Attachment-Focused Parenting: Effective Strategies to Care for Children (Norton Professional Books (Hardcover))

by Daniel A. Hughes

At the core of successful parenting practices and optimal child development is the child’s secure attachment relationship with his or her parents. This reality has often been overlooked, much as a fish overlooks water, in favor of theories that stress the importance of rewards and consequences for childhood behaviors to facilitate parents’ influence over their child’s development. This has been thought to be a straightforward, one-directional process, whereby a child’s good behavior would increase when it was followed by a positive consequence chosen by the parents. Other behaviors were thought to decrease if they were followed by either no consequence or a negative one. The relational context in which such consequences were applied was often overlooked in early behavioral programs. Later efforts attempted to define the parent-child relationship within the same learning theory that stressed the parents’ reinforcing opportunities and abilities. By doing so, the rich and comprehensive reciprocal relationship and interpersonal learning that exists between parent and child were often overlooked.