Attachment
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Descriptions, definitions, synonyms, organizer terms, types of
According to Reber and Reber(2001), attachment means a binding affection, an emotional tie between people. Attachment is formed when the persons depend on each other for emotional satisfaction. In developmental psychology, an emotional relationship formed between an infant and care givers such that the infant will: (a) approach them; (b)show no fear of them; (c) be highly receptive to being cared for by them; and (d) show anxiety when separated from them. An infant will seek for the care givers and behave so as to maintain close contact when the binding affection formed between the infant and the care givers.
Attachment theory is a theory (or group of theories) about the psychological concept of attachment: the tendency to seek closeness to another person and feel secure when that person is present. Attachment theory has its origins in observation of and experiments with animals. Much early research on attachment in humans was done by John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980)
Attachment behavior
The concept of attachment is of a control system intended to achieve certain goals. The primary aim of an infant is to seed the presence of an attachment figure, usually his mother, when feelings of alarm, upset, or anxiety are dominant. When these anxious feelings are assuaged by a responsive mother, other behavior such as the exploration of the environment becomes possible; the child can tolerate separation from this available attachment figure when his memory of self interacting with her is secure. Other people and situations can be explored and, as emotional and cognitive learning develop, it becomes possible to extend and reconstruct the control systems which have been built on past experience so that future experience can be safely anticipated.
Dynamic Play Therapy: to help young children and families with attachment
An Integrated Expressive Arts Approach to the Family Treatment of Infants and Toddlers
Steve Harvey, Ph.D., ADTR, RDT, RPT/S Colorado Spring, Colorado
Edited from the Zero To Three Journal, August/September 1994
The father of a very securely attached little boy recently told me about the jumping game that he and his son developed and extended during the boy's first two years. During the boy's third and fourth months, the father would begin bouncing his son as the boy bent his knees--to the baby's great delight. Throughout the next several months, the boy began regularly to "ask" for this game by crawling over to his father and placing himself in the "jumping" body position. Later he would place his father's hands on his own waist, and during his second year, the boy would gesture and babble to indicate his desire to start the game. When, as a toddler, the boy would run away from his father during chase games, he would raise his arms when he was ready to be "caught" and lifted. The father, of course, played along, and both father and son thoroughly enjoyed what became of rejoining or reuniting "dance" when the father returned from work. Through repetition and development over the years, the jumping/lifting game was full of meaning, even though no words were used. It was a way for father and son to generate, express, and remember their positive feelings for each other.
Dynamic Play Therapy is an intervention style which encourages parents and children to engage in mutual expressive activities. This approach involves an integration of movement, dramatic games, art activities, sound-and music-making, and video-making. Its goal is to help parents and children experience more creativity and flexible expressiveness in their daily life, and to develop meaningful metaphors that reflect difficult issues (particularly those concerning intimacy and attachment) and emotions in their relationships. Dynamic Play Therapy techniques are helpful not only in work with birth parents and their children, but also with infants and toddlers who have been abused and are now in foster care or adoptive families. Parents foster secure attachment in part by meeting their children's nonverbal expressions of distress in a sensitive, attuned, and contingent manner--often through nonverbal, emotionally and physically matched interactions.
The Dynamic Play approach emphasizes the playful interaction between parents and children. It assumes that healthy, secure parents and children will generate dances, drawings, turn-taking dramatic games, and videotapes easily and with pleasure. Expression builds from the interaction, and small interactive problems are solved easily through creative and imaginative negotiation. For example, a young child who playfully runs off, distancing herself from her parent, might spontaneously become a bird in search of a nest who, returning to her parent's lap or "nest," expresses joy with her entire body. As early as the second year of life, children attentively watch videos of themselves and their parents playing with pillows, gymnastic balls, and scarves; then they repeat and elaborate on their past enactments with pleasure.
As a therapeutic approach, Dynamic Play Therapy uses movement, art, and interactive games to identify expressive mismatches between parents an children who have difficulties with intimacy, attachment, and emotional expression. As suggested by attachment theory, the goal of Dynamic Play Therapy is to help parents generate security; to help children produce organized behavior which shows both exploration and return, related to their own internal needs; and to help both parents and children experience trust, leading to pleasure in their relationship.
