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My partner and I are in a potential 'foster to adopt' situation. We have had an 11 month old for about 3 weeks now. He is beautiful and we have spent most of the past 3 weeks with him.
I have been reading about bringing home adopted children and everything I read online says that we shouldn't let him hold the bottle, shouldn't let him be held by others, limit the amount of people coming through he door.
We haven't been doing this. We have had a lot of friends through in the past few weeks and he seems to want to go to them and plays with them lovingly. We also let him hold the bottle. We also let him cry in bed until he falls asleep - he doesn't always cry, sometimes he's fine. We do feed him with a spoon and hold and kiss him a lot and tell him what a good boy he is and how much we love him.
Despite some crankiness after visits with his birth parents, he is reasonably well adjusted - at least he seems to be a very happy little guy who is clingy and won't let us leave his sights for a second when we are here alone with him. He always has a big smile when he wakes up and we go to the crib to lift him out.
Are we doing the right thing by not getting bent out of shape about letting others hold him and the whole crying and bottle business? Should we just keep on as is and believe that the bond/attachment will only grow stronger? Any thoughts will be helpful.
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The super-short answer is this:
If this child either already has an attachment disorder, or if he is predisposed to developing one, then doing as you are doing will make the attachment worse.
But... If this child neither has an attachment disorder nor is at risk of developing one, then doing as you are doing won't matter.
However...
Nobody, not even the experts, can predict which children will develop attachment disorders. They can only identify which ones are at risk based on waht they already experienced in life - abuse, neglect, and moves being the roughest on a child's attachment abilities. The statistics simply show that those children whose parents follow attachment parenting guidelines are the ones that develop attachment problems at the lowest rate.
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