Comments on: Why AP?

By: Jasmine Carlson

Jasmine Carlson — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:44:43 +0000

Though I am not the parent in my story I can relate so well to what you are saying Cristina. Nancy Thomas was someone who we used a lot in our therapy with RAD. She had some of the earliest material out on RAD and still is one of the most comprehensive.

By: Cristina Leivas

Cristina Leivas — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:51:15 +0000

Interesting comments to this sensitive post.

I am an adoptive parent and having many issues with AP. I am open to AP ways, but feel that this alone doesn’t necessarily help the child. I believe in a happy medium and using different methods to reach the same goal. I’m also dealing with Reactive attachment disorder and some fetal alcohol syndrome symptoms. I wish it was as easy as it sounds to attach or connect to your adoptive son/daughter, but I do see the differences between my Biological Downs Syndrome 18 year old and my adoptive children. My hope is that this will change with time, but I’m not too sure it will.

Looking for positive recommendations.

By: Travel to Attachment | Attachment Parenting International Blog

Travel to Attachment | Attachment Parenting International Blog — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 02:57:41 +0000

[...] Jasmine on November 3, 2009 When my foster brothers–who suffered with attachment disorder– were in some of the worst periods of their [...]

By: annie

annie — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:49:55 +0000

I am a huge advocate of Attachment Parenting. There are many reasons why I think AP is the best way to parent for me, for my children, for our family and broadly for society.

That said, reactive attachment disorder is something that occurs in cases of severe abuse or neglect or multiple traumatic losses or changes in their primary caregiver.

Regular, mainstream, North American child rearing practices are not ideal IMO. But I don’t think that NOT being completely AP leads to attachment disorders.

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 01:49:40 +0000

p.s. Thank you for the island correction, you are completely correct.

By: Jasmine

Jasmine — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:56:33 +0000

I would also like to add that we may indeed be in the minority of adoptive families, and for that I am very glad!
Please keep in mind that this is a very condensed version of a very in-depth story with the point being how important APing is whether it is with your body-born child or with your adopted child.

By: Jasmine Carlson

Jasmine Carlson — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:02:12 +0000

I am in no way hinting or suggesting that a child that is adopted can not be attached. At the age that my brother’s arrived to us and the extent of the damage in their lives it was not possible for them to attach to us.
I also hope that their lives have been good since returning “home”.
This of course is a very broad post, like was pointed out by Lara and has very many issues. I purposely kept it broad just to encompass why I am so strongly for APing also it has been quite the experience APing my son after the experience with my brothers.
Thanks for the response!

By: Heather Lacey

Heather Lacey — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:38:58 +0000

I do not believe that you can compare the parent/child relationships that begin upon the birth of a child (biological or adoptive) with those that begin when the child is older. While the ideals of AP can still be guides, the means by which an attached relationship forms will be different. See Beyond Consequences, Logic and Control for more … Read Moreinformation. Also, please note that the writer of this article was a child herself and cannot possibly know all the intricacies of the relationships her parents tried to develop with her brothers (or, perhaps, foster children – it’s not clear from the article).

Further, Haiti is a country on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean – not the Island of Haiti. My children from Haiti should be home with us sometime this year.H

By: Lara

Lara — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:29:34 +0000

This post hints at several complicated issues that probably each deserves its own post–the events or experiences that inspire us to become AP parents, the naive assumptions we often have about love being “all you need” to make a child’s world right, the tragedy that can occur when children’s emotional needs go unmet…All very important topics that we’ve all probably talked about many times with other parents and in our API support groups. I hope Jasmine’s attached parenting has helped her achieve some level of healing over the trauma of loving and then losing her brothers.

By: Barbara Putman

Barbara Putman — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:00:05 +0000

As an adoptive parent who has been bonding with my son since he was three hours old, I am disturbed by the implications of this post. I hope you are not suggesting that productive bonding can only occur between biological mother and child. If so, then you are dooming to failure hundreds of thousands of adoptive family relationships that are formed each year in the US (and hundreds of thousands more around the world.) I’m sorry that your brothers’ attachment experiences were such a challenge and I hope that they have done well since returning to Haiti, but their experience, while all too common, doesn’t represent the multitudes of successful attachment experiences in domestic and international adoption around the world.