Children coming into foster care have often experienced trauma and disruption in their early relationships. This can affect their ability to form secure attachments with others. As a foster carer, understanding attachment theory can help you compassionately respond to the children in your care.
What is Attachment Theory?
Attachment theory examines the dynamics of long-term relationships between humans. It looks at how early childhood attachments with caregivers shape our expectations and behaviours in later relationships.
Children coming into care with orangegrovefostercare.co.uk may have insecure attachment styles due to inconsistent caregiving. Their survival responses are still operating as if they are in an unsafe environment. With compassion, we can help children feel securely attached.
Common Attachment Styles
Children coming into foster care often exhibit one of these attachment styles:
Avoidant Attachment
Children with an avoidant attachment style show little emotion. They avoid intimacy and act very independent, even from an early age. This style develops when needs are ignored or rebuffed by caregivers.
Ambivalent Attachment
These children desperately seek love but push it away too. They have trouble regulating their emotions and behaviour due to the unpredictable care they received.
Disorganised Attachment
Children seem unable to control or predict their own behaviour. They can appear fearful, frozen or extremely impulsive. This style develops after trauma from a caregiver.
How Past Trauma Affects Attachment
When children have suffered trauma like abuse, neglect or domestic violence, it changes how their brains develop attachment skills. Trauma forces the brain into survival mode, impairing its ability to regulate emotions, manage stress or trust others.
Children coming from traumatic backgrounds often see the world as a dangerous, chaotic place. New or unexpected situations can trigger fight, flight or freeze responses.
Creating Consistency and Safety
As a foster carer, you play a vital role in transforming children’s ability to attach securely. Consistency, empathy and unconditional care help make children feel safe to come out of survival mode.
Providing structure through predictable routines gives children’s brains a chance to develop self-regulation skills. When children can self-soothe emotions, it frees up mental energy to focus, learn and connect with others.
How to Respond with Compassion
Creating safety is the first step in helping foster children form secure attachments:
Provide Reliable Care
Keeping to routines helps children feel safe when everything else around them seems uncertain. Be patient if they resist at first.
Stay Calm
Children with insecure styles can react strongly. Stay relaxed in the face of anger or withdrawal. This enables them to eventually lower their defences.
Give Unconditional Care
Make sure children know you care for them regardless of their behaviour. Help them understand their emotions without judgement.
Keep Communication Open
Talk to children simply and honestly about what is happening and why. Repeat often that you are there to keep them safe.
The Road to Recovery
With consistent compassion, children can attach, reconnect or transfer attachment to their foster carers. Ultimately though, attachment wounds can reopen during difficult transitions. Work closely with your supervising social worker. Ensure subsequent moves are timed carefully with the child’s needs at the forefront.
