"Adoption and Attachment"

Dr. Neufeld's model of attachment is used in all venues with parents, step-parents, grandparents, foster parents, adoptive parents and teachers. He sees adoption as the process of transplanting children from one setting to another. Growing roots in new soil or in a new context is not without difficulty. Often the difficulties show up later on in the adoptive family.

This article is intended to help parents with the transplanting process. The only way to acknowledge that each child and their background is special, is to take some of the original soil or family history with the child. Foster children and adopted children need to maintain their fantasy attachments with their biological parents. Usually the fantasy involves thinking about their birth parents in a positive light. Children need to create the fantasy attachment in order to live with the vulnerability of being separated from the parents who created them. Fantasy is a process through which a child can bridge this divide.

The sensitivities of foster children and adopted children are usually overwhelmed, usually since birth or even gestation. The brain's mechanical defenses are called into action to numb the child so these sensitivities or vulnerabilities are protected. In this mode, the child cannot do the parents' bidding nor can the child experience two attachments at the same time. His attachment to his birth parents is in competition with any other attachment that comes his way.

The less the caregiver stands in the way of her competing attachments, the more likely the competition will disappear and the sooner the deeper attachment will happen. Moving in beside the child, assuring the child that her birth parents are thinking of her, that she has lovely brown eyes like her mother or that her creativity must have come from her father is calming for the child. When she is assured that she can keep this (fantasy) attachment, she will see that the adoptive parent or caregiver is on her side. In order to grow in the relationship, adoptive or foster parents must provide a context in which the child can maintain a fantasy attachment to the birth parents. This is a context in which a child can rest, that is, he or she can feel safe and secure. When children cannot rest securely in their attachments they learn to numb out, tune out and back-out of relationships.

Dr. Neufeld points out in his work that science has taught us that if we engage in a relationship with a child without attachment that it is a violation of nature. This observation could revolutionize not only foster or adoptive parenting but teaching, step-parenting, grandparenting and parenting as well.

Love is not enough, commitment is not enough and skill is not enough. Attachment is the context for raising children. The context needs to be cultivated. However, 95% of the current parenting literature says that the pivotal factor is knowing what to do. As our current social chaos reflects, knowing what to do has not worked. It is who we are to the child that creates the context for parenting.

For adoptive parents, the good news is that the true parents are those to whom the child is attached. The bad new is that attachment is not always inevitable nor automatic. When there is no attachment, the child will not do what the parent asks of him. In fact the child will resist control, break the rules, wish to rule, be belligerent, argumentative, defy and disobey. Children are designed to be impossible to manage unless sufficiently attached to those who are responsible for them. It is nature's way of protecting the child from being managed or manipulated by those who may not have their best interests at heart. This refusal to do our bidding is the result of being allergic to perceived coercion or manipulation and in Neufeld's terminology is called counterwill.

Creating a context for attachment is much like creating a womb in which the child can rest in the relationship with the parent. He can then emerge as a separate human-being who is still a participant in the family, in the social milieu and in the culture. Parents must look for ways to make it easy for the child to be dependent on this context and must find ways for keeping the child close, for feeling at home or at rest, and for being special to us. Demonstrate that as a parent, you believe the relationship can handle anything which might come along and that nothing will get in the way of you taking charge and keeping your child close to you.

Copyright, 2010 by Susan Dafoe-Abbey. Permission to use this material, either in English or in translation, for educational purposes is hereby granted.