Identification and classification of childhood developmental difficulties in the context of attachment relationships.

OBJECTIVE This paper addresses challenges in identification and classification of childhood difficulties in the context of the current psychological literature on early attachment relations and normative development. METHOD A review of the literature on childhood development and attachment relationships was conducted in relation to recent advances in developmental psychology. RESULTS Findings include recommendations for studying the child in ecological context, focusing on positive assets and resiliency, and seeing children as active participants in the construction of their own environmental niches. Studying the active strong child in context involves taking an integrative view by investigating the interactions of all basic biopsychosocial facets of the child's world, recognizing the delicate balance between pathologizing and insisting that all behaviour and psychological states are equally valid expressions of a normative developmental course. Further, developmental science now has amassed the requisite data to establish the need for taking attachment relationships into careful account in assessing a child or youth's biopsychosocial wellbeing. CONCLUSIONS It is thus argued here that identification of children in psychological distress requires an holistic, contextually inclusive, examination of their early and subsequent attachment experiences and positive relations if a diagnosis is to lead to appropriate, efficacious, intervention.