Dynamic Play Therapy uses various expressive forms to help parents and children generate positive behavior during the actual experience of play, so that they discover their own natural creativity in a context that encourages the enjoyment of mutual, spontaneous, uninhibited expression within their relationship. Parents and children create new experiences together. From these new experiences, which generate significant, positive feelings between parents and children, families begin to understand what positive change, leading toward increased attachment, might feel like for them.
Dynamic Play Therapy differs from other approaches in two significant dimensions:
a much enlarged use of physical engagement for both parents and children; and
an emphasis on spontaneous creativity in moment-to-moment playful expression.
While most, if not all, parent-infant intervention utilizes the concept of a parent being able to follow or mirror the young child's nonverbal gestures and expressions, the expressive arts approach emphasizes the use of a parent or child's whole body expression, whether in following or in turn-taking activities.
Techniques of observation and intervention
In order to encourage large-scale physical interaction, Dynamic Play Therapy is usually carried out in a large room furnished with attractive large props. This context encourages a much wider range of interactive movement possibilities, including the use of all limbs, large locomotive movements (such as running, crawling, climbing, and movement through space), as well as movement on all levels--from crawling on the floor to jumping and swinging in the air. With these resources, a movement interaction between, for example, a very withdrawn toddler and his parent might cover the range from matching finger games, to the parent and child rolling together across a large expanse of floor, to crawling together underneath large parachutes.
Large foam pillows in various shapes are especially helpful in organizing mutual movement. Rectangles, squares and cylinders are used to build houses (which are sometimes knocked down), walls (to be crawled over or under), and "lands." Heart-shaped pillows five feet across can be used to represent Mom's or Dad's Land or Heartland. The pillows' softness helps to channel even children's most energetic movements into activity which is potentially more interactive. The large hearts and other pillows can also be used to rock and soothe children toward the end of sessions.
Parents and children use large gymnastic balls, stretch ropes, and stretch blankets to pull toward and away from each other. Large brightly-colored scarves and life-sized stuffed animals also stimulate creativity and dramatic play with children, especially with children over two.
The large scope of Dynamic Play Therapy also facilitates dramatic enaction (any interaction which involves turn-taking or the use of role, even in nonverbal activity). For example, a young toddler dealing with issues of object constancy might run across the space and hide from her parent under several large pillows, while the parent takes on the role of finder. It is extremely helpful to have a video camera and monitor available to capture interaction and immediately feed this back to both parents and children. I have found children as young as 18 months to be extremely interested in such visual feedback of their interactive play.
The creativity of young children is easily recognizable: toddlers begin to dance or sing and engage in scribbling or mark making; two-and three-year-olds engage in imaginative role play. But even young infants can be creative in their playful use of variation in interactive games with their parents. Emphasizing creativity, the Dynamic Play therapist attempts to go beyond simple face-to-face activity or mirroring of body parts.
All activities are designed to produce interaction in which parents and children match each other in complementary ways. Therapist-directed activities include games, such as face-to-face play; swinging the child, sometimes to produce an excited state between children and parents, sometimes for soothing and calming down; playing peek-a-boo with the large scarves; and playing hide-and-seek using the large pillows. In free play, parents are coached to help set the structure of the activity, and then to follow the child's lead throughout the room--swinging, hiding, falling, and rolling over pillows are common activities. Drawing activities (scribbling on newsprint, drawing outlines of body parts or full bodies) and dramatic play (especially with stuffed animals) also produce interaction.
Natural creativity and "breaks"
Natural creativity in interaction can serve as an ongoing resource to help build or rebuild relationships between parents and children. It is useful to think of certain aspects of a parent-child relationship as an improvisational dance or drama, in which one partner's nonverbal expressions stimulates the other partner's expressions, by eliciting a creative response. In healthy relationships, the natural creativity within a parent and child keeps their "dances" moving from gesture to gesture, facial expression to facial expression, etc. One partner's expression stimulates and moves the other, in a pleasurable, problem-solving flow that generates good feeling. This natural creativity can be thought of as the magical "it" of a relationship, in which parents and children fill out and continue their emotional expressive experience with each other from moment to moment.
