Disruptions in infant attachment

In my blog about attachment disorder, I talked about infants with attachment issues. It is a controversial topic. Some people feel that children adopted as infants can not have attachment problems because they didn’t have time to attach to their parent. I totally disagree with this theory.

The other day I was talking to an adult adoptee. She was placed in an infant private adoption and did not leave the hospital until she was placed with her adoptive parents. She had received her birth records from the hospital and discovered some startling information. She said that for the first four days of her life, she did not demand to be fed. The hospital records show that she did get fed on a schedule, but as a baby, she did not “ask” to be fed. That is unusual for an infant.

My mother-in-law is a professor at Texas Tech University. She has worked at a couple of different universities since Larry and I have been married. I don’t remember which one she was at when she conducted this research. They placed headphones on a pregnant woman’s stomach and played one particular type of music to the baby. After the baby was born, they placed sensors on the baby’s feet. If they turned their right foot one type of music played, and if they turned their left foot another type of music played. One of the pieces of music was the one played while the woman was pregnant. In almost every case, the baby turned the foot to play the music that was played in utero, even if that was not the baby’s dominant hand.

Infants develop their sense of hearing between 25 and 27 weeks in the womb. Babies learn the sounds of the parents voices, the regular sounds of the home, and can certainly hear fighting.

Now imagine that you take this baby away from all the things that are familiar. Those sounds and voices that were heard in the womb are no longer there. Wouldn’t that have an impact on the child?

Now let’s think about the moves that a baby goes through. In a “perfect” scenario, the baby is placed with the adoptive family and does not go through foster care. When Mackenzie came to us, we were her third placement, and she was only five days old. She was born in the hospital, and spent a day or two there with her birthmother and she was breast fed. When they were discharged, Mackenzie went to a foster home (placement number two) where she waited for the court hearing to determine placement. At the courthouse she was cared for by strangers until the time we took custody of her. We then put her in the car and drove 3 hours back home with her and became her third placement.

She was greeted by more sounds, sights and smells that she didn’t know, and tons of people who couldn’t wait to meet here. In our first two days home, we had thirteen visitors. Add all of this to the fact that she was born blind in one eye, and sores all over her face so there were medical issues involved.

Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound, says this:

It is important to recognize that the adoptee was present when the substitution of mothers took place. The experience was real. That he does not consciously remember the event should not detract us from this truth. It wasn’t a concept to be learned or a theory to be understood; it was a traumatizing experience about which the adoptee may have persistent and ambivalent feelings, all of which may be legitimate. He is not abnormal, sick, or crazy. His feelings are an appropriate response to the most devastating experience one could ever have: the loss of the mother.

So even in a perfect world, a child can suffer trauma or attachment issues from the loss of a birth parent.

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