An intervention aimed at helping parents with their emotional attunement to their child

摘要

Abstract Comfort Zone for Children is an intervention that practitioners in a range of settings can use in their work with parents, with the aim of enhancing parental emotional attunement to their child. This article describes the development and evaluation of the intervention using preliminary outcomes, focus groups and interviews with staff and parents. The ongoing development of the intervention in the light of the feedback and future development is discussed. The benefits for children and their caregivers of developing a secure relationship have been well documented, as have the difficulties that may ensue when insecure attachments develop (Allen, 2011). Emotional availability, a concept that refers to emotional responsiveness and attunement to another's needs (Emde, 1980) is an essential component of helping infants regulate their own emotions and develop secure attachments (Easterbrooks and Biringen, 2000). As a consequence of these findings and the ever-increasing understanding of the importance of the quality of early relationships, academics, practitioners and policy makers have become focused on the need to intervene early to promote secure attachments and reduce the potential for insecure patterns developing. Various interventions have been developed to help facilitate this process, eg, Family Nurse Partnership (Olds, 2006) the Solihull Approach (Douglas, 2001) and Brazelton (Brazelton, 1995). The rationale behind Comfort Zone for Children (CZ4C) was to develop an enabling model that, although informed by complex concepts of attachment and attunement, was relatively simple to engage with and actively encouraged parents to take responsibility for attunement with their child. It requires that they rate their emotional responses to their child and change them, if necessary, with staff support. This may help develop skills and insights that could generalise across settings and time. The development of the scale The CZ4C scale was developed in 2009 by the first author and is based on the ABC+D model of attachment (Main and Hesse, 1990). The nature of the attachment relationship can be arranged on a continuum from A(insecure/avoidant) when carers' responses are intrusive and over-controlling; to B (secure attachment) when the carer is sensitive and responsive to the child's needs; to C (ambivalent) when carers' responses are unreliable and under-responsive. Disorganised (D) is spread out across the three previous categories as it is possible, as stated by Howe (2011: 48) that'when stress levels are lowered, otherwise disorganised children can, and do show some organisation in their attachment behaviour such that their strategies might be recognised as either avoidant, ambivalent or even secure.'