‘Now we’ll all go to bed,’ said Moominmamma. ‘It’s not good for children to hear frightening stories at night.’
Tove Jansson, Comet in Moominland, 1946.14
Attachment theory tells us that for your child to be their ‘best possible’ self, the attachment between you and your child needs to be both secure and organised.
As we’ve seen, a ‘secure attachment’ occurs when you are comfortable with a full range of emotions in yourself — happiness, sadness, anger, fear — and accept all of those emotions in your child too. The term ‘organised’ — the focus of this chapter — is added to that if you can ensure your child feels safe — both physically and emotionally.
Making a child feel safe goes beyond the cocoon of mother and child: the world around your child and the kind of support you have also count greatly. One of the biggest costs of domestic violence, or drug and alcohol abuse, or intergenerational poverty or being held in detention centres is that they all alter the way in which parents express their love to their children. Children whose parents live desperate lives in desperate circumstances frequently show a particular set of behaviours. As toddlers these children begin to stumble in the presence of their parents, they freeze, they display fear as a parent moves towards them, they carry out strange, repeated rocking movements, or they wander about in a dazed fashion. That is the most extreme scenario, but children who simply have short periods where they have a blanked-out expression may be displaying elements of disorganisation.
What is the explanation given for this in the attachment literature? Feeling safe is an essential building block in childhood. So what makes a child feel safe? Mostly it is us, their parents. A child is hard-wired to respond to her parents as her safe haven, to return to them when danger threatens, to go to them for comfort, to stay near them much of the time to simply feel safe. But what if it is the parents who are the frighteners, the dangers, the people who hurt?
In such a situation the program for normal development has been utterly disrupted or ‘disorganised’, say the attachment researchers. The baby’s world doesn’t make sense at the most basic of levels. And a baby in such a world cannot find a way to adapt.12, 15, 16
A clinical puzzle
My view of the stereotyped movement patterns seen in children with disorganised attachment is slightly different. Many of these movements are the same ones you will see in newborns, the reflexive movements that all children are born with. As these children never feel safe they keep many of the movements that do have a survival function. It is in this way that the emotional state of the child directly impacts on all movement skills. This is not a generally held conclusion, mind you, but it is what my mother and I think. It was a conclusion we reached after months and months of trying to understand why we were seeing such an unusual clinical picture in the Aboriginal children with whom we worked.
I can remember the phone call from Mum that was to give me my first inkling of this clinical puzzle. I work mostly from home scoring and collating results, writing up programs for schools and parents and so on, and Mum was out in the communities, directly working with people. This is a well-established pattern we have, so I was very surprised when she asked me to come and help her with assessing kindergarten, pre-primary and Year One children.
‘I think I’m going mad,’ she began. This is something she says surprisingly often, but I’ve not yet found that she’s really slipped over the edge. ‘These results just cannot be right. I need you to come and do the same assessment on the same children.’
‘Well, what are you finding?’ I said, curious but not terrifically willing to get out of my comfort zone.
‘I won’t tell you just yet,’ she said. ‘Let’s see if you find the same thing.’
This was all very intriguing so, sure enough, I was in the school the next day. Matching up our assessments at the end of the day, we had made exactly the same observations. Some of the children didn’t have eyes that moved together, which is something babies have usually mastered by two months of age. There were other things wrong too, things that working closer to Perth we had only seen occasionally but which, in this case, were showing up as whole class patterns.
As well as our observations there were those of teachers, who reported that the children struggled far more than usual with transitions between activities, often resulting in them becoming aggressive or emotional. Acting out by one member of a class left the rest of the class very stressed and they had difficulty calming down again and learning. Learning was very difficult for these children even on good days and academically they were very behind. In adolescence, when schoolwork required abstract thinking skills, the children were simply lost.
There were also ongoing problems in terms of children appreciating that others had different feelings and perspectives on an event, which led to bullying. The children had very poor self-esteem and the teachers found it very difficult to build relationships with them — and you need a relationship with a child before you can educate that child.
As well as my personal journey through the research, solving this clinical puzzle has been the other great journey I’ve been on for the last four years. I would like to share this one with you too as, like so many researchers and clinicians before me, I have learned the most about human development from children who are very disadvantaged. The biggest strides in understanding the vital importance of attachment were made because of the work done on children from orphanages who were later adopted into First World countries.
