Parenting Children & Teens with Reactive Attachment Disorder

I had heard of the terms before, but until I agreed to take my 13-year-old niece in, “Reactive Attachment Disorder”, sometimes known as “detachment disorder”, or simply “attachment disorder”, held no personal significance to me. My husband and I took our niece in to live with us in March of 2015. While we knew, and anticipated that there would be significant problems, we had no idea as to the extent of her disability. Our niece was diagnosed with RAD, shortly after coming to live with us and, despite the fact that this is a disorder that was barely on my screen of consciousness prior to that time, my husband and I have both come to understand it quite well. Making it go away was another matter entirely. As a counselor for more than 18 years, I had come to appreciate signs and symptoms pointing to specific diagnoses, yet I was astounded to see how closely and how clearly our niece fit the pattern for RAD. I only wish that treating the problem were as easy as diagnosing it

Reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is described in clinical literature as a severe and relatively uncommon attachment disorder that can affect kids. REACTIVE ATTACHMENT DISORDER is characterized by markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate ways of relating socially in most contexts. It can take the form of a persistent failure to initiate or respond to most social interactions in a developmentally appropriate way—known as the "inhibited" form—or can present itself as indiscriminate sociability, such as excessive familiarity with relative strangers—known as the "dis-inhibited form". The term is used in both the World Health Organization's International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10)[1] and in the DSM-IV-IV-TR, the revised fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).[2] In ICD-10, the inhibited form is called REACTIVE ATTACHMENT