Even if you’re not familiar with attachment theory, if you work with children, the chances are you’re dealing with attachment difficulties, whether you’re aware of them or not.

Attachment patterns or ‘styles’ develop in infancy and are essentially adaptive behaviours which children learn to keep themselves as safe in the world as they can.
This is fine if you have a ‘secure base’ from which to explore it, but what if you don’t?

Our understanding of ‘insecure attachment’ – what it looks like and how it presents – has come a long way since John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth first described it in the 1960’s, but despite it being a well-aged theory, its potential affects are still on the periphery of our collective knowledge.

One thing we’ve learned in the intervening years is that many factors can contribute to weak attachment; it’s not simply a by-product of poorly attuned parenting. In fact, a larger percentage of the population than we may think – about 40% – is insecurely attached.

The unfortunate reality is that the associated behaviours don’t ‘unadapt’ in a hurry.
Insecurely attached kids – and the adults they become – can be hard work to live and work with; at one end of the spectrum, they may remain guarded, aloof and detached, or at the other, rapidly and intensely invest emotionally in every and any person who offers some kind of connection.
Or seemingly bounce around in between the two extremes.

Much of my work is focused on more vulnerable children like these, and I hear the same stories time and again; the foster carers who, after years of trying to build emotional connection, still aren’t there…
The teachers whose students perceive the gentlest critique as an insult or attack…
The care staff whose genuine acts of nurture and care are met with hostility…
The kids who, while immersed in an activity they love, will just get up and leave, because saying goodbye at the end will re-open an unhealed wound…

But how easy is it for us to not see a child whose once-adaptive behaviours are, in this environment, now maladaptive; to instead see a child choosing ‘poor behaviour’?
How easy is it not to see a person who’s just trying to feel secure in a world that – for them – is not?

And yet, while many kids’ behaviours of scream ‘insecure attachment’, we’re also beginning to recognise that attachment patterns aren’t always as rigid as we may think.
At the centre of some tragic abuse cases, a child who should have been noticed wasn’t because they’d learned that the safest way to stay alive was to present ‘securely attached’ behaviours to the outside world, when in real life, they were far from safe.

There’s a wider safeguarding context around this of course, but my point is that any child, even those who appear ‘fine’, may have attachment vulnerabilities.

The silver lining is that anyone who has a relationship with these children is in a position to affect positive change; we don’t need to have a therapeutic role or an intervention.
It may feel like just a drop in the ocean, but there are a multitude of ways we can help give young people the experience that they do matter: that they belong, that they’re accepted, that someone cares what happens to them.

And we must. Because there’s an inevitable intergenerational aspect to attachment patterns; without a break in the chain, insecurely attached children become insecurely attached adults, but when we buffer its impact, we don’t just help the child in front of us, but potentially their children, and their children and their children.

So how do we connect with, relate and attune to the child who doesn’t want or can’t handle a meaningful relationship in a healthy way?
‘Working With Attachment Difficulties in School Aged Children’ is a practical resource by Dr Sue Jennings and offers over 100 simple, creative approaches to help. 
Any adult can use it to help children develop healthier relationships with the adults – professionals and parents – and the other children in their lives.
All you need to do is choose an activity that they can engage in, and to engage with them.
You can get it here AND get 30% OFF with the code 30GIFT (applied at checkout).

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