ABSTRACT
During the past decade, attachment research has shed new light on the nature of parent-child relationships and their potential contribution to child and adolescent psychopathology. Researchers have linked insecure states of mind in the Adult Attachment Interview to increased risk for a variety of symptoms in adults (Dozier, Stovall, & Albus, 1999) and patterns of insecure parent-infant attachment have been associated with increased risk for child and adolescent psychopathology (Greenberg, 1999). Despite the progress in understanding the relation between attachment and psychopathology, research findings have had several notable limitations for clinicians working with children and their parents. First, available research methods for assessing attachment are labor intensive and often beyond the resources of most practicing clinicians. Second, and perhaps most important, research methodologies such as the “strange situation” and Adult Attachment Interview provide a narrow and rather limited understanding of how attachment processes contribute to the emergence of psychopathology. More specifically, both methodologies focus on the individual child or parent and fail to describe or account for the nature of the current parent-child relationship. Third, these methodologies cannot be used with children and young adolescents. The strange situation is restricted to use with infants up to the age of 18 months while the Adult Attachment Interview can only be used with subjects who are at least 15 years old.
