This document discusses the differences between formative and summative interventions with children. Formative interventions focus on a child's development and inner instincts, addressing their unmet needs through relationships. Summative interventions focus on behavior and consequences. The document advocates for formative or attachment-based interventions, noting counseling should create context for emotional maturation. It also discusses how attachment pedagogy instructs attunement in relationships over roles, and how a child's behavior may indicate missing feelings of co-regulation, safety or being grounded.

1. Formative Interventions
with Children
or why behavior should not be our focal point
(applied Attachment Theory) Devon Wolfe

2. Attachment pedagogy is
rooted in development (Bowlby, 1969)
Development demands
formative intervention
! Assumes inner
instinctual interest &
initiative
! Focus on antecedents
! Key to child is insight
! Address unmet needs in
ecologies of the child
! Context to work with
child is relationship
Behavior demands
summative intervention
! Assumes outer sources
direct interest &
initiative
! Focus on consequences
! Key to child is skill
! Address inappropriate
behavior of the child
! Context to work with
child is the incident

3. Counseling becomes
formative work to create a
context for emotional
maturation so a child can:
(Neufeld, 2007, part ii)
• Learn from trial & error
• Transcend handicaps or
disabilities
• Benefit from having errors,
mistakes & failures pointed out
• Learn from consequences
• Accept what doesn’t work and
try something different
• Resourcefully resolve conflicts
• Avoid trouble with others
• Accept limits & restrictions
• “Let go” of what doesn’t work
• Not be easily provoked

4. Attachment pedagogy
addresses attunement
Instructs us to have an authentic
relationship with a child based on
attunement not role. Then child
can avoid behavior meant to:
! attract attention
! gain power
! Be first/best to win approval
! demand to be special
! impress to be esteemed
! being nice only to be liked
! measure up to be valued
! seek status to be recognized
(Neufeld, 2007, part v)
! Attunement creates a
context to work within.
! Attunement adjusts our
perceptions to see what is
missing for the child.
! Could a child be missing:
1. Adequate freedom from
alarming feelings?
2. Adequate freedom from
daily frustrations?
3. Adequate freedom from
pursuit of co-regulation?

5. How can we see what is
missing?
Behavior speaks but
doesn’t communicate
! Child uses extremes of
hyper or hypo styles of
interacting and behaving
! Child is almost always
irritable, easily upset, easily
provoked, mad, ruminating
or worried
! Child turtles, hides, whines,
clings, crawls, wants to
sleep or curl up in a fetal
position
Development nurtures
but doesn’t teach
! Child is missing feelings of
co-regulation necessary to
manage feelings of alarm
! Child is missing feelings of
safety in attunement to
frame and solve multiple
frustrations
! Child is missing feelings of
being grounded and
centered possible only
through Attachment
(Powell, et al., 2014)

6. Seminal Works
! Ainsworth, M.D., Blehar, M.C., Waters, E. & Wall, S.N. (1978). Patterns of
attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation. New York:
Routledge.
! Watson, J.B. (1930). Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
! Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss vol.1. London: Random House.
! Bowlby, J. (1998). Attachment and loss vol.2: Separation- anger and anxiety.
London: Random House.
! Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and loss vol.3: Loss, sadness and depression.
London: Random House.
! Neufeld, G. (2007). Neufeld’s intensive one: Making sense of kids [DVD].
http://www.neufeldinstitute.com
! Powell, B., Cooper, G., Hoffman, K. & Marvin, B. (2014). The circle of
security intervention: Enhancing attachment in early parent-child
relationships. New York: The Guilford Press.
! Winnicott, D.W. (1971). Playing and reality. New York: Routledge.