Reactive Attachment Disorder - It's Time To Understand

Slide 8 of 23

Presentation Notes:

Consider a child in the first days, weeks and months of life. The child is hungry, or wet. What does the child do? He screams out for attention, and in the rage he expresses, the mother comes to the child's aid and feeds or changes the child.

Day after day, week after week, the closeness of eye contact, touch, movements, and smiles creates a bond of trust between the child and its mother.

But what happens if this cycle is broken? What if the mother doesn't want to respond to the demanding needs of the child? What if there was an undiagnosed condition in the child, that was never appropriately responded to and comforted?

In these instances, the child does not learn to trust, does not learn to bond, and proceeds on with the next lesson to learn in life. The neural paths for bonding have been ignored.