Facilitating Developmental Attachment: The Road to Emotional Recovery and Behavioral Change in Foster and Adopted Children

by Daniel A. Hughes

This book shows how to work successfully with emotional and behavioral problems rooted in deficient early attachments. In particular, it addresses the emotional difficulties of many of the foster and adopted children living in our country who are unable to form secure attachments. Traditional interventions, which do not teach parents how to successfully engage the child, frequently do not provide the means by which the seriously damaged child can form the secure attachment that underlies behavioral change. Dr. Daniel Hughes maps out a treatment plan designed to help the child begin to experience and accept, from both the therapist and the parents, affective attunement that he or she should have received in the first few years of life. Hughes' approach includes:

―Using foster and adopted parents as co-therapists

―Teaching differentiation between old and new parents

―Overcoming the perception of discipline as abusive

―Framing misbehavior, discipline, conflicts, and parental authority as important aspects of a child's learning to trust.

All children, at the core of their beings, need to be attached to someone who considers them to be very special and who is committed to providing for their ongoing care. Children who lose their birth parents desperately need such a relationship if they are to heal and grow. This book shows therapists how to facilitate this crucial bond.
A Jason Aronson Book

Genres: Psychology, Parenting, Adoption, Nonfiction, Fostering

276 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jean-Paul Eberle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a remarkable contribution to the field of children in the foster system with seeming insurmountable challenges with attachment. However, one apparent limitation of this book is its focus on the sometimes out of reach ideal of thoroughly committed foster parents actively working intensively and therapeutically on the above-mentioned attachment challenged children (i.e. - the parental rights have been terminated and these same children are moving towards likely adoption).

While the ideas in this book are invaluable, the reality in the field also is that children often live in limbo with continual hopes of being reunified with their biological parents (parental rights are not so easily and glibly terminated), complicating the attachment to their foster parents. Additionally, it is not uncommon that in the child's placement their foster parents' resources are stretched too thin because of their own life responsibilities and obligations and the many foster children under their watch. Seldom do foster parents, in my experience, only assume one child to foster; they usually have multiple children with high needs, in addition to their own family and children. Not to mention, their lives can sometimes be as chaotic (spinning plates here) as the internal lives of their foster children. And lastly, many children have been reunified with their biological parents and still struggle with intense complex trauma and attachment difficulties.

I have only the utmost respect for the providers and caregivers who consciously choose to engage in a system that is deeply imperfect and itself flawed in so many ways, all in efforts to apply their resources the best they can to assist in the healthy psychological birth of the child navigating the foster system.

[Eli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing if you are interested in therapy or fostering children with attachment issues.

[Gina Barnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dan Hughes is one of the best on emotional bonding / attachment strains for children

[Amber]

1 copy

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great book if you are dealing with, or know someone dealing with these issues. Clinical read.