Attachment Theory

Attachment theory presents different propositions for comprehending how children behave in the classroom. While in their infant stage, children start developing expectations of the way their needs will be met by the caregiver through continuous interaction. There are higher chances that children are exposed to traumatic events when in their early childhood. Due to these traumatic events they experience, children face instabilities in relation to domains that comprise the emotional basis for development, for instance, losing trust in caregivers, social agencies, and not expecting to receive protection from other individuals. Trauma will often make many children experience educational impacts such as learning and attention-related disabilities, which would make the child’s profile to have further complications. School professionals can apply the knowledge obtained from attachment research to create interventions for developing a school environment that upholds the confidence of children in others, as well as themselves.

Secure children show high competence in peer relationships, have more resilience when facing challenges, and operate more independently. On the contrary, their insecure colleagues always tend to be more dependent, anxious, withdrawn, more aggressive, or having deviant behaviors. Additionally, the relationship that children form with their teachers is likely to be affected by their internal working models (Rucinski, Brown & Downer, 2018). According to the self-trauma model, trauma meddles with how children develop, specifically their attachment system (Chapman, 2014). This system is one of the key action systems that regulate reactions to threats and prevent them from interfering with the daily action systems. When there is a disruption of the attachment system, people will be more focused on safety and security issues while ignoring their growth in areas like establishing interpersonal relationships, learning, and exploring (Fonagy, Luyten, Allison & Campbell, 2018). On the same note, when exposed to neglect and interpersonal abuse during childhood, people will have a higher risk of having attachment insecurity (Kehoe & Egan, 2019). This attributes to the fact that trauma considerably impedes psychological development, for instance, the growth of positive internal self-working models (Souers & Hall, 2018).