be steady and sensitive. It is not a time to move into a tough approach.

Researchers prove what our storytellers and songwriters have always known—in our attachments we become our truest and best selves.

Attention deficit disorder means that children have trouble not only paying attention, but shifting attention. It is actually harder for children with ADD to shift away from TV or computer games. Children with ADD have the most trouble getting “stuck” on computer games or TV. Other children shift away from computer or television with only mild or moderate effort.

Often people become stuck in a position because it mirrors their pain or loss. Acknowledge the pain, but see if they are able to move into more helpful ways of thinking.

Stress includes the distortion that there is no one to count on, no one who really understands, or who truly cares. Counteract this with comments like, “I noticed you. I was thinking about you. I am here for you.”

Shared stress often causes the caregiver or family member to talk too much. Do not become the irritating wallpaper for an overwhelmed person.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for our domestic adoption process. A lot of the opening sections on attachment was already familiar material to me - I think I must have read an abridged version by the same author at some point, maybe in Adoptive Families magazine.

The stuff on attachment is great, very reassuring and with actual tips for all stages of development. The book ended up having a lot of parenting stuff that goes well beyond attachment, but I pretty much read the whole thing (other than teens and tweens section!) because it was the best book our agency has asked us to read so far. Husband especially liked the pictures, and I did lots of underlining and starring for later reference. I still don't think mirror neurons are a real thing, but other than that it's pretty well written and not overly goofy.