Attachment Theory in the Classroom: Guidance for Teachers

Attachment theory in the classroom and schools is a hugely important topic. After all, teachers are often the first attachment figure children encounter after their primary caregivers. Therefore, if you’re having trouble with children “acting up” in class, or are concerned about those who become anxious or withdrawn, attachment theory might hold the answers you need.

Attachment theory suggests that our bonds with our attachment figures influence how we see the world and act within it. For this reason, attachment theory can go a long way toward explaining how and why children behave in certain ways in the classroom.

By having an understanding of attachment theory as an educator, you can gain insight into your students’ lives. You can then use this information to fuel your communication, helping to identify the type of support each child needs.

What Is Attachment?

Attachment is the bond a child forms with their primary caregiver, often their parent. Psychologist John Bowlby was the first theorist to study attachment, and he came up with attachment theory based on his findings.

The central belief behind attachment theory is that a child’s attachment bond depends on their caregiver’s availability (both physically and emotionally), attunement to their needs, and responsiveness. When a caregiver is readily available, attuned, and responsive, their child typically develops a secure attachment style.

However, when the caregiver is physically or emotionally absent, struggles to meet their child’s needs, and doesn’t consistently respond with sensitivity and empathy, the child develops an insecure attachment style.

There are three types of insecure attachment styles:

• Anxious attachment
• Avoidant attachment
• Disorganized attachment

Understanding attachment theory can give you a deeper understanding in to why your students:

• Behave in certain ways
• Do or do not make friends
• Respond to you within the classroom in particular ways
• Find concentration and motivation difficult.

Furthermore, understanding your students’ attachment styles can help shape your approach to them within the classroom and ensure you’re giving every child equal opportunities to thrive.

How You Can Recognize Attachment Styles in Your Students

It’s important for educators to be able to recognize their students’ attachment styles, as this can help identify effective strategies to support them. After all, behavior, if understood and acknowledged, can be a form of communication.

Therefore, if you look carefully at a child’s behavior within the classroom, it can tell you a lot about their life experiences so far. You just have to know what to look for.

Let’s take a look at the characteristics of each attachment style in turn, starting with the secure attachment style.

Secure Attachment Style in the Classroom

A child with a secure attachment style has positive early experiences with relationships. Their primary caregiver was responsive and reliable, which means they developed a feeling of safety and trust in the world.

Children with a secure attachment style tend to be able to:

• Tolerate not knowing or understanding in the classroom
• Ask for help when they need it
• Be resilient when they make mistakes or get things wrong
• Accept that others may be better at certain topics or skills than they are
• Persevere in the face of difficulties
• Wait for their turn

Children with a secure attachment style also typically make friends readily and get along well in a classroom setting, as they can seek support if necessary and don’t criticize themselves for their weaknesses and mistakes.

Anxious Attachment Style in the Classroom

The anxious attachment style develops when children experience their caregiver as unreliable and inconsistent. The child learns that they can’t rely on their caregiver, which makes them anxious. They become particularly anxious when their caregiver is absent, as they can’t trust that they will return or meet their needs consistently.

As a result, children with an anxious attachment style find separation from their attachment figures difficult. Due to this separation anxiety, anxiously attached children tend to have poorer attendance, and they may struggle with transitions (from one class to another, between schools, etc.). Anxiously attached children also often seem to have a weak sense of self, struggling to make decisions and not confidently knowing their likes and dislikes.

Anxiously attached children don’t typically want to be independent like securely attached children. This may mean they struggle to achieve, as they’re so preoccupied with keeping you close that they are distracted from their work.

Signs that a student is anxiously attached in the classroom include:

• Clinging to you in the classroom or schoolyard
• Generally highly anxious behaviors
• Frequently seeking your attention
• Preferring to spend time with you rather than focusing on a task
• Strong verbal skills (often used to keep you on their side)
• Becoming upset or sulky when your attention isn’t on them
• Appearing to be uncertain or indecisive most of the time
• Taking on lots of additional responsibilities (in an attempt to please you)

Does this remind you of a particular child? You may have called this child “clingy” or “attention seeking” in the past before you knew this was related to their attachment style.

Avoidant Attachment Style in the Classroom

A child develops an avoidant attachment style when they experience their caregiver as rejecting or insensitive. Their caregiver may struggle to express their own emotions, which means they are emotionally unavailable to their child. As a result, these children learn that difficult emotions aren’t acceptable and avoid them instead of expressing them.

As these children learn early on that they can’t depend on their caregiver, they rely solely on themselves. This means that they show high levels of independence and struggle to seek support from others.

As a result, avoidantly attached children may keep an emotional distance from you and their peers to avoid potential rejection. For these children, emotional closeness is scary, and relationships are dangerous. Therefore, they may tend to be “loners” within a school setting.

A student may be avoidantly attached if they:

• Don’t ask for help when they need it
• Appear not to care about making friendships or forging a relationship with you
• Don’t tend to converse or share ideas with their peers
• Struggle with group work
• Sometimes become disruptive or aggressive toward their peers
• Are extremely independent, preferring to learn through their own efforts, not from your teaching
• Practice topics that they know well, avoiding topics they need help with

As a result of their behaviors, these children may make you feel distant from them and sometimes become frustrated by their lack of support-seeking when they need it.

Disorganized Attachment Style

Children with a disorganized attachment style develop extreme anxiety as their caregiver has repeatedly not met their needs. Children are more likely to have a disorganized attachment style if their parents are:

• A source of fear, not safety
• Physically absent (or separate from them for a long time)
• Abusive or mistreating of them
• Emotionally absent (possibly due to mental health difficulties, for example)
• Behaviorally or emotionally unpredictable (due to substance abuse, for example)

As a result of such caregiver behaviors, children with a disorganized attachment style show a combination of behaviors, representative of both the anxious and avoidant attachment styles. Disorganized attachment behaviors are often the most challenging in the classroom. So, they’ll test you and push you to your limits. In extreme circumstances, children with the disorganized attachment style may get expelled or excluded.

