Children’s attachment representations: A pilot study comparing family drawing with narrative and behavioral assessments in adopted and community children
Section snippets
Measuring attachment in childhood
Attachment theory was first developed by John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980) and Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978; see Bretherton, 1992) and it focused on the importance of the first experiences within the relationship between child and caregiver, that is, the person who offers care, support and protection, who may not necessarily be the child’s biological mother (Bowlby, 1969). Bowlby suggested a “hierarchy model” implying that only one caregiver, typically the mother, is the
Family drawing and attachment theory
Within attachment theory, Kaplan and Main (1986) were the first to use the FD as a tool for capturing children’s attachment representations. In their pioneering work, these authors developed a coding system for systematically evaluating FD productions with this in mind. The coding system is comprised of a checklist of 24 individual drawing features, such as the child positioned far apart from the mother or crowded or overlapping figures, and leading to four attachment classifications: secure,
Participants
Forty-one children were recruited: 29 children adopted after four years of age (late-adopted) and 12 children being raised by their natural parents (“community children”). Selection criteria were: children aged between 5 and 8 years, without special needs, from middle-class families (to which most of the adoptive families in Italy belong; Commissione per le Adozioni internazionali CAI, 2017), with parents married and living together.
At the time of the assessment, both the adopted and community
Descriptive results and preliminary analyses
Table 1 shows the four-way distribution (A, B, C, and D) based on the children’s FD, MCAST, and SRP, for the separate adopted and community groups.
Since some other studies have found sex differences in distribution of attachment classifications for the MCAST (Del Giudice, 2008) and the FD (Behrens & Kaplan, 2011), we also examined sex differences in both groups. However, a series of chi square tests revealed that children’s gender was not associated either with secure vs. insecure or D vs.
Discussion and conclusions
This study endeavored to deepen understanding of the FD’s attachment-based coding system by comparing the attachment classifications assessed through this tool with those captured by a narrative and an observational attachment-based measure. To do so, we collected data from samples of community-based and children adopted after four years of age (a group considered at risk for insecure and/or disorganized attachment patterns).
Our first hypothesis, that children’s attachment classifications and
Funding
This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Acknowledgements
We want to thank all those who have helped in carrying out this research, especially all the families and their children who participated in the project.
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