Children who attention-seek, i.e. monopolise their primary caregivers’ time and who struggle to tolerate your attention being elsewhere, can be an extraordinary challenge. It is not uncommon for these compulsive behaviours and the reactions they elicit to damage relationships between child and carer. These behaviours are frequently, however, an expression of your child’s evolutionarily programmed need to know that you are there to protect and keep them safe.
Examples of “Attention-Seeking”:
Attention seeking in fostered and adopted children can take many forms:
- Asking lots of questions;
- Talking incessantly;
- Apparently over-reacting to minor injuries or upsets;
- Causing trouble when you are doing something else (when adults are talking on the phone is a common one);
- Telling fantastical tales;
- Looking for, or creating, confrontation;
- Persistently trying to help;
- Any other way of encouraging you to interact with them.
These kinds of behaviours can be enormously draining for carers and parents. Often adults will resort to retreating to other end of the spectrum and emotionally push their child away due to the very overwhelming feelings created by this behaviour. After all, none of us can tolerate being wrung dry every day.
Carers and parents also all have their own implicit understandings of how “needy” children of any given age “should” be. These internal, subtle and taken-for-granted rules have invariably been programmed in us by our own experience of being parented.
In order for carers and adoptive parents to cope with “attention-seeking” and stand the best chance of you parenting your child in the most therapeutic way you can, it’s important to be aware of the feelings and parenting behaviours it creates in you. It’s also important to understand why the “attention-seeking” happens and not to default to treating it as “naughty” behaviour that requires reward-punishment thinking. Such treatment will not help to manage your child’s emotional and psychological well-being if the behaviour is related to the profound effect of their early experience.
Why do fostered and adopted children “Attention-Seek”?
In order to answer this we need to think about which group of people are the most instinctively, naturally and acceptably attention-seeking. Who are the people that we accept relentlessly attention-seeking behaviour from? For whom do we willingly and unquestioningly put our lives on hold and focus all of our attention on? What group of people do we accept will compel us to give them attention regardless of whether we are busy or even asleep and no matter what we thin is important at any given time?
As you probably guessed, I’m talking about babies. They need adults to be constantly available to take care of their emotional and physical needs; they simply cannot manage either of these things without help.
As you can read about in the theory pages the majority of fostered and adopted children are stuck, in their emotional, physical and neurological development, as babies. There is, however, a distinct difference between the demands of devoting attention to a baby and devoting the same to an older developmentally traumatised child. That difference is that babies respond to your efforts quite rapidly and you can see pretty obvious signs of their growing independence. It takes much longer to get through this stage with developmentally traumatised children.
This is the point at which I explain how attention-seeking for fostered and adopted children is, almost inevitably, better understood as attachment-seeking. Think about why babies are demanding in the extreme ways that I have described above. The ability to get an adult to attend to them is as essential to babies as the ability to breathe. Whilst humans in their infancy are fragile, vulnerable and unable to feed or protect themselves, they do have the ability to seek out their attachment figure (via crying, smiling and connecting) to encourage carers to provide those essential elements for them. Thus the attention-seeking that we see in babies is in fact evolutionarily programmed and essential attachment-seeking. Children that haven’t been allowed and enabled to have this stage of entirely devoted attention will not have been able to internalise all the things that come with it (see Brain Development page) and so remain stuck with their need to exercise power and control over their parental figure.
The expression “just ignore him he’s just attention-seeking” is heavily ingrained in our parenting culture but when we’re dealing with developmentally traumatised children ignoring is, in fact, likely to cause the child to need to escalate their attachment-seeking and will do nothing to overcome the psychological damage done by the absence of sufficient attention in babyhood.