Attachment Relationships and Adoption Outcomes

Miriam Steele, Ph.D. The New School for Social Research Research has demonstrated the powerful influence of the attachment relationship between parents and their children. How does the nature of this relationship affect children who have experienced trauma in the past or newly developing parent-child relationship with adoptive parents? How does it affect the parent’s experience of parenting? This review summarizes recent research that examines these questions and reveals implications for practice and policy. In his groundbreaking work on attachment theory, John Bowlby (1973, 1980) describes the critical importance of a long-term, secure relationship between a child and caregiver. This relationship, and the way the child is treated within it, has a powerful influence on the child’s development and personality functioning. From birth, and particularly during times of crisis, infants learn to cry and reach out toward primary caregivers in order to be held and comforted. If the caregiving environment is consistent, positive, and aims to meet the child’s needs, then the infant is apt to develop a ‘secure’ attachment. If, on the other hand, the caregiving is typically inconsistent, or negative, then the attachment pattern that is most likely to develop is an ‘insecure’ one, either avoidant or resistant. A fourth pattern called ‘disorganized’ typifies children who have experienced less than optimal caregiving often with displays of frightening behavior on the part of the caregiver. These infants display fear or lack a strategy to deal with stressors in their environment such as separation from a caregiver. These patterns develop within the context of an attachment relationship with primary caregivers and are reflected in the childrens’ ‘internal working model’ or template for how relationships work. These representations are thought to guide their expectations about others and inform their own sense of self, especially with regard to thoughts and feelings concerning relationships with others. The move into an adoptive placement represents a dramatic intervention for a child. Bowlby (1973) gave expression to the challenge faced by these children and the parents who adopt them when he described the following — ....once a sequence of behavior has become organized, it tends to persist and does so even if it has developed on non-functional lines and even in the absence of the external stimuli and/ or the internal conditions on which it first depended. The precise form that any particular piece of behavior takes and the sequence within which it is first organized are thus of the greatest consequence for its future.