Enhancing attachment security in the infants of women in a jail-diversion program

Abstract

Pregnant female offenders face multiple adversities that make successful parenting difficult. As a result, their children are at risk of developing insecure attachment and attachment disorganization, both of which are associated with an increased likelihood of poor developmental outcomes. We evaluated the outcomes of participants in Tamar's Children, a 15-month jail-diversion intervention for pregnant, nonviolent offenders with a history of substance abuse. All women received extensive wrap-around social services as well as the Circle of Security Perinatal Protocol (Cooper, Hoffman, & Powell, 2003). We present data on 20 women and their infants who completed the full dosage of treatment (a residential-living phase from pregnancy until infant age six months and community-living phase until 12 months). Results indicated that (1) program infants had rates of attachment security and attachment disorganization comparable to rates typically found in low-risk samples (and more favorable than those typically found in high-risk samples); (2) program mothers had levels of maternal sensitivity comparable to mothers in an existing community comparison group; and (3) improvement over time emerged for maternal depressive symptomatology, but not other aspects of maternal functioning. Given the lack of a randomized control group, results are discussed in terms of the exploratory, program-development nature of the study.

Keywords:

• attachment
• incarcerated parents
• intervention
• maternal sensitivity
• female offenders

Acknowledgements

The research reported here was funded by a grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to the Mayor and City Council for Baltimore City. We are grateful to Danielle Dallaire and Marinus H. van IJzendoorn who provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Portions of these data were presented at the 2007 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston. The study reported here examined participants who received the Circle of Security Perinatal Protocol (COS-PP) intervention embedded within the context of the additional services provided by the Tamar's Children program; at the time of publication of this manuscript, the COS-PP intervention was no longer part of the Tamar's Children program.

Notes

1. The van IJzendoorn et al. (1999) meta-analysis reported that low-SES samples and samples of depressed mothers did not differ from non-clinical, middle-class North American samples in the proportion of disorganized infants.

2. Because the intervention study from which the comparison participants were selected focused on irritable infants, the 33 control group participants whose infants did not meet criteria for high irritability were used (i.e., for the 33 infants, the mean of two Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale scores [Brazelton, 1973] within the first month was <6). Comparison group mothers did not differ from Tamar's Children mothers on race/ethnicity, but did differ on mean age such that Tamar's Children mothers (M = 33.3, SD = 5.4) were significantly older than the comparison group mothers (M = 23.9, SD = 5.2), t(46) = 5.76, p < .001.