Parents’ views on facilitating and inhibiting factors in the development of attachment relationships with their children with severe disabilities

Abstract

Being confident as attachment figures is not self-evident for parents of children with severe or profound intellectual disabilities (SPID) given the children’s limited clear communicative responses. The current study drew upon the Attachment Strengths and Needs Interview to get an overview of factors that parents identify as influencing their parent-child attachment relationships. Inductive semantic thematic analysis was conducted on 23 semi-structured interviews (including responses of 35 parents). These were the parents of children (1–9 years) with a severe or profound intellectual (or multiple) disability. The results showed that parents mentioned a large number of inhibiting and facilitating factors related to developing attachment relationships with their children. Adopting an ecological systems perspective, these influences were organised in a micro-, meso-, macro-, exo- and chrono-level. This implies that not only factors related to the child (and his/her disability) were mentioned, but also factors related to (amongst others) the parents, the parent-child and family interactions, the broader environment and policy. Concluding, from parents’ perspectives, it seemed that the factors influencing the (development of) attachment relationships can be positive and negative, are versatile, layered in different levels, interconnected and not necessarily linked to their children’s disability. Both generic factors across parents and specific factors, related to individual families, should be taken into account to provide tailored support.