A student may have a disorganized attachment if they:

• Don’t trust adults or reject adult authority
• Are hypervigilant (this may manifest as flinching or being “twitchy.”)
• Have sudden aggressive outbursts
• Avoid classroom situations that are uncomfortable or make them feel vulnerable
• Are hyperactive
• Respond to you with defiance and insensitivity
• Bully other students if they remind them of their vulnerabilities
• Refuse to cooperate in lessons and frequent disruptions
• Lack respect or sympathy toward others
• Are extremely sensitive to criticism or constructive feedback

As you may notice, the behavioral characteristics of disorganized attachment are similar to those of ADHD. Children are often diagnosed with ADHD when attachment difficulties may be at the root cause. This is worth bearing in mind within the classroom setting.

How to Support Your Students in the Classroom

For some children, “acting out” is the only strategy they’ve learned to communicate that they’re struggling, anxious, or in distress. It’s easy for an educator to become frustrated by these behaviors (after all, they do make structuring a classroom or learning schedule harder). However, it’s important to remember that these children are using the only coping strategies they have in their toolkits.

Supporting your students in the classroom means understanding their individualities and giving them specific tools (based on their attachment styles) that will help them succeed.

Supporting Anxiously Attached Children

With anxiously attached children, it’s important to recognize the power of their separation anxiety. For these children, separation from their attachment figures is unbearable, so separating from their classroom teacher and support staff may be difficult.

Remember that behind these children’s need for closeness is their fear and anger that they cannot depend on others. For these children, turn-taking activities are very important, as this helps them to distinguish themselves as a separate person from you (requiring them to make their own decisions). Furthermore, using an egg timer during times of separation to demonstrate when you will be back to support them may also help ease their anxieties about absences.

Other useful interventions for anxiously attached children include:

• Offering a comfort object: Comfort objects can be especially useful for anxiously attached children as they can provide a sense of closeness with you, even when you’re not.
• Giving them class responsibilities: Anxiously attached children often want to feel valued and noticed. Giving them class responsibilities can help them feel useful.
• Plans and calendars: Plans and calendars are very important for anxiously attached children as they help to ease anxieties about separations.
• Reassurance: Reassure these children about when a separation will end. For example, if they’re anxious about the weekend, reassure them that there are only two days, and then it’ll be Monday.

Supporting Avoidantly Attached Children

For children with an avoidant attachment style, any form of emotional closeness can be terrifying. However, showing your care for and availability to them indirectly can communicate your support. For example, if you help them with an educational task, they may learn that you can be relied on without triggering their anxiety about rejection.

Other indirect forms of support may be to offer positive written feedback in their book rather than verbal feedback to their face. Indirect support could also include leaving a book on their desk that you think they’d enjoy or having a written conversation with them rather than relying on verbal communication.

Finally, improving an avoidantly attached child’s understanding of rejection and anger through stories can be invaluable. These stories can offer indirect ways for them to process their feelings about their early relationships. Where the Wild Things Are is a great example of a story based on avoidantly attached children’s experiences.

It’s important to note that an avoidantly attached child’s independence may be extremely convenient when you have a busy class with many children who require your support. It can be easy to assume that these children are fine and that they don’t need your help. But their resistance to seeking a relationship or asking for your help doesn’t reflect their needs; rather, it’s the exact opposite of what they need.

Supporting Children With a Disorganized Attachment Style

If you support a child who you suspect to have a disorganized attachment style, know that it’s natural to feel various ways about them. These children may be difficult to get along with, as they are naturally distrustful of you. They may also make you nervous or even be a source of fear due to their unpredictability.

However, it’s vital to bear in mind that these children are reacting to intense fear and vulnerability, and they’re navigating themselves in a world that doesn’t feel safe. Being able to recognize disorganized attachment in a child can help you continue to support them despite this discomfort and stop the cycle of rejection and abandonment that this child has experienced so often.

Regular meetings with all the professionals supporting a child with a disorganized attachment style are essential to ensure consistent and appropriate strategies are in place. These meetings should take place consistently rather than as a result of a crisis. These professionals may include:

• Class teacher
• Mentor
• LSA (Learning support assistant)
• SENCO (Special educational needs coordinator)
• Headteacher
• Local mental health services
• Social services (if applicable)
• Foster carers (if applicable)

For children with a disorganized attachment style, mechanical, concrete, rhythmic activities that utilize left brain function are particularly beneficial. For example, coloring, counting, sequencing objects, copying, and building structures. So, educators should try to integrate these activities as much as possible.

Children with a disorganized attachment style also need as much routine and consistency as possible, as this helps them to feel safe. Providing dates and calendars can make them feel more in control, and consistent and firm boundaries are essential.

Final Word on Attachment Theory in the Classroom

Children are all different, and so are their behaviors within the classroom. But much of these differences may be down to their early relationships. Children who tend to get along well with school staff and their peers, and ask for help when necessary, generally have a secure attachment style.

If a child is clingy and seemingly constantly anxious, they may have an anxious attachment style. However, if they don’t ask for help and seem to muddle along on their own, without close friends or close bonds with teachers, they may be avoidantly attached.

On the other hand, if a child’s behaviors are erratic, sudden, or unpredictable, and sometimes even aggressive, they may have a disorganized attachment style.

Having a basic understanding of attachment so you can identify the attachment difficulties your students have can help you recognize effective ways to support them. This can make the difference between just teaching or changing children’s lives.