Attachment
Posted by Amanda , Thursday, April 1, 2010 10:53 AM
Speaker: Barbara Ruegger
Topic: Attachment
It’s our last and final day of lectures. I can hardly believe we are finished. At the beginning, it seemed like this day would never come. Now I feel like it has come too fast. This last week our topic was attachment and attachment disorders. It’s a really interesting and useful topic, something I didn’t know much about before. There are an estimated 800,000 children in the United States that have attachment disorder. That’s a huge amount for just one country. One of the things we have learned this week is that attachment disorder is a fairly new concept and seems to be highly overlooked. Many kids that are struggling or exhibit violent behavior could have attachment disorder, but often we just put them off as “bad children.”
Attachment is defined as the affectionate tie between two people. This is a normal thing and it shows how a child will form future relationships. Attachment disorder happens when individuals have trouble forming lasting relationships. Usually it occurs when they don’t have anyone consistent in their lives as a child or have been abused. We watched a disturbing movie this week about a young, 5-year-old girl who had been sexually abused by her father when she was only a year old. A family had adopted her and her younger brother, but there were many problems with her. She abused her little brother and tried to kill him several times, once by repeatedly slamming his head into a cement floor. She was stealing knives from the kitchen and planning to kill someone. The parents had to lock her in her room at night so she wouldn’t harm anyone. Remember…this is a five year old girl. They interviewed her in the movie and it was sad to see the hollowness in her. She had no emotion, no feelings. Thankfully, the adopted parents sent her somewhere to get help. Her life completely changed, she was able to heal and even began going to church.
To me, it was such a shock that young children could be that emotionless and even want to kill. While this is an extreme case, there are many children still affected by this disorder and are not getting the help that they need. If we are working with kids, we need to start realizing that this could be the cause of why they are acting up. If we find out the real reasons, instead of just assuming, we can do so much more for the child and help them in greater ways.
