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6 J. Child Custody 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/wjcc6 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Child Custody, 6:1-7, 2009 *iRoutledge Copyright ) Ginger Calloway and Robert E. Erard Taylor&FrancisGroup ISSN: 1537-9418 print/1537-940X online DOI: 10.1080/15379410902894825 Introduction to the Special Issue on Attachment and Child Custody GINGER CALLOWAY Private Practice, Raleigh, North Carolina ROBERT E. ERARD Psychological Institutes ofMichigan, P.C., Franklin, Michigan The idea of producing a Special Issue on attachment developed gradually as it became increasingly evident that this sometimes rather arcane area of study in the field of developmental psychology has critical importance for anyone who wishes to understand parent-child relationships and their developmen- tal consequences in depth. Although the centrality of attachment in child development has been a subject of extensive theoretical work and empirical investigation for some four decades, the longstanding failure of academic and applied psychologists to converse in similar languages, much less avidly study each other's work, led to the unfortunate consequence that a treasure trove of scientific work that could hardly be more relevant to child custody evaluations was for many years all but ignored by forensic psychologists. As obvious as it seems that a detailed understanding of the developmen- tal processes attendant to attachment and loss should be close to the heart of any effort to appreciate the experience of a child facing parental divorce or separation, most applied psychologists naively assumed that their years of clinical experience adequately equipped them to address these issues without much further formal study. This is not to say that terms like attach- ment, bonding, and even securely attached or insecurely attached did not often find their way into child custody reports, but all too often their use was casual, ill-informed, and even misleading. For example, few custody evaluators recognized the distinction between a highly dependent or demon- stratively affectionate relationship between a parent and child and a secure attachment. Even fewer seemed cognizant of the pitfalls of trying to assess the quality of parent-child attachment when the child is under no particular stress or when the attachment system is not activated. Address correspondence to Ginger Calloway, 855 Washington St., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27605-3270. E-mail: gcphd@bellsouth.net

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