[Significance of bond security of the child to the mother for the psychological and physical development of failure to thrive children].
The present investigation was guided by two main objectives. Our first objective was to describe the relationship between infant-mother attachment and the pediatric condition of failure-to-thrive (FTT). Second, we intended to see if differences in the security of attachment could predict individual differences in the developmental outcome of FTT children. Sixty-eight infants with the disorder of failure-to-thrive were assessed to test the following hypotheses: 1) Infants with a "secure" attachment classification at 12 months would score higher than infants classified as "insecure" on "ego-resilience" measures at 42 months. 2) Infants classified as "secure" at 12 months would show less chronicity of FTT at 42 months of age than "insecure" infants. Attachment was assessed by Ainsworth and Wittig's (1969) Strange Situation attachment classification system. At 12 months roughly half of the children (49%) were securely attached; the remainder of the sample were either avoidant (33%), resistant (12%), or unclassified (6%) (Drotar, Malone, Nowak, 1985). Attachment classification at 12 months proved to be related to ego-resilience at 42 months as measured by correlations between Ego Resilience Index Scores (Block & Block, 1980, 1984) and scores on items of the California Child Q-Sort. The results were in the predicted direction, with the secure attachment group scoring slightly higher on ego-resilience than the insecure group. However the difference was not statistically significant at the p less than .05 level. Children rated "secure" also scored higher than those rated "insecure" on 4 out of 13 ego-resilience items from the California Child Q-Sort.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)