When bonds start to go wrong

Unfortunately, people often hold onto the myth that children are resilient and will cope with traumatic situations better than adults.

However research would tend to disprove this idea and, sadly, the most traumatised children are those least emotionally equipped to deal with this, especially if the problems happened earlier in the child's life.

When a child develops a faulty or, as professionals put it, insecure attachment with their mother their needs are met with an inconsistent or abusive response or are not responded to at all.

When this happens the child feels negative emotions such as discomfort, rage, fear or confusion and develops a profound sense of distrust and insecurity.

As Professor David Howe, writing in the Adoption & Fostering journal last year put it: "Children who experience less sensitive, consistent and responsive caregiving are less able to mentally represent themselves as loveable, effective and worthy, or other people as emotionally available, caring and protective.

"This lack of sensitivity or apparent concern means that at times of distress, the caregiver is not experienced as emotionally available.

"In many severely abused and rejected children, the overwhelming feelings are ones of helpless rage and hopelessness, and fears of being unprotected, abandoned, and left to die."

He argues that there is a particular pattern of behaviour in children whose parents directly cause their distress. The children may be either afraid of them, in cases of physical or sexual abuse, or afraid for them, in instances where a parent is psychologically unavailable through depression, or because of their misuse of drugs or alcohol.

Also how well a parent behaves towards their child can depend on how their own parents treated them - bad parents damage their children who then go on to become damaging parents themselves.

Alternatively the parent may have an unresolved problem from their past such as the trauma of the death of a parent when they were very young which has subsequently affected their ability to form relationships with people - including their own children.

Although many cases of attachment disorder are due to faulty parenting, there are thought to be other experiences that can lead to attachment problems, particularly if met before the age of two.

These include: