Creating Loving Attachments - Daniel A. Hughes PhD.

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Creating Loving Attachments Author: Kim S. Golding and Daniel A. Hughes, PhD Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers Ltd; 1st edition (March 15, 2012) Paperback: 240 pages ISBN-10: 1849052271 ISBN-13: 978-1849052276

Book Description
All children need love, but for troubled children, a loving home is not always enough. Children who have experienced trauma need to be parented in a special way that helps them feel safe and secure, builds attachments and allows them to heal. Playfulness, acceptance, curiosity and empathy (PACE) are four valuable elements of parenting that, combined with love, can help children to feel confident and secure. This book shows why these elements are so important to a child's development, and demonstrates to parents and carers how they can incorporate them into their day-to-day parenting. Real life examples and typical dialogues between parents and children illustrate how this can be done in everyday life, and simple stories highlight the ideas behind each element of PACE.

This positive book will help parents, grandparents and adoptive parents understand how parenting with love and PACE is invaluable to a child's development, and will guide them through using this parenting attitude to help their child feel happy, confident and secure. This book also helps the stressed parent make sense out of their own life, which aids them to be fully present to assist their child to make sense out of their life.

About the Authors
Daniel A. Hughes, PhD. is a clinical psychologist who resides in Lebanon, PA.  After receiving his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Ohio University Hughes developed Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, a psychotherapeutic treatment method for families that have children with symptoms of emotional disorders, including Complex Trauma and disorders of attachment. He is also the author of Building the Bonds of Attachment, 2nd edition, (2006), and Attachment-Focused Family Therapy Workbook (2011).  He has provided training and consultations to therapists, social workers and parents throughout the US, Canada, UK, and Australia and provides regular training's at Colby College in Maine, Annville, PA, and London, UK.  He also is a visiting tutor for a graduate program in London.

Kim S. Golding, MSc Clinical Psychology, DClinPsy, previously worked as a clinical psychologist at The Park Hospital for Children, Oxford, UK, and was an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, UK. She is currently a clinical psychologist with the Integrated Service for Looked After and Adopted Children (ISL) in Worcester, UK. Golding was influential in the founding of the ISL - a multi-agency, holistic service providing support for foster, adoptive and residential parents, schools and the range of professionals supporting children growing up in care or in adoptive families. Kim was trained and mentored by Dr. Hughes in the use of Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP). She is on the board of the Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy Institute supporting the use of DDP in Europe, USA and Canada. She accredits and trains professionals in the approach in the UK.

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The T for my gd7 offered me this book to review while I waited during a play therapy session. I told her I was going to get the book – she said “I got a lot out of that training, and wish I had known of these concepts years ago”. Then the session was over.

Kim Golding’s book has guided me to a better understanding of so many other things I have learned in the past few years coping with my BPDDD26 and being the primary caregiver for my gd7. Its basis in the unconditional love needed to fulfill the role as parent in any child’s life connects very strongly in me.  “Whilst PACE is an attitude, love is a state of being. Love embraces PACE. It provides the strength for the journey and the courage to carry on when the present is difficult, challenging and relentless. In loving this child, you will have a relationship that will last for ever, whatever happens between you. The connections that you create will last, even if, at times of estrangement, this feels unlikely. Ultimately, you will have touched this child, and this touch will transmit through future generations. The child will be a healthier adult because of your love.”

There is also an emphasis on the biological basis for love as a human person, and how this translates into this unconditional parental love so needed in a child’s life. There is so much hope that I can help my gd7, and in some ways my DD26, to gain the confidence and security needed to have better lives. And hope for me to be a better person from these connections with my girls.

In reading this book, it was helpful to start in the back, in the glossary, for an overview of terminology that was unfamiliar to me. I am new to attachment theory. I too wish I had known of this years ago – maybe it crossed my path but I was not feeling confident and safe enough to take it in.

Searching out this book led me to a new book by the co-author, Daniel A. Hughes, referenced by Kim Golding. “Brain Based Parenting”, which focuses on how the parent can do this work first – gain self-attachment using the PACE model – to be more effective on living this and teaching this with their children.