No abstract

Children in foster care are at risk of developing insecure and disorganized attachment, which is problematic for establishing new relationships in foster families. However, most previous studies have focused on attachment behaviors in young children rather than on attachment representations. We compared foster children's attachment representations with those of a community group, analyzing also the contribution made by different factors to foster children's attachment representations. We assessed the attachment representations of 109 children aged between 4 and 9 years (51 children in non-kin foster care and 58 community children) in southern Spain, using a narrative story stem measure. Case records information were collected for adversity and child protection variables. Foster children had fewer security and more avoidance indicators than their community counterparts, with those who had suffered more severe maltreatment scoring lower for security and higher for disorganization.Exposure to physical and emotional abuse and birth parents' opposition to the foster placement predicted more disorganized attachment representations. Interventions with foster children should consider their heterogeneity in terms of attachment outcomes, and foster caregivers of abused children may need guidance in order to provide therapeutic caregiving.

Children in foster care are a remarkably heterogeneous group regarding their adaptation, and disrupted emotion understanding is one of the processes that may lead to differential outcomes in them. Previous research has found different effects for abused and for neglected children in emotion recognition. However, very few studies have analysed more complex forms of emotion understanding in maltreated children while considering different adversity dimensions. The present study analysed associations between threat and deprivation exposure and different facets of emotion understanding in a sample of maltreated children in foster care. The sample comprised 51 children from 4 to 9 years old (M = 7.07, SD = 1.63) in nonkin foster care in Spain. We used the Test of Emotional Comprehension to measure emotion understanding and maltreatment reports to measure exposure to threat and deprivation. Threat exposure predicted enhanced external emotion understanding after controlling for age, vocabulary, and deprivation, particularly understanding emotions based on desires. Deprivation predicted worse external emotion understanding. Our findings reinforce the limits of cumulative risks models for understanding foster children's developmental outcomes and the value of assessing separately adversity dimensions when possible, given the variable relations of threat and deprivation exposure with social cognitive development.

Sattler et al. (Global Implement Res Appl 2:12-21, 2022) raise several challenges to implementing the evidence-based intervention Attachment & Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) with Spanish-speaking, Latinx families. As the team working in the community dissemination of ABC, in this commentary response, we outline the ABC approach for reaching populations with diverse cultural backgrounds and languages. We also offer an update on efforts to support parent coaches implementing ABC in Spanish with Latinx families. We agree with Sattler et al. (Global Implement Res Appl 2:12-21, 2022) on the need for translated materials and cultural and language-specific supervision and have worked in recent years to address those needs. We disagree on the need for deep adaptations to the ABC intervention (if we consider "deep adaptations" as changes to the core components of an intervention), based on a broader review of the evidence on ABC's mechanism of change and its effectiveness with Spanish-speaking, Latinx populations. We hope to contribute to this important discussion with the aim of ultimately improving services to culturally diverse populations while retaining intervention effectiveness.

No abstract