A New Perspective on Youth Care Programs: Using Attachment Theory to Guide Interventions for Troubled Youth

Abstract

Traditional models of residential care for troubled youth are based on the assumption that their difficult and threatening behaviour needs to be contained and controlled. These models typically adhere to a behavioral or social learning perspective. Treatment is geared toward changing reinforcement schedules to reduce undesired behaviour as well as toward teaching social skills to increase the likelihood that youth will use socially appropriate strategies to have their needs met. In this paper we argue that, despite the usefulness of some traditional treatment strategies when employed within certain contexts, these interventions are often of limited value in working with youth who have developed internal working models of adults as rejecting, punitive and untrustworthy. The reliance of traditional treatment programs on behavioral strategies that emphasize control and containment of behaviour can, in effect, undermine already fragile attachments of troubled youth to adults and instigate power struggles that inevitably fail in helping youth to develop a sense of personal responsibility for and control of their actions. We propose that attachment theory offers a framework for a fundamentally different approach to working with troubled youth; an approach that begins with an appreciation of the youth's internal working models of self and other. This article reviews the process of transformation of a “traditional” control-focused program into a program that is guided by attachment theory.

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