Although children are incredibly resilient and can handle various forms of neglect and abuse, probably even more so than adults, they’re not immune to physical and mental torture or harsh living conditions.
Children who live with neglectful parents or caregivers or experience bullying, poverty, and violence can develop various attachment issues, including reactive attachment disorder or RAD, which will be our subject of discussion today.
We’ll cover the importance of attachment, types of RAD and how it manifests, what causes it, and which kids are prone to developing it. Finally, we’ll discuss how to treat it if you believe your child has this disorder.
In this article
Explored in the 1990s by Bartholomew and Horowitz, attachment during early childhood is the base on which all other attachments and relationships are built later in life. With that said, it’s obvious why these early attachments are crucial and how failing to develop these during childhood can affect children for the rest of their lives.
These two brilliant minds also gave us the attachment styles theory, which suggests that there are four attachment styles – anxious, avoidant, fearful, and secure. These attachment styles affect how we, as humans, experience love and relationships with others, and not just during our childhood.
Namely, children who don’t develop a secure attachment style will likely have issues showing affection as adults. They’re more likely to have trust issues and problems building relationships with other people.
On the other hand, developing a secure attachment style during childhood is a strong base for children to explore the world, form connections with others, develop excellent social skills, train their emotional intelligence, and strengthen their mental health.
Now that we know the importance of attachment, we can better understand what reactive attachment disorder is and what might cause it. Namely, RAD is a rare disorder but a serious one. A child with RAD can’t form healthy emotional bonds with their parents or caregivers, and these attachment issues during childhood can affect them for the rest of their lives.
Now that we know what reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is, we can dive deeper into the subject and learn how it manifests. Moreover, we can learn more about its types. So, what are the two types of reactive attachment disorder?
Children with inhibited RAD are often very withdrawn and rarely interact or talk with their adult caregivers. Such children rarely show positive emotions, don’t respond well to comfort, and rarely respond to others. They can also be highly irritable and display signs of fear and sadness, even during a typical social interaction.
On the other hand, disinhibited RAD involves a lot of unsystematic social behavior, where such children can have all the issues of inhibited RAD but with an additional complication. Namely, their reactions to social instances are much more random and are impossible to expect or predict.
It’s worth noting that, according to DSM 5, reactive attachment disorder is separate from its disinhibited type. Since DSM 5 came out in 2013, the disinhibited type is known as a different diagnosis – disinhibited social engagement disorder, or DSED for short, and it’s separate for a reason.
Its symptoms take much longer to disappear than RAD once children with it are placed in a stable environment.
Although it’s a rare disorder, RAD is a severe condition that can have long-lasting effects on children, but how do we know which children might develop it?
Statistics show that around 1 in 10 children, who have been victims of extreme abuse or heavily neglected during their early childhood, develop RAD symptoms. However, it’s still unknown why those in the 10% develop RAD while the other 90%, raised in similar or the same conditions, don’t.
Young children without parents and those often bouncing between foster families or living in institutions rather than homes where they don’t experience enough affection or care are more likely to develop RAD.
Although no one can say why some children develop RAD while others in the same living conditions don’t, a few factors might increase the risk of RAD. Here are some of those:
- Living in an orphanage, in extreme poverty, or constantly changing caretakers – As mentioned above, these are some of the most well-known risk factors that can affect the development of reactive attachment disorder in children.
- Institutionalization or prolonged hospitalizations– Not having constant caregivers and living in an institution instead of a home can also be a risk factor for causing RAD in children, as their emotional needs aren’t being met in such places.
- Inexperienced, neglectful, or abusive parents – Parents with mental illnesses, a history of drug usage, or anger issues, and even parents who are young or not ready for children can all be an extreme risk factor for the child to develop RAD.
- Mobile phone addiction – We all use our mobile phones a lot, but recent studies have shown a correlation between mobile phone addiction and attachment anxiety. That attachment anxiety can further lead to reactive attachment disorder.
Although parents and caregivers can’t do anything about most of these risks, they can at least reduce the chance of RAD development by controlling the child’s smartphone addiction, which can be done with a parental control app such as Wondershare FamiSafe.
