David: Avoidant Or Appropriate Attachment?

Foster care has a major impact on children and adolescents. There are several areas of a child’s life that is affected by being placed in foster care. When children and adolescent enter into foster care due to abuse or neglect their world can change for better or for worse. A child’s experience before entering foster care predetermines their behavior(s) that will occur while in foster care. Often time’s children have to deal with these life changing events due to a mistake that their parent/guardian made or a lifestyle that their parent/guardian has chosen. In particular, several foster children and adolescent have attachment issues upon entering care (Kelly & Simon, 2014). This topic is concerning because it can help identify the issues that occur when children and adolescents enter into care and help front line service workers assist their families in a more appropriate manner in order to decrease the issues that are due to attachment. The outcome for every child is different, but understanding that attachment disorders is the problem and possible ways to deal with it can assist in making a positive social change in the foster care world.

Research has revealed that there is a strong relationship between insecure attachment and a history of abuse and neglect (Begle, Dumas & Hanson, 2010). Insecure attachments are formed due to parenting stress and abusive parenting behavior. Parenting stress and abusive parenting behavior form children’s mental schemas of how the world works based upon early interactions with caregivers. These mental schemas construct their expectations about relationships. Ultimately

Effect of Foster Care on Children Human Development March 30, 2011 Introduction/ Problem Statement Each year 542,000 children nationwide live temporarily with foster parents, while their own parents struggle to overcome an addiction to alcohol, drugs, illness, financial hardship or other difficulties (Mennen, Brensilver, & Trickett, 2010.) The maltreatment they experienced at home, the

Children suffer significantly until someone decides to protect them. The government allocates funds to establish the foster care system and that system advances to enforce rights for children. When the right to remove children from an abusive situation first originated, the foster care system established a separation procedure for children from their abusive homes. This act of removing children from their families brought about psychological issues and trauma. Throughout earlier years, the foster care system adjusted their program according to the rules and regulations established to provide for the needs of children. However, problems keep appearing elsewhere. These children endure the brunt of every new philosophy in behavioral health management. Often, the biological parents will be left out of the solution. The foster care system develops services to train foster families in caring for foster children and behavioral issues. For some reason, the foster care system believes improvement simpler to reform the children and makes a trivial attempt of the reformation with family. The foster care system needs to try to achieve bonds within the biological family instead of the sole reliability on removal of children to be an adequate answer. The foster care system’s obligation should be to develop a training system for the rehabilitation of families and offer support to achieve the greatest outcome in child rearing. Foster care needs to adapt to supporting families emotionally,

According to the Children’s Bureau, there were 427,910 children in the foster care system in 2016. Placements in a foster family have dramatically increased over the last ten years. For some young children and young adults in the foster care system, they have experienced abuse and neglect and have been removed from their parents. Other children have suffered a variety of parental problems such as drug addiction, abandonment, incarceration, mental and physical impairments and death. These painful experiences associated with maltreatment and the trauma of being removed from parents or caregivers can affect the mental health and development of these young people. “ Most children in foster care, if not all experience feelings of confusion,

INTRODUCTION An ideal environment for the social, emotional, and developmental growth of children does not always exist in today's society. Family units that have become separated due to family or behavior problems often contribute to delays in these areas. In order to promote continuity in the social, emotional, and developmental growth of children who have been victims of family disruption, children are often removed from the home and placed in foster care. Placement in the foster care system affects children in a unique, individual fashion. The affects of child-care by non-parental custodians, though subjective in nature, have common parameters that must be addressed and examined.

r care can prevent kids from forming healthy relationships and bonds with peers and adults if they constantly change foster homes. Multiple caregivers, abuse, neglect and abandonment can result in reactive attachment disorder, signified by strained relationships and a general lack of interested in socialization with others. The mental effects include distrust, and uncertainty in others, heightened by anxiety, fear and depression. Behavioral symptoms include avoidance of physical contact, straying from social interaction, remaining withdrawn, acting preoccupied or detached from people or activities, devoid of outward emotion and wanting to remain alone.

