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CHARACTERISTICS OF SCHOOL
THAT ARE PROBLEMATIC FOR
THE ATTACHMENT DISORDERED CHILD

  1. The primary focus of school is to impart information about the external world. Children with Attachment Disorder (AD) are focused on keeping themselves safe as they see it. The school's objectives will truly engage the child with AD only in those moments when the child perceives the information to be relevant either to his immediate desires or longer-term survival. Otherwise, learning is usually of little interest to AD children - it is just another of the adults' annoying agendas.


    2.
  2. School typically expects students to organize their behavior around external factors, such as the schedule and curriculum. This clashes with the AD child's behavior being almost solely based on internal considerations.


    3.
  3. Much of the motivation for participating in school rests on assumed desires to interact collaboratively with others and to foster one's own individual growth and learning. These factors carry little weight in an AD child's thinking.


    4.
  4. Many of the activities in a school setting are group-based. Having to deal with multiple people simultaneously increases the chances of stimulating the AD child's anxiety, which will lead to behavioral attempts to re-establish a sense of control.


    5.
  5. Most of the sources of gratification offered by school (parent and teacher approval, public recognition of achievement, grades on tests / report cards) are delayed gratifications. AD children's relentless focus on gratification in the moment, and distrust of the future, leaves these gratifications stripped of most of their appeal, and hence, unmotivating in the end.


    6.
  6. School demands performance, and AD children usually don't perform on others' terms. Refusal to perform is one method AD children will use to demonstrate to the teacher that they are not under the teacher's control. This parallels the AD child's refusal to show affection at home on the parents' terms.


    7.
  7. TEACHERS have a dual role: that of the dispenser of "educational goodies" (instruction / information, attention, recognition for effort / achievement, granting requests, etc.) and that of limit-setter. This dual role will inevitably conflict with the AD child's personal priorities sooner or later. As occurs at home with parents, no matter how many times a teacher has been an ally / support to an AD child in the past, the first time that teacher blocks the AD student's desires, all those past occasions will be forgotten and the teacher will be instantaneously transformed from an ally to a persecutor in the child's eyes. AUTHORITY which the AD student sees as unfair, deserves no respect; and so now the AD student will feel entitled to be disrespectful to such a "morally bankrupt" authority figure.

    Because teachers must deal with the numbers presented by a classroom, as opposed to a family, the authority of teachers can appear even more arbitrary and persecutory than parental authority. When teachers set limits for the greater good of the whole class, this will seem more arbitrary still, as AD children have no conception of "the common good".

    Understandably, teachers may feel attacked and unappreciated themselves at these moments, and because these feelings can run very strong, it is tempting to react. Reacting, however, will only worsen the situation, for the AD child will see the reaction as "evidence" that the teacher is, in fact, a punitive authority figure out to get the child.
    8.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SCHOOL THAT THE AD CHILD “WELCOMES”
  1. One of the primary defensive maneuvers that AD children rely on to maintain their psychological safety is that of projection. The many people present in the school context offers the AD child an abundance of targets for their projections. Because of their hypervigilance, AD children are generally quite perceptive of others' vulnerabilities and skillful at striking at those vulnerabilities with their projections. This can make the projections seem very believable to the receiver which can put that person on the defensive.


    2.
  2. In general, teachers change every year. This provides a model of “short term attachment” which makes minimal to no demands for emotional honesty and intimacy. This circumvents AD children’s area of greatest vulnerability thereby avoiding provoking much of the problematic behavior typically seen at home. This can lull educators into seeing the AD child as more functional than is truly the case.


    3.
  3. School / home split: AD children frequently seek to pit school vs. home in the spirit of dividing and conquering the adults. Typically this takes the form of attempting to set the teacher up as a preferred parental figure and may go to the point of asking the teacher to adopt them away from their parents. These approaches can be quite seductive in their presentation and teachers need to be aware of not forming an opinion of the parents based on such interchanges with the child.

 


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