Attachment-Focused Parenting: Effective Strategies to Care for Children

摘要

I liked this book very much. It is not an academic treatise on attachment theory, so no revelations for the experienced professional but it is exactly as its title suggests: a beautifully crafted illustration and explanation of effective strategies for caring for children from an attachment perspective. Designed as a guide for all parents and a resource for all mental health clinicians and anyone working with parents - and the parenting workforce in this country is much larger now than once it was - it is clearly written by a wise and experienced psychologist (and I suspect a delightful grandfather) in clinical practice in the USA. Parenting programmes are now more widely available in the UK but this book makes clear the importance of the relational context in which programmes based on social learning theory should be understood. Connection is all. Hughes stresses how important it is for parents to know the meaning of their child's behaviour before knowing how best to respond to it. He very effectively describes the power, the importance and the subtlety of the connections between parent and child that are the substrate on which we build all of our social relationships.