Attachment
Featured Books
The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family
Often the first book parents read when adopting a child “from a hard place,” Dr. Karyn Purvis’s The Connected Child is a trusted guide for navigating confusing or challenging behaviors. With warmth and compassion for both parents and children, Purvis emphasizes “connection before correction,” offering practical tools that bring hope and renewed energy. While especially helpful for foster and adoptive families, its wisdom benefits all parents seeking stronger, healing relationships with their children.
Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive
This empowering book helps parents recognize the gifts and baggage they bring to parenting and shows how awareness can transform family life. With a balance of spirit and practicality, it offers hands-on exercises at the end of each chapter, plus research summaries for those who love the science behind the strategies. Both encouraging and deeply useful, it’s a resource we can’t recommend highly enough.
Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child Is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic
This invaluable guide gives all parents insight into why children behave the way they do. With vivid examples and a positive approach, Dr. Mary Sheedy Kurcinka offers emotional support and a simple four-step plan for success. She shows how to use positive labels, understand temperament (yours and your child’s), and manage tantrums, mealtimes, bedtimes, school, and more. Practical and encouraging, this book equips parents with proven strategies to navigate tough moments while fostering connection and confidence.
More Great Books
Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love-Based Approach to Helping Attachment-Challenges Children With Severe Behaviors
This insightful book goes beyond theory to offer both science and hope for parenting children with attachment challenges. The first chapters explain the neurological research behind “The Stress Model,” while the following sections focus on seven common behaviors—such as lying, stealing, hoarding, aggression, gorging, defiance, and lack of eye contact. With clarity and compassion, it provides parents with understanding and practical strategies for building trust and connection with struggling children.
Attaching in Adoption: Practical Tools for Today’s Parents
A classic in adoption literature, Attaching in Adoption is a comprehensive guide for prospective and current adoptive parents on fostering healthy attachment. Deborah Gray explains what attachment is, how grief and trauma impact development, and offers practical strategies to build trust, cooperation, and emotional well-being. Simply the best resource for parents, it remains an essential read. Gray also wrote a companion volume, Nurturing Adoptions: Creating Resilience After Neglect and Trauma, for professionals.
The Attachment Parenting Book: A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby
In The Attachment Parenting Book, Dr. Bill and Martha Sears—the husband-and-wife team who coined the term—introduce parents to the six “Baby B’s”: bonding, breastfeeding, babywearing, bedding close, belief in the value of baby’s cry, and beware of baby trainers. While focused on infancy and less applicable to foster care or international adoption, it remains a practical, inspiring introduction to attachment parenting and a helpful resource for building strong early connections.
Adopting the Hurt Child: Hope for Families With Special-Needs Kids
Adopting the Hurt Child tackles the harsh realities of abuse and neglect while offering real hope for healing. Written for adoptive and foster parents, social workers, and caregivers, it provides clear insight into understanding wounded children and practical strategies for supporting them. Its companion volume, Parenting the Hurt Child: Helping Adoptive Families Heal and Grow, is equally essential. Together, these books are invaluable resources for anyone committed to helping children overcome trauma and thrive in safe, loving homes.
Loving Adopted Children Well
In Loving Adopted Children Well, Gary Chapman and Laurel Shaler adapt The 5 Love Languages® to the realities of adoptive families. With warmth and honesty, they offer practical ways to build connection, attachment, and hope—even when love doesn’t come easily. Addressing topics like sibling rivalry, single parenting, and emotional burnout, this encouraging guide helps adoptive parents see love grow and flourish in everyday family life.
A Child’s Journey Through Placement
This practical guide is designed for social workers, adoption professionals, and foster parents seeking to better support children in care. It explores the importance of attachment and separation, the unique developmental stages of adopted children, and strategies to minimize the trauma of moves. With clear advice on case planning, behavior management, and direct work with children, the book combines professional insight with case studies and exercises, making it a valuable resource for learning and applying best practices in child welfare.
The Addicted Child: A Parent’s Guide to Adolescent Substance Abuse
This reassuring guide helps parents better understand and respond to the challenges of teen substance use. In clear, everyday language, it explains how to spot warning signs, what substances kids are most likely to encounter, and how struggles like self-harm or disordered eating can be connected. Parents will also find practical tips for seeking treatment and choosing a counselor who’s the right fit. Full of guidance and compassion, it’s a resource to help families face these tough issues with hope.
The Traumatized and At-Risk Youth Toolbox
The Traumatized and At-Risk Youth Toolbox offers practical, play-based ways to help children move through trauma with curiosity and creativity. Filled with activities drawn from play therapy, art, storytelling, and more, it’s designed with foster youth in mind but useful for any child struggling with anxiety, grief, anger, or depression. With strategies to support kids facing PTSD, ADHD, attachment challenges, and beyond, this guide helps parents and caregivers create safety, rebuild trust, and nurture healing step by step.
Present Moment Parenting
Winner of the 2017 Mom’s Choice Gold Award, Present Moment Parenting by parent coach Tina Feigal helps families find calm when raising an intense child. With new insights on trauma-informed parenting, Feigal explains how stress affects the brain and offers simple strategies to reduce intensity and bring more peace at home. Whether your child struggles with ADHD, autism, attachment issues, trauma, or simply being “hard to handle,” this guide equips parents with tools to connect, understand, and thrive together.
Toddler Adoption: The Weaver’s Craft
Toddler Adoption explores the distinct joys and challenges of adopting children between 12 and 36 months old—a stage marked by emotional and cognitive transitions. Drawing from both professional expertise and personal experience as an adoptive parent, the author offers compassionate guidance and practical strategies to help families navigate attachment, behavior, and developmental needs. This revised and updated edition equips caregivers and professionals alike with tools to support a toddler’s adjustment and foster strong, healthy family bonds.
*As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, but we only recommend books that we value. Thanks for your support!