Conversations that Make a Difference for Children and Young People

Relationship-Focused Practice from the Frontline

Lisa Cherry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367644017
• eBook ISBN: 9781000386219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this unique book, international trainer and consultant Lisa Cherry invites professionals from education, social work and healthcare to engage in conversations on a range of pertinent topics and issues affecting children and young people today.

Divided into three main parts, which introduce attachment, adversity and trauma, each discussion places an emphasis on emotion and the understanding that we have as humans for compassion, empathy and connection. By encouraging collaboration between sectors and exploring a range of intersecting themes, the conversations take the reader on a winding journey to broaden their depth of thinking, reflect on their practice and to consider the central message: that we can bring about social change, one interaction at a time.

This book is a call to action and an opportunity to look around and decide what kind of service we want to provide, what kind of community we want to live in and what sort of legacy we want to leave. At a time of ever-present social and political challenges, this book will stimulate conversations on current practice and professional development for the future and is a must-read for everyone working with children and young people.

Part I

Thinking about attachment

Branches and Roots

You pulled me out, like weeds

disregarded, cast aside

mistook my bleeding sap

for a self-centered need

not a fight to stay alive

scattered parts of me,

my seeds, left far and wide,

I resemble the walking wounded

while you remain one whole part.

Please, pick me up gently

replant me, water and feed me daily,

relational dose every part of me

take care with your decisions

be very kind, as they can make

me bloom like flowers or

become a trodden piece of grass.

Chrissy Kelly

Introduction

This chapter is a small introduction on attachment with a reading list at the end to support your further interest. The chapter also highlights how we can think about inequality and its interplay with how we raise, protect and educate our children. It is my call to action that we are in constant reflection about the need to step away from the individualisation of the child that stands before us, so that we are also thinking about anti-racism, poverty and the policies that create injustice. However, this chapter does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of attachment theory, its development since its conception and its complete relevance to working with children and young people and beyond.

Part I of this book really calls us to think about the life course and introduces more fully the idea that the child becomes an adult and an adult was once a child, asking how we can reconnect with that in the services that work with children and young people. It is not possible to talk about this without getting up close and personal with inequity, identity and inequalities of resources and privilege. The conversations seek to develop an understanding that what happens in our childhoods has the potential, for good or bad, to influence the whole of our lives.

Attachment theory is a good place to start, yet it is often overlooked. I have met lots of people over the years who work with teenagers or in adult services who felt that understanding attachment theory simply wasn’t relevant in their work. The reality, though, is that we all have an attachment story and while that story is not fixed or static, developing an understanding of the beginning of our lives offers us wisdom as we seek to explore ourselves and others. As we make sense of our relationships across the life course this wisdom can be drawn upon. The potential is there for us to be changing and growing all the time in the new relationships we form; our attachment needs are important for the whole of our lives, whatever age we might be.

Having been told myself to ‘go back to the beginning’ when seeking to understand my own life journey, I feel clear that exploring our early lives gives us much in the way of any healing and recovery we may need to undertake as adults. Understanding how we are shaped, how we develop and what the best circumstances are for building human resilience within that attachment dance, should in theory weave through policy. Policies such as maternity and paternity rights, health awareness, housing entitlements and affordability can all be influenced by placing the science of childhood development at their heart.

It is prudent that any discussion about attachment is rooted in our understanding of inequity; economic, educational and health inequalities and structural racism that all shape and form our capacities, our opportunities and what we can access. In chapters 6 and 11, we will look at adversity and trauma respectively and apply the same lens.

The ideology of austerity that took place between 2010 and 2020 did not support families in providing the best possible conditions for their children, according to the Child Poverty Action Group (2017). In their report, The Austerity Generation, they found that the life chances of hundreds and thousands of children had been and would continue to be damaged. For those families who rely on services to provide relational opportunities, support mechanisms and freely available activities, the loss of this support was impactful. For example, we know that between 1 April 2018 and 31 March 2019, the Trussell Trust’s food bank network distributed 1.6 million three-day emergency food supplies to people in crisis, a 19% increase on the previous year. More than half a million of these went to children. Policy, political will and persistent narratives about individualism have an impact on child development that can last a lifetime. In this context, we must look at attachment theory with a holistic and intersectional lens, considering the external forces at play.

