Infant-parent attachment when a child comes with very special needs

Research has shown that the shared experience of joy and play between parent and child plays an important part in development.*

Peter Limbrick writes: In TAC Bulletin earlier this month, I asked for help in finding information about attachment issues when a baby or infant has very special needs. I had very relevant responses from countries including Canada (mostly), Australia and UK. I am making sense of the responses and will put a summary report into TAC Bulletin in due course. In the meantime I thought I would share two items. The first is an article on the Green Child website that was sent to me by Alison Benedict. Here is an extract:

Many parents who use attachment parenting techniques such as babywearing, co-sleeping, and breastfeeding report being told by health care providers that their special needs children are calmer and make significantly better progress than their similarly-challenged peers. 

However, attachment parenting a special needs child can itself be challenging. We thought we’d take a closer look at some of the obstacles parents of these special children often encounter when attempting to follow AP principles, along with ideas for helping them overcome these challenges…

Read more here: https://www.greenchildmagazine.com/attachment-parenting-special-needs/ 

 

The second is a theoretical background to attachment failures in two articles by Alan Schore:

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/schore-2001a.php

http://www.trauma-pages.com/a/schore-2001b.php

 

*Quote at the top from Gay Watson in Beyond Happiness 

I welcome more items of information: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

share your information  Cartoon © Martina Jirankova-Limbrick 2011