Promoting Attachment

A quick list of tasks for parents and techniques to promote attachment: • Provide a high nurture, high structure environment for your child. • Maintain predictability. • Keep the schedule simple and home pace slow. • Reduce stimulation, simplify surroundings. • Make it clear there is always food available. Have a fruit bowl or healthy snack in sight and available at all times. • Keep parents associated with food. • Limit childcare (if necessary try to arrange for the care to be in the child’s home). • Cuddle often and stroke the child’s palms, cheeks, or soles of her feet while cuddling. • Spend time playing with your child. • Encourage the child to come into your room at night if afraid. Put a sleeping bag on the floor for them. • Insist on more and more positive eye contact and make certain good things happen after eye contact. • Take pictures and videos of the new child and his family doing fun things together and make sure he sees them. • Carry this child often if possible. If they are too big have them sit on your lap or close up against you. • Make valuing statements. Praise and overtly tell them they are wonderful and that you and their siblings are wonderful too. Don’t be shy; this gives children who have met with past rejections the courage to try again. • Help children produce order through their choices. • Establish rituals. • Stay with the yelling, inconsolable child to help him not feel out-of-control and alone. • Make non-compliance as boring as possible. • Do not use pain or isolation as consequences. • Allow regression. • If children throw tantrums hold them close. They may break into grieving. • If they claim to be hurt over a minor injury, hold them close with a kiss and hug. This develops a cycle of comfort. • Maintain as much of child’s identity as possible. • Help your child find areas of interest and competence. • Help him or her form friendships. For teens: • Agree with process of separation (ie. “Of course you have a different idea then I do. You are a different person.”) • Set up limits while still sympathizing with requests. • Maintain eye and physical contact. • Continue rituals. • Be easy to obtain when she wants to talk. • Find fun activities to do together. • Supply teens with identity information about their past. Some tasks adapted from Deborah Gray’s Attaching in Adoption and Nurturing Adoptions.