Games and Activities for Attaching With Your Child
Games and Activities for Attaching With Your Child
Packed full of great ideas for fun games and activities, this book encourages positive attachments between a parent or carer and their child.
When it comes to choosing the best games to play with children who have difficulties attaching, it is often hard to know how to play with a purpose. This book contains fun, age-appropriate games along with an explanation of why they matter. All the games included are designed for specific age ranges, from infants to older children, and help to address particular needs in children that are known to affect attachment, including fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. It provides an easy-to-understand description of attachment and reveals the crucial role that play has in forming attachments.
Written for parents and carers, as well as for use by professionals, it is full of strategies to help build healthy attachments in children who have experienced early trauma.
Finally a book to engage children in building attachments with their parents through playing games. This book is practical and offers fun activities to encourage closer relationships between parents and children. – Dr. Sue Cornbluth, National Parenting Expert in Childhood Trauma, USA
When children are exposed to poor care very early in life, they have to suppress two very important processes that normally help children to feel safe with and enjoy their relationships with caregivers: separation distress which engenders the need for comfort and playfulness which leads to joyful connection. In this book, the author focuses on the playfulness side of parent-child connections, offering a wealth of practical, hands-on ways for caregivers to engage children in playful interactions. Parents and therapists who work with children exposed to poor care early in life will find this book extremely helpful. – Jonathan Baylin, PhD, psychologist and coauthor of Brain Based Parenting
Deborah Gray, MSW, MPA specialises in the attachment, grief, and trauma issues of children in her practice, Nurturing Attachments. A clinical social worker, she has worked for over 25 years in foster and adopted children's therapies and placement. She is core faculty for the award-winning Post-Graduate Certificate program in Foster and Adoption Therapy at Portland State University and main faculty in the ATTACh-recognized Post-Graduate Attachment Therapy Certificate Program through Cascadia Training. She is the author of Attaching Through Love, Hugs and Play: Simple Strategies to Help Build Connections with Your Child, Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today's Parents and Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience after Neglect and Trauma, also published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Visit her website at www.deborahdgray.com.
Megan Clarke is a licensed marriage and family therapist in private practice with a focus on attachment, trauma, adoption and domestic violence. She is a graduate of the post-graduate programs Attachment/Trauma Certificate Program (Cascadia Training) and Adoption and Foster Care Therapy Certificate Program (Portland State University).
