Stimulating Secure Attachment Development in Middle Childhood: A Transdiagnostic Intervention to Enhance At Risk Children's Resilience.

The last decennia, there has been a significant increase in the number of children and adolescents that develop mental health disorders. Moreover, once children develop a disorder in middle childhood, they are at elevated risk for mental health problems throughout further childhood and adolescence. There is a general consensus that this apparently growing mental health crisis reflects the fact that many new trends in societal distress overpower children’s coping abilities. The best strategy to reduce children’s vulnerability to develop mental health disorders is stimulating their resilience by targeting mechanisms that stimulate children’s healthy development. In middle childhood, one critical resilience factor is children’s secure attachment, which reflects children’s ability to seek primary caregiver support during distress. However, to date, there is an international lack of evidence-based programs that effectively stimulate middle childhood attachment development. Based on the vast knowledge our research lab has gathered on the specific characteristics of middle childhood attachment and its development, we have created a middle childhood attachment-focused intervention that has been piloted in first cases. In the current project, we want to move the evaluation of this intervention to the next level by testing whether this intervention can be used to stimulate the attachment development and resilience of children on a waiting list for mental health treatment.