From this perspective, children and parents with problems in their attachment might be thought of as experiencing breaks in this ongoing creativity. The gaps created by their mismatched expressions become so great that mutual creativity stops. Expressive arts intervention, then helps parents and children become aware of and use their natural curiosity within creative responses to each other as they occur in the moment, during mismatches. This style of intervention attempts to help parents and children engage or re-engage with each other in activities which generate creative mutual responsiveness. The goal, in other words, is to help restart an ongoing improvisation that has stalled.
Summary
Healthy parent-child interactions can be thought of as improvisational dances and dramas. These interactions produce a motivated flow of active expression, which rises and falls to match internally felt emotional impulses. Dance/movement, art, drama, music, and video techniques can help parents engage creatively and positively with their young children. Creative arts therapists observe how interactive play emerges between parents and children and notice breaks and deviations within it. Therapeutic intervention then works to re-engage family members in game-like activities which generate curious, playful, creative interaction.
While many parent-infant intervention styles make use of activities and video, the creative/expressive arts therapies offer two unique contributions to the field of parent-infant psychotherapy. First, when parents and children make use of their whole bodies to move through space, using multiple levels of locomotion and an enlarged movement repertoire, their physical, artistic, or dramatic interactions seem to generate an "expressive momentum" which creates new, positive experiences. Second, building on naturally occurring motivation, curiosity, and mutual enjoyment helps parents and children who are experiencing difficulties in their relationship create engaged, playful exchanges in the therapeutic setting. As these are repeated and elaborated upon at home, the style of playful give-and-take of these parents and children comes to resemble the spontaneous, joyful interaction of healthy parents and children.
(Zero To Three is the bi-monthly professional publication of ZERO TO THREE: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families
Application in classrooms and similar settings
Evidence of effectiveness
Critics and their rationale
Alternative explanations due to Diversity considerations
Signed "life experiences", testimonies and stories
As a kindergarten teacher, I was able to observe parents' and students' varying degrees of attachment throughout the school year. Some parents were securely attached (see http://psychology.about.com/od/loveandattraction/ss/attachmentstyle_4.htm) while others' attachment was clearly detrimental to both the parent and the child. It was interesting to watch this change over the course of the school year. Some families were able to grow into more healthy styles of attachment while other seemed to fall further back. Now, as a junior high teacher, I am seeing the same patterns all over again. -R. Foley
I am currently a research assistant to Glenn Roisman's Adult Attachment Lab. I conduct the Adult Attachment Interview and later help classify people into different attachment style groups. It is a very interesting process and I am able to hear an incredible range of life stories and study how these may or may not play a role in one's attachment style. --S. Peduzzi
In recent years I have discussed attachment with my colleagues over lunch. We have observed many students who are overly attached to their parents. We have concluded that in most cases the parents exhibit tendencies that are unhealthy for the child's social well being. Overly attached parents are very defensive of any constructive criticism regarding their children and usually pass their defensiveness on to their children. For example, I have heard of parents wanting to come to school just to observe their child for the entire school year. Now, how is that child ever supposed to become independent, be able to explore their surroundings, and learn outside of the watchful eye of their parents hovering over every move that they make. I am sure that parents who are overly attached to their children mean well and want the best for their children, but I don't think that they realize that they can not protect their child from every ill that life throws their way. ~ C.Hatchett
I have seen attachment problems in my own family. My youngest sister is very attached to my mother. She is now 21, but still cannot seem to do things for herself. My mother doesn't help the situation either. She still pays all her bills for her, even though she lives with her fiance and his parents and she has a child. I have tried talking to my mother and suggesting she inform my sister that she needs to be taking care of her own bills now that she is an adult. My mother can't seem to let go. As long as she keeps providing these thing to my sister she is never going to be able to detach herself from my sister. My sister will always just expect my mother to do things for her and will never become independent. I see it as a huge problem.--M. Smith
References and other links of interest
Wikepedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory
Barrett, M. & Trevitt, J. (1991) Attachment behavior and the schoolchild: an introduction to educational therapy. Tavistock/Routledge
Reber, A. S. & Reber, E. (2001). The Penguin dictionary of psychology (3rd ed.). London, Penguin Books Ltd., England.
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