God's Heart For The Orphan By Dr Robert GloverSample

Day 4

Attachment

Children need safe secure environments to grow up in. Attachment theory, developed in the mid-20th Century by child development pioneer John Bowlby, states that a strong emotional and physical attachment to at least one primary adult (parent) is critical to personal development. Here are some tips on developing strong attachments.

1. Availability: the parent’s ability to convey a strong sense of being physically and emotionally is necessary to meet the child's needs. When the parent can do this, the child begins to trust that those needs will be met warmly, consistently, and reliably.
2. Sensitivity: the parent’s capacity to empathize with the child, to think flexibly about what the child may be thinking and feeling, and to reflect this back to the child. The sensitive parent also thinks about their own feelings and shares them appropriately with the child.
3. Co-operation describes the ways in which the parent can convey that the child is unconditionally accepted and valued for who they are.
4. Family membership is a vital strand of healthy emotional and psychosocial development. A child who has no close family relationships will carry feelings of psychological and social dislocation. In contrast, the certainty of an unconditional family membership can provide anchorage and the reassurance of practical and emotional support throughout life, acting as a psychosocial secure base for exploration, identity, and personal development.

We love the picture of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus absorbed in a flood of divine love. God is showing us an example of the secure attachment that we all need. Jesus Christ lived a perfect life of love for God, died on the cross for us, and rose from the dead. We read of God’s love in the Bible and to know it’s truth personally we need to experience a sufficient measure of it in human relationships, especially as it relates to our need for secure attachment.