The Social Construction of Attachment, Attachment Disorders and Attachment Parenting in International Adoption Discourse and Parent Education

This article examines how ideas about forming emotional attachments with internationally adopted children are communicated to parents via adoption agencies, parenting courses, magazines, books and websites. In adoptive parent education, attachment is often presented as an elusive goal that requires concerted effort to achieve, without which the child may suffer from an attachment disorder with lifelong psychological and behavioural consequences. The result is the promotion of intensive parenting practices derived from, but also exceeding, those advocated by the 'attachment parenting' philosophy, practices that are often demanding, inflexible and proscriptive, yet only tenuously connected to their supposed evidence base in psychology. Copyrigh