Whether you’re dealing with young children, preteens, or older teenagers, FamiSafe can help you limit your child’s screen time and prevent smartphone addiction, which can then prevent attachment anxiety and RAD development.
The app is also filled with features necessary for helping parents control their children’s smartphone usage, such as browser and app history, safe searches, web filters, geo-location tools, etc.
Although reactive attachment disorder is not precisely curable with medication, it is treatable. There are plenty of treatment options that can help the child develop into a stable, well-behaved individual and gain the ability to form healthy emotional bonds with both parents and other people later in life.
You can find some of the treatment options below.
Inexperienced parents can also be neglectful parents, and as mentioned above, these can be risk factors for RAD development. That’s why training sessions and classes for parents of children with RAD are the first steps toward proper RAD treatment.
During such classes, parents or other caregivers can learn to create firmer boundaries for the child, better solve conflicts and repair the bond between the two, and learn about structures, schedules, and routines to which they should hold the child.
Moreover, these classes can also teach parents to become a safe harbor for their children, which is vital in the case of RAD children.
With the rise of the internet, various RAD guides and articles have become readily available, and parents are a brief search away from finding more information about reactive attachment disorder, which can be highly valuable in battling and treating it.
Educating parents about RAD can be highly beneficial for children with this disorder, as parents will know how to act towards such a child and implement new ways of communication and interaction, which can significantly improve the child’s behavior.
Moreover, it can help the child suffering from RAD build better connections and teach them to act better in both social situations and with parents.
Another possible treatment for a child with reactive attachment disorder can be found in psychotherapy. Namely, such a child will require psychological counseling, where a professional mental health counselor can work on the root of the problem and decrease the number of behavior issues that cause the reactive attachment disorder.
Psychological counseling can help the child build better emotional skills and develop healthier ways to interact with their caretaker. That’s done by working with both the child and the caretakers or parents and will likely require weeks or months of work where the parents have to stay patient and continue working on the issue.
Some of RAD development risk factors include prolonged hospitalization, extreme poverty, and bouncing from home to home. Children who endure such conditions, including severe neglect and possibly needing medical attention or living in institutions or unsafe environments, are more likely to develop RAD.
Therefore, the child’s housing, safety, and medical needs are some of the first aspects to address during RAD treatment. These conditions likely lead to the development of RAD, and it’s why they have to be appropriately sorted during RAD treatment, or the treatment might fail.
Physical needs aren’t the only thing that leads to RAD development, and emotional needs are also incredibly vital. That’s why proper RAD treatment requires these to be worked on. It also includes placing the child in a positive environment where they can interact with peers and play.
Thus, for the treatment to be effective, the child must be moved to a good home where their emotional needs will also be met. Otherwise, the treatment will likely fail without a stimulating and interactive environment.
As mentioned above, children that spend a lot of time in foster homes or going from one family to another are more likely to develop RAD. However, when it comes to treating the disorder, it’s paramount that the child’s caregivers are constantly there.
Treating RAD in children requires a lot of time, dedication, and patience, and various counseling treatments also need both the child and the caregivers to be present to work out any issues and lessen the problem.
That’s why RAD treatment works best if the child isn’t bouncing from one family to another and has caregivers who are present both physically and mentally.
These are only a few treatment options for children with RAD, and although a few more are available, they all require massive amounts of time and constant work to fix the issue. Staying patient with the child and continuing the treatment is paramount to helping the child cope with this disorder.
Reactive Attachment Disorder is a rare yet severe disorder that affects young children whose basic needs weren’t met. Even if children are highly resilient, they can still be impacted by inexperienced, neglectful, or abusive parents and caregivers.
Moreover, harsh living conditions, bullying, and unmet needs for comfort, affection, support, and nurturing can also play a significant role in RAD development. However, these causes can also be removed from the equation, and once the child gets the care they deserve, RAD becomes treatable.
Smartphone addiction has also been known to correlate to attachment issues such as anxiety or RAD, but you can work on this cause much easier, and that’s with the help of a parental control app – FamiSafe.
The app will let you battle smartphone addiction in children by limiting their screen time, controlling the sites they visit, and disabling problematic apps, making it perfect for children of all ages.