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Summary Of A Child's Journey Through Placement

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Summary and Evaluation Baby Jack displays a healthy attachment to mom, while Alice shows clear indicators of a strong and healthy bond with Jack. As indicated in the above chart, Jack is displaying all the behaviour expected for this stage of development (from 6-12 months), and accordingly, as related to attachment, he was friendly with me as long as mom was close, and vigilant in ensuring he was always aware of her location. The fact that Alice is able to soothe Jack quickly and consistently and that he is able to adjust to a new stranger so well points to development of the confidence that Vera Fahlberg (2012) maintains in her text, A Child’s Journey through Placement, as intrinsically tied to secure attachment to a “primary attachment object” …show more content…

Insight to the ease in which Jack could be settled was illuminated through observation of Alice’s focused positive attention to Jack prior to his ‘needing’ it—not due to over-attentiveness but rather as within a natural rhythm of activity that Jack and Alice are sublimely attuned to; Alice is genuinely interested and engaged in Jack’s activities and continuously feeds his need for attention with understated but meaningful interactions that include eye contact and her demonstration that she understands what he is seeing or doing, without his explicit request or demand. This reduced the need for more dramatic expression of need by Jack and seemed to facilitate a ‘low-maintenance’ level of engagement by Alice—she and I had a long-conversation of good depth without any major interruption from baby. Even during this period of strong natural preference for caregiver and wariness of strangers (p. 31), because of a notably secure attachment to Alice, Jack was able to adapt to a new person (myself) with considerable ease and self-confidence for this stage of life, when the child is grappling with the understanding of his mother as a separate entity from himself (Kail & Zolner 2012, p. 185). All three factors in the development of attachment –arousal-relaxation cycle, positive interaction cycle and claiming (Fahlberg 2012, p. 54)—were …show more content…

Freud’s theory of personality examined the interplay between the primitive, instinctual urges—the ‘id’; the practical and rational ‘ego’; and the morally attuned ‘superego’; ‘object relations’ refer to the "object" of an instinct”, which is “the agent through which the instinctual aim is achieved”—most often a person and, according to Freud, most often the mother (Ainsworth 1969, p. 1). The psychosexual development theory that Freud launched reduces our behaviour to mechanistic responses to an instinctive need for pleasure fueled by the ‘libido’ and barriers or distortions to the gratification of the libido at various delineated stages of development were responsible for later problems in life (Kail & Zolner 2012, p. 5). Erik Erikson later added depth to the approach by including more humanistic elements to Freud’s stages and including more periods of development (p.

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