The theory of attachment

Attachment theory is still considered to be one of the most important contributions to understanding the development of children. This is the work of English psychiatrist John Bowlby. Bowlby set about formulating the idea that a child should have a ‘warm, intimate and continuous relationship with his mother’ (Geddes, 2006: 10) and argued that this provided the basis for the best possible development of the child. He observed children with emotional and behavioural challenges against the backdrop of Freud’s view that children were motivated by internal driving forces rather than by their environment. This question of whether we are who we are due to nature or nurture has been something we have been fascinated with for a very long time. Neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology have long thrown a spanner into that view but we will return to that later.

What was particularly significant and hugely important in the development of attachment theory was how the theory opened up an understanding of the importance of relationships in childhood development. Bowlby’s theory of ‘maternal deprivation’ brought to the fore the view that babies need the adult and the community into which they arrive and that disrupted attachments in early life have an impact upon how we develop. The concept of ‘maternal deprivation’ did not differentiate between maternal separation and cruelty and/or neglect. Neither did it acknowledge that the impact of our environment best helps children (Clarke and Clarke, 1976). What Bowlby’s work did do, however, was create an opportunity for a shift in thinking that allowed us to start to understand how relational our behaviour is and how much we need that early relationship to survive and grow.

Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist, went on to build upon Bowlby’s work. She developed the idea that a baby is born helpless and has particular survival behaviours that can be described as attachment behaviours. It is these behaviours that help us to survive, such as crying, whether for food or soothing, or looking gorgeous with our cute little smiles to pull our carer towards us. This attachment seeking and attachment giving dance is met with attunement (I can feel you need soothing so I will gently sway as I hold you closely to my beating heart) supports safety. The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University explore attunement and have many resources.¹ An early childhood filled with the sense of safety supports resilience. There is often no in-depth dialogue about attachment and resilience but, of course, when we feel safe and we know our trusted adult is not far, we can explore knowing that all is well. The more we explore, the more opportunity there is for things to go wrong and for our trusted adult to return to us to ensure we know we are safe. It’s a sophisticated dance, much of it part of our inbuilt system of survival.

Bowlby and Ainsworth worked together to identify different attachment styles (Ainsworth and Bowlby, 1991). The attachment styles were the work of a study conducted by Ainsworth (1978) which became known as the ‘strange situation’ (Jarvis, 2020). In her study, she argued that there were four different styles.

Secure attachment: A term used to describe when a child has a strong attachment to the mother. This has come about through the ability of the mother to be attuned to the needs of the baby and child.

Anxious-resistant insecure: This is used to describe an inconsistent level of response from the primary care giver. This child becomes irritated when the stranger appears in the room, while mother is still nearby. And when mother leaves, the child cannot explore and continue play. He is very distressed. But when the mother returns, the child appears resentful and upset towards the mother and rejects her.

Anxious-avoidant insecure: Where the primary care giver has been rejecting and insensitive of the child’s needs. This child doesn’t show much in the way of emotions whether the mother is in the room or not. He doesn’t want to be played with or held. He acts the same with the stranger as well.

Disorganised attachment: This describes a child who has suffered some kind of neglect or abuse from the primary caregiver and was identified later (Main and Solomon, 1990). Sroufe et al. (2009) later identified in his 30-year study that disorganised attachment in infancy is by itself a strong predictor of later disturbance unlike other poor attachment styles for those children who had experienced them. It is worth noting that this is the only attachment style that meets the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders guidelines for a diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder.

Peeling back the layers

There are many critiques of the theory of attachment styles. Ainsworth observed the babies in that moment of separation, of distress, rather than in moments when they were not in distress, and the behaviours observed are limited to those with the mother (Field, 1996).

We have well over half a century underneath our belts since Bowlby and his colleagues, coupled with developments in neuroscience that were simply not available at the time. The pressing evidence that our early relationships matter deeply to our development remains. As Jarvis (2020) points out, it was Bowlby’s attachment theory that was the basis of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of The Child (United Nations General Assembly, 1989).

By placing attachment theory at the heart of our work with children (developing), young people (still very much developing) and families (living and playing out early experiences of attachment relationships), it offers us a means of understanding early childhood development through a relational lens.

‘Attachment is a relationship in the service of a baby’s emotion regulation and exploration. It is the deep, abiding confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver’ (Sroufe and Siegal, 2011).

Furthermore, what happens during that perinatal period (20 weeks gestation through to 2 months old) remains crucial from a relational perspective and has been a focus of the influential work of Bruce Perry. In fact, in a recent study of 3,523 children aged between 6 and 13 years seeking behavioural health services w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimer
• List of Contributors
• Part I Thinking about attachment
• Part II Thinking about adversity
• Part III Thinking about trauma
• Bonus conversation with Pooky Knightsmith
• Index