Many foster children are facing an increased risk of behavior and mental problems (“Perceived Mental Health, 1). Foster children are vulnerable to neurocognitive delays that can hinder them from developing at the average rate of a child in a permanent home, such as poor memory skills, poor visuospatial process, and

The National adoption Agency defines foster care as “a temporary arrangement in which adults provide for the care of a child or children whose birthparent is unable to care for them. Foster care is not where juvenile delinquents go. It is where children go when their parents cannot, for a

Keywords: attachment disorder, attachment disturbances, attachment style, foster care Introduction This literature review focuses on a general understanding of the history of attachment, as well as the basis of what attachment means in early childhood development. It will also review how the diagnosis of RAD has evolved over the years since it was first introduced as a condition in 1980. This paper will reveal what scientists suggest happens when a child’s attachment to his/her primary caregiver is

In order to determine an infant’s attachment type, Ainsworth established an experimental study known as, “Strange Situation” (Berger, 2014, p.144). This study was an experiment off of Bowlby’s findings that suggest attachment “related behaviors, are activated in times of personal distress” (Bernier, Larose, & Whipple, 2005, p. 172). Therefore, within this study, an infant’s attachment was determined by studying their behavior and level of distress within a new environment at the absence or presence of their caregiver. Additionally, Bernier represents the results of Larose and Boivin’s 1998 study that express a possible correlation between “Strange Situation” and the transition from high school to college (Bernier et al., 2005, p. 173) as both

451). “Research has found that adolescents with secure attachment to their parents do better than their peers in terms of self-reliance and independence, behavioral competence, and psychological well being” and those who have secure attachment score lower for social and psychological problems (Ashford & Lecroy, 2013, p. 451). While looking at attachment development during this phase, should an adolescent be securely attached or begin to detach, this would not apply much to the client. The client, due to extreme circumstances and experiences, has already detached her attachment from the caregiver, and has already developed her own autonomy. This is also usually a struggle for adolescents with parents, control versus autonomy, but the client is already leading her life to full autonomy. While the mother is having more difficult detaching from the client, which is due to her own psychological problems, the client has been forced to detach attachment to mother from a very young age. The client would not fall under the typical development pattern of finding independence with attachment because of her life

In this day and age, multiple interventions are being implemented in order to address the various attachment-related problems that infants and young children experience due to the separation from their caregivers. It was previously mentioned that there was a new area of speciality called infant mental health which has a particular take on attachment between a caregiver and child. They mainly focus on analyzing the support that these children have available to them such as family, social, and emotional. One of their primary focuses for intervention is infant-parent psychotherapy in which the emotional exploration of the parent toward the child is done in the room with the child (Weatherston 2000, 4). Infant mental health specialist might be useful to both foster parents and the children, however, it is mainly aimed at women who are having either postpartum depression, an emotional reaction due to previous pregnancy trauma, or even premature children. There are only a few micro related interventions, therapy is the most popular form. Children develop trauma and PTSD like symptoms due to the separation(s) they experience at a young age. There is a big emphasis put on caregivers being aware of PTSD symptoms so that the child can be linked to the appropriate treatment resources which are the first steps in helping the child to manage and cope with their symptoms (Hieger 2012, 3). In therapy there are two main evidence base treatments that are useful for traumatized children.

Assignment 1 – Person-In-Environment Paper Assisting minority groups describes a need for understanding the behavioral theories and practices. These groups present numerous cultural challenges that one has to identify while working with such populations. The crossing of identities across racial lines presents unique challenges for Social Workers when applying behavior theories

Facilitating Developmental Attachment by Daniel A Hughes is an in depth look at the work of Dr Hughes, a clinical psychologist who specialises in child abuse and neglect, attachment and works with children in foster care or adoption. Hughes discusses every facet of his practice including the theory and research surrounding attachment, the qualities and expectations required by each of the people involved in the therapeutic process as well as including four case studies. Hughes states the book is written for those working with children who have “…severe forms of attachment problems that correspond to