Sometimes you only realise the value of something when it is missing. Just what happens to children’s brains when they don’t feel safe is a message we all need to heed.
The most recognisable group of children with disorganised attachment come from families that most people would quickly perceive as troubled. This is where a parent is not simply frightened, but is the frightener. It is when parents are frightening or dangerous to their children that the worst damage is done. Who can the child run to for protection when it is the protector who is hurting them? It is a crashing discordance, a betrayal and contradiction so great that the growing brain cannot encompass it, leading to all kinds of psychological damage.15, 17
But a frightening or harsh parent is not the only kind of parent who can create a child with a disorganised attachment. It was a real shock to me, finding this in the literature. In fact, I did not include much detail on disorganised attachment in the first draft of this book. I believed that it would be the rare reader of parenting books who had experienced or was creating such an attachment in their children. But at a recent workshop I was staggered to see research showing that in the mainstream population, 15 to 20 per cent of mother–child pairs were classed as disorganised.18
And when I chased up the exact breakdown of that figure — what percentage was disorganised insecure and what percentage was disorganised secure — I found that just over half of all disorganised attachments were ‘disorganised secure’.19 This means that parents who are mostly sensitive, responsive and warm are still not managing to make their children feel safe. What can be the explanation?
Fear is such a strong emotion. It says to our brains and bodies, ‘Your survival is under threat. Drop everything else! Deal right now with what is before you!’ If the brain experiencing fear is a developing brain, then the message is, ‘Your survival is under threat. Drop all non-essential brain and body development. Grow the size and speed of your flight and fright circuitry.’
Children can be made fearful by all kinds of things in our parenting, not just by harsh, neglectful or abusive parenting. They are made fearful by a parent who is frightened themselves. Fear in a parent is transmitted directly to a child when she sees the ‘frozen mask’ expression on a parent’s face. Whether the parent is frightened because of an abusive relationship, a dangerous setting — such as a war zone or a natural disaster — or because they are remembering in a ‘flashback trance’ such a situation in the past, does not matter. That expression of fear is the same, and, for survival reasons, children are hard-wired to detect it: and then, immediately, to begin growing the right kind of brain to survive in those conditions.
Children are also made fearful by parents who withdraw from them. Deep inside, children know that they cannot make themselves safe and they need the protection of a parent. When parents withdraw they know they are not safe.
They are also made fearful by parents who behave very oddly. Drug and alcohol affected or mentally ill parents may not be violent towards their children, but disorientated or highly emotional behaviours are terrifying for children to witness in their parents. Again, the child knows that they cannot be kept safe by such a parent.
Parents who miss or who misread their children’s emotional signals also frighten their children. The child thinks, ‘I asked for a reassuring cuddle and she is poking me in the ribs and laughing. I can’t possibly be safe in this situation.’
Babies and toddlers are made fearful when parents suddenly disappear from their lives. If a baby or toddler can’t yet understand the explanation that because Mum and Dad are going away for a week or two she will be staying with Auntie and while she’s there she will be able to hold a conversation with you over the phone, then she is too young to be left.20
Children are made fearful when a parent threatens violence, abandonment or suicide. Certainly, such threats tend to lead promptly to compliance in children — and parents will sometimes make them in a ‘mock-threatening’ manner — but, if the threats work, you know they are being taken seriously by children. Basically, if you frighten your child, then she is not going to develop as she should. The parent who controls their child by fear may have an obedient child but that child is not going to be able to become their ‘best possible self’.
And, at the other extreme, very permissive parenting makes children fearful. Although this made sense, it was not something that had ever occurred to me. Frequently Martin used to tell me, ‘Don’t waver. Tell the children yes or no and then that’s the end of it.’ And in fact, much of the time he was the person who was firm and I simply went along with him. This worked just fine when he was around a great deal, but at the moment he is working away from our property five days a week.
Fortunately, I found this research around the time he started being away more. So rather than feeling ‘mean’, which was my feeling before, I now repeat to myself, ‘Knowing limits helps children feel safe.’
Having observed Martin for many years, I have learned a few things about enforcing rules. Fewer words is better — saying more sounds like you feel a need to defend your decision, which in turn undermines the request and invites argument. Assume they are going to do exactly what you have asked, as that lends an unquestionable authority to your tone; and also know that what you are asking is completely reasonable. Every now and then you will need to defend a decision, so be prepared to back up your request by explaining your reasons to your child.
