Attachment Disorder

Parental acceptance refers to the love, affection, care, comfort support, or nurturance that parents can feel and express towards their children. Parental rejection refers to the absence or withdrawal of warmth, love, or affection by parents toward their children. Parental acceptance-rejection has profound influence in shaping children’s personality development over the life span, and can cause extreme anxiety and insecurity.

A Reactive Attachment Disorder [RAD] is a markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness that begins before age five and is associated with pathogenic care. When the infant fails to form natural attachments to a primary caregiver in early childhood, the child may develop RAD, an aberrant departure from the normal child/parent relationship.

As the RAD child grows, his or her failure to develop an attachment is reflected in some or all of the following symptoms:

• Lack of ability to develop close relationships with others;
• Ostensible friendliness with people they do not know;
• Captivation with the macabre such and blood and fire;
• Sadistic tendencies, either physical or emotional, to other people or to animals;
• Avoidance of eye contact;
• Abnormal speech patterns;
• Food and appetite abnormalities such as hoarding and gorging food;
• Frustration intolerance;
• Need for control;
• Masochism;
• Crazy lying;
• Difficulty with friendships.

Early diagnosis and treatment can help to decrease the risk for future borderline personality disorder or anti-social personalities in adulthood, thus improving the lives of children with RAD and their families.