Chores, too, are very important here. Nothing conveys to children their sense of place more than knowing they are contributing and that they are needed. This is a big part of feeling safe.
So how does disorganised attachment show itself in addition to the odd behaviours discussed at the beginning of this chapter? The most well-known marker begins when the child is around three years old. Where the parent won’t provide that feeling of safety, the child begins to control the environment and her parents to make that happen. This shows itself in two different ways.
The first of these is by becoming the caregiver for the parent. You will see the child working to help the parent keep their head straight: entertaining them, directing them and reassuring them. Often, unfortunately, other adults are so impressed by this behaviour in a child that they praise the child for it. ‘What an amazing child she is! So mature and caring! You don’t need to worry about a thing with her around!’ In fact, this is a child who is not having a childhood. In the long term, despite how good those care competencies look, this child is on track for an unhappy adulthood.
Controlling behaviours:
whingeing and temper tantrums
Just in these last two weeks I have realised that children very quickly give you direct feedback about how ‘organised’ they are feeling. The cold weather has come and Rafael has been strongly resisting being dressed in warm clothes. Well, I don’t like wearing layers and layers of clothing either, so although I continued to argue for the clothes to go on, my face and voice were not entirely congruent with my message.
Within days he was ‘whingeing’, that mosquito-pitched tone which is like a spike into a parent’s brain stem. From clothes the protest was extending to the eating of vegetables, and suddenly it struck me: Rafael was trying to control me. And although he doesn’t have temper tantrums, I realised that some temper tantrums may also be an attempt to control a parent with a display of rage.
So if he was trying to control me, did that not mean there was a gap in my parenting? Having checked through the research I found that two and a half year olds have a stage of attempting to control Mum and Dad, but as Rafael is nearly four this didn’t apply to him, so I realised that this is precisely what those behaviours meant.
It was my usual gap: not a strict-enough adherence to rules. There is always that little catch-up for a child between when you make a change to parenting and when it shows in their behaviour. However, within three days of my enforcement of ‘warm dressing’ (no going over to Grandad’s for sausage and jam and toast otherwise) and all food being eaten, the whingeing had stopped. To further support this I took my own recommendations and began insisting that Rafael helped far more around the house. Now I just have to stick to it!
The second strategy is never approved by society. This is the child who controls their parent negatively. Just yesterday Mum saw a child, apparently in a good mood, suddenly walk up to his mother and hit her with all his strength. These children bully, coerce and physically attack their parents in order to control them.
In both cases, knowing that parents can be controlled gives the child that essential feeling of safety that the parents have not provided in their parenting. The imperative of coping with fear and of simply surviving has been met, but at a profound cost.
Without a ‘corrective attachment experience’ — in other words, if they don’t somehow find someone with whom they can have a secure, organised attachment — these children are placed on the path to difficulties with self-regulation skills, with all the consequences that has. Children with disorganised attachment are anxious and show difficulties with thinking, empathy and impulse control from a very early age. They grow into teenagers who struggle to control aggressive impulses and to empathise with others. School performance in the teenage years is suddenly much poorer as their thinking skills may be ‘stuck’ at a 12-year-old’s level.
Finally, a disorganised attachment can also show itself as ‘indiscriminate attachment’. This behaviour is one where a child attaches herself to a complete stranger within seconds of seeing her and is ‘all over them’, trying to elicit the kind of care a child normally only gets from a parent.
One of the things I find most extraordinary is that we don’t question this behaviour when we see it in other cultures: we don’t see it as aberrant and dangerous and a marker for pathology. When we see it in non-Indigenous Australian children we say, ‘Oh, that’s not right, that child is at risk, that child has no sense of “stranger danger”’ and ‘How odd it is they don’t seem to know that some behaviour should only be directed to family members.’ But when it is seen in Aboriginal children, for example, we often say, ‘Oh, they are so lovely and friendly.’ And while Aboriginal culture is a lot warmer than ours, this remains aberrant behaviour when physical affection is directed to a complete stranger.
Knowing about the disorganised and organised half of attachment classifications really helped me to ‘sharpen up’ the questions I asked myself on the way to a parenting decision. I now ask myself, ‘Is that behaviour or decision of mine going to make the children feel worried about something that isn’t really dangerous?’ What I say and do, and what media and reading material the boys are allowed access to must